Just a little mixed plate for this Thursday morning.

A friend and former islander, now living in the SF Bay Area, was in Honolulu for a few days and shared his initial assessment of the Star-Advertiser.

I was in town for a few days last week, and was disappointed at my first readings of the Star-Advertiser. Just one story on the front page? Promo upon promo, instead, which advertisers love, as it gets readers into the belly of the paper.

I was particularly appalled at the Today section, which is mostly fluff to begin with. Last Thursday (7/15), it featured a huge story on cataracts that was bought and written by an advertiser, Aesthetic Vision Center. No mention or disclaimer that this was an ad. The advertising department confirmed that this type of “placement opportunity” will become more prevalent due to advertiser demand and the changing focus of the paper.

And in Saturday’s Today section, there was not a single bylined story by a Star-Advertiser writer. Page 1 was filled with short, locally written blurbs, and then pages and pages of syndicated columns and content.

There seems to be a lack of general news gravitas in the paper. And an anti-intellectual mindset — every article, headline and op-ed piece seems dumbed down. And the writers are desperately searching for the local angle. It seems that if if doesn’t have the any or all of the words “ohana, keiki, kupuna, or aina” in it, then it’s not a worthy news story.

Interesting to see an outside perspective.

In the meantime, hold on to your hats! Poinography.com, one of the best of the local blogs, is back! Blogger Doug White also has a new scanner, OCR software, the latest version of WordPress, and, newly received, “all the incoming and outgoing communication and records related to the veto (or approval)” of bills from the 2009 legislative session. It took a year to get these records from the governor’s office, but hopefully we’ll reap the benefits shortly. Welcome back, Doug!

Bob Jones sent along this long comment:

Mufi Hannemann campaign “volunteer” Keith Rollman’s pitch is that his recent web site attack on governor candidate Neil Abercrombie was just personal blogging and not a studied hit with his boss’s blessing.

Absent evidence otherwise, we have to take his word. It’s just hard for us skeptically-inclined old-timers in journalism to accept that a man with a City job and a history of doing “opposition research” didn’t even ask some high Hannemann campaign official if it was okay to portray Abercrombie as a brain in a glass jar controlled by former Gov. Ben Cayetano, as a “flailing gasbag” and his wife, the scholar Nancie Caraway, as “a witch.”

Nothing illegal of course. It’s just hardball politics. Similar stuff to that churned out by Richard Nixon’s hitman Charles Colson. George H.W. Bush’s Roger Stone and George W. Bush’s Stephen Marks. They do the nasty attacks while the candidate says “I never authorized that.” And, as I said, maybe he didn’t. Campaign people do have a tendency to get out ahead of the candidate.

Rollman’s Atomic Monkey blog was his own registered site. He basically says “so what, it’s still a free speech country.” And that the Hannemann campaign PR people “expressed their concern that others might try to associate it with the Mayor so I took it down.” Of course, in this age of the internet, what Rollman posted already had gone viral in blogs and in the newspaper.

The legendary Stephen Marks in his “Confessions of a Political Hitman” laid out these strategies for winning:

(1) Digging up dirt on opponents works. Even if attacks are ridiculous or untrue, they work.

(2) If you’re caught, say you did it on your own without the candidate’s knowledge.

I’m guessing Rollman not only read but memorized the book.

And it’s just going to get nastier at least until the primary, perhaps beyond.

Now here’s one you just couldn’t make up, unless someone is channeling Hunter Thompson!

Would you believe an alleged extortion plot involving Mexican hit men hired by Wal-Mart, the Samoan mafia, an exotic dancer from Guam, her love child and a fearful farm family from Granite Falls, Minn.?

All that and a Pearl Harbor naval officer (and until recently commanding officer of the Military Sealift Command Office at PH) are in this Minneapolis Star Tribune story.

And with at least some rain in the mornings for most of the past week, scenes like this have been more common. Don’t forget to click on the photo for a larger version. Enjoy!