Ige Approval Rate Drops to 36%
Cabotage Sabotage: Jones Act Reduces Water Trade Between US States
Business Fees Go Down! – Huh?
Gabbard: “We’re taking this all the way to the nomination”
AP: …Gabbard’s campaign has been promoted by Russian state-owned media and a number of alt-right websites and defended on Twitter by the Russian Embassy. She’s previously faced controversy and criticism from leaders in her party for her unorthodox foreign policy positions, like her decision to meet Syrian President Bashar Assad.
On Friday and today, Gabbard refused to disavow the support she’s seen from Russian actors and alt-right sites. But she repeatedly said she will not run as an independent or third-party candidate if she doesn’t win the Democratic nomination.
… it’s unclear exactly what Gabbard hopes to achieve with her unorthodox campaign, as she’s struggled to raise money and hit the polling threshold to make it on the debate stage. She has yet to qualify for next month’s debate.
Gabbard has just three staff members on the ground in Iowa.
Asked whether she plans to add staff in any of the early states, Gabbard demurred.
She said she’s “continuing to use every platform possible to reach voters directly” when asked about her path to the nomination, and wouldn’t predict how she’d finish in Iowa. But she suggested that might not matter — even if she doesn’t have enough delegates to win, “we’re taking this all the way to the nomination.”…
(Really Obvious Question: If Gabbard is staying in the Presidential race “to the nomination” then will the sister isles let old boy candidate Kai Kahele have the Congressional seat without any opposition?)
read … Tulsi Gabbard elevated in Iowa by Clinton spat
Maui Police, Prosecutor Conspire to Cover Up Hate Crime: Attack with Shovel Recorded with Audio, Video
KHON: … February 13, 2014, was Christopher Kunzelman’s first night in his new home in Kahakuloa village.
He said his wife decided to move to Maui after she was diagnosed with Multiple sclerosis.
“I asked her where she wanted to spend the last days of her life and she said 7478 Kahekili Highway, she found it on the internet and she knew where she wanted to go spend her last days,” Kunzelman said….
(Photo: It’s the brown house on the beach.)
It was around sunset time when Kunzelman and his uncle noticed two men walking towards the home from the beach.
“Something about the way they were walking just gave me chills, I knew they were there for bad reasons,” Kunzelman said.
He said he grabbed his gun and hid it in his belt.
He started recording the argument between the men and his uncle near the front door.
The two men, later identified Kaulana Alo-Kaonohi and Levi Aki Jr. … tell Kunzelman to pack his stuff and leave.
When he starts doing so, he said Alo-Kaonohi started punching him in the face.
Aki Jr. then brought him a shovel and Alo-Kaonohi hit Kunzelman’s head with the shovel….
“I said, ‘let’s talk about this, let’s communicate but they weren’t interested in that. They were there to deliver a message, they were there to evict me from my own house,” Kunzelman explains.
“They started explaining to me why I was being evicted and they started explaining to me it was because I had the wrong color skin,” he said.
“At one point he even said, ‘You seem like a nice guy, but you’re the wrong color for this place,” Kunzelman said Alo-Kaonohi said to him.
Kunzelman said that while Alo-Kaonohi was beating him up he told him, “You have the wrong skin color, no white man is ever going to live here. We’re the law, we’re the police, the police have our backs, we’re the ones who make the laws, we’re the ones who enforce the laws, we’re the judge in Kahakuloa, and we’re the ones who decide if you live or die.”
According to Kunzelman, the men kept telling them that they were going to be cut up and fed to the fish.
“Every single comment had haole and the F word,” Kunzelman said.
…Kunzelman was able to grab a spare key and jump into his car.
As he was leaving, he asked for his uncle who jumped into the car and closed the door at the exact moment they say Aki Jr. smashed the passenger window with a shovel, shattering the glass over Kunzelman’s uncle’s face.
As he started driving away, another man started attacking from the driver’s side trying to turn the steering wheel.
But that was only the start of Kunzelman’s problems.
While at the hospital, he said a Maui police officer asked him what happened.
“I kept telling the officer this is what they were saying, they were saying no white person would live there, they were beating me up specifically for my skin color and at one point they said, ‘nothing personal,’ and you can hear it clearly on the video,” Kunzelman said.
“The police officer refused to write down anything about race, nothing.”
Kunzelman said he told the officer the whole reason for the attack, as the men explained it, was because of race.
“He was uninterested in writing anything down about it being a hate crime,” Kunzelman said.
Kunzelman said MPD decided to bury the case.
“They weren’t going to charge these men and they were going to bury the evidence.”
After not hearing back from officers, Kunzelman went to a community meeting in Kihei and approached the then- Maui police chief.
He said he told the chief he was attacked at his home because of the color of his skin. “I was a victim of a hate crime and your police officers will not call me back,” Kunzelman said.
He said because of MPD’s delay that Alo Kaonohi was able to commit another crime, this time at the Steel Horse Saloon.
“There was a complete stranger to Kaulana who was having dinner with a friend and he got tapped on his shoulder, turned, and he got sucker-punched [by Kaulana], and passed out immediately,” Kunzelman explained.
“He suffered 16 more blows to his face when he was unconscious which caused bleeding in his brain and caused permanent brain damage.”
Kunzelman said the original prosecuting attorney on the case was determined to put both Alo-Kaonohi and Aki Jr. away and would refuse anything less than prison time.
But then, a new prosecuting attorney was put on the case and cut a plea deal with the two men.
“He immediately gave them five year’s probation as a plea deal and they walked for what they did to me,” Kunzelman said….
Kunzelman said the people have put a fence around the house with a lock and he won’t sell it to anyone else for risk of their own safety….
read … Watch the video
FORCING the Homeless to Accept Shelter: Pilot project aimed at reducing Oahu’s homeless will start in Waipahu
SA: … A hub for homeless services will go up in the middle of Waipahu Cultural Garden Park — home to Hawaii’s Plantation Village.
At the same time, within a 5-mile radius, a zero tolerance for illegal homeless activity also will go into effect.
City and state officials are trying a new, two-pronged strategy to deal with homelessness on Oahu by opening a temporary, all-in-one “navigation center” and imposing a crackdown on any violations in the vicinity….
The HONU will be made out of military-grade, inflatable structures that will stay up no longer than 90 days before they’re broken down, said Pam Witty-Oakland, director of the city’s Department of Community Services….
After the 90-day period ends in Waipahu — or sooner depending on the needs of the area’s homeless — the goal is to set up a second HONU next spring in another city park somewhere in the urban core, said Marc Alexander, director of the city’s Office of Housing….
HPD officers and state sheriff’s deputies plan to drive homeless people around Waipahu to the first HONU in unmarked vehicles to make the experience less confrontational….
He expects that the Waipahu HONU could house up to 20 people per night. But the goal is to get every person in and out into some form of housing within 48 to 72 hours, Witty-Oakland said….
The first HONU will utilize the successful “Hiehie” hygiene trailer operated by Project Vision Hawaii that offers hot showers and bathrooms to homeless people across Oahu as a portal to connect them to additional services, including housing.
Officials plan to augment future HONUs with an additional, new hygiene trailer, which also will include a clothes washer and dryer, Witty-Oakland said….
Big Q: Do you think the pop-up homeless pilot project in Waipahu, dubbed HONU, will be effective?
HNN: Roving homeless service center with inflatable tents to debut in Waipahu
SA Editorial: HONU has hope for the homeless
read … Pilot project aimed at reducing Oahu’s homeless will start in Waipahu
HART P3: No Plan B
SA: … The decision to use a public-private partnership to complete the Honolulu rail project has always been a bit of a gamble, but now the stakes are getting higher, and the city is all in.
When rail officials first publicly pitched the plan to use a public-private partnership or P3 agreement to build the last four miles of rail line through the urban core, the rail authority board of directors was assured there was an “off-ramp” or backup plan ready if the unique and complex P3 plan didn’t work out.
But the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation has now told federal officials the so-called off-ramp is “not feasible at this time, and (it) believes that the P3 procurement will be successful,” according to a new report from Hill International Inc., a consultant for the Federal Transit Administration.
That is a significant shift from just April 18, when HART Executive Director Andrew Robbins assured the rail board his staff was ready with alternatives if the P3 procurement effort failed. Robbins said at the time there were “two or three, I would say, probably more, but two potential off-ramps that we could employ.”…
read … HART takes gamble on partnership plan for rail
Kahuku Protectors Need Food, Propane
SA: … Kahuku resident Kananiloaanuenue Ponciano settled in for a 12-hour shift yesterday at the Ku Kia‘i Kahuku campsite along Kamehameha Highway on the North Shore, the hub for protesters of a planned wind farm.
After meeting with guests who stopped by, she set herself to her next task — getting a propane tank for her portable stove so the protesters could cook dinner.
Ponciano, 34, is president of Ku Kia‘i Kahuku, or guardians of Kahuku, a nonprofit that was started in August by a handful of mothers in someone’s living room. In the early stages, the organization had nine women on its board, but now has several committees working to protest the construction of eight wind turbines by Virginia-based AES Corp. in Kahuku….
People stop by daily to drop off supplies or pick up and wash dishes, Ponciano said. Others have offered services, such as photography and legal counseling, which organizers find helpful because they want their actions to be pono, she said.
“As mothers, we have to make sure we’re an example to everyone,” she said.
Yesterday afternoon, Kahuku couple Jonathan and Ellouise Reed pulled up at the camp next to the Kahuku Agricultural Park to drop off water and a case of Vienna sausages….
For now, she and her supporters plan to continue opposing the developer, which is permitted to move turbine parts from Sunday nights to Friday mornings, between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.
“We do suspect that they’re going to start movement on Sunday,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”…
read … Kahuku wind farm protesters prepare for long fight
Protests rise up when voices go unheard
Cataluna: … Oh, sure, politicians and “community engagement professionals” representing various development projects will hold meetings in a school cafeteria a couple of times before the construction vehicles start rolling. They’ll have serious looking people in reverse-print aloha shirts sitting impassively through hours of testimony and earnest pleas.
They may even call these meetings “listening sessions,” which means that they won’t answer any questions, and then they’ll go ahead and do whatever they planned to do all along, though perhaps they’ll write a check to a community organization or an after-school program to try to buy some acquiescence. It’s too often about quelling the voices of opposition, not giving them credence.
But community members — moms and dads who work all day at jobs they don’t even like just to afford to live in the same town where they grew up, grandparents who worked hard all their lives thinking of the future, grandparents who are spending their retirement years raising their grandchildren, people who just want to go about their lives without undue burdens — they don’t feel heard. Listening is not hearing. Truly hearing the voices of the community means taking the messages to heart and being open to changing plans…
read … Protests rise up when voices go unheard
Trans Activists Claim to Have Trans-Formed 3% of Hawaii HS Students
HM: … Theodore is one of an estimated 1,260 public high school students in the state—3% of the student population—who identify as transgender, an umbrella term that can include gender- nonconforming and nonbinary teens. (Most of the alleged 1,260 are 9th graders who don’t understand what those words mean and just check a box on the questionnaire. The numbers drop off in 10-11-12 grades.) The number of transgender students was largely unknown until the Hawai‘i Sexual and Gender Minority Health Report 2018, the first assessment of its kind, released by the state Department of Health in September. The survey’s figure may still be low as it doesn’t include students who have stopped attending school regularly or dropped out altogether ….
read … In Transition: Hawai‘i’s Transgender Teens
Bill 40: Bans aren’t the best solution to help Hawaii’s environment
SA: … There’s another debate at City Council about the kinds of food containers and utensils that Oahu restaurants are allowed to use. Bill 40 would ban restaurants from using plastic utensils, straws and stirrers, foam food containers, as well as plastic bags for prepared foods, beverages and bakery items. We’d like to explain what is really at stake here.
The price of eating out will increase. Already, the cost of living in Honolulu is among the highest in the country and when factored with average salaries, locals earn the lowest wages in the U.S. The proposed policy to ban certain materials for use in food service will inevitably result in higher prices for citizens who are already struggling to make ends meet. That’s because alternatives to plastic and foam are very expensive and in short supply.
Bans on plastic food containers, bags and utensils would create big headaches for small, locally owned restaurants. Banning plastic means that they lose their lowest-cost options for serving takeout meals, as well as lose the type of containers and bags that are best for keeping meals warm and clean. What customers will see is more expensive to-go meals, in containers and bags that may leak. An example of this is paper straws, which seem like a great idea until one collapses after sitting in your drink for 20 minutes.
The cost of switching from plastic to compostable options is dismissed as “pennies,” but in this case the pennies really add up. This ban would double or triple the cost of items that smaller restaurants use for every customer, so they’d be paying extra every time they hand out a straw, fork, or bag….
read … Bans aren’t the best solution to help Hawaii’s environment
More Homeless Mayhem: Stabbing near Kapahulu library leaves a man in critical condition
HNN: … A man was stabbed Saturday afternoon near the Kapahulu library. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition.
According to EMS officials, the 45-year-old man was stabbed in the lower half of his body.
The call came in just after 4 p.m. Saturday and police and EMS rushed to the scene.
Police on scene say the victim was stabbed in the leg by a 58-year-old suspect. Police believe the two involved are homeless….
read … Stabbing near Kapahulu library leaves a man in critical condition
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