VA Exec Overseeing Hawaii has Fake Masters Degree
Am Samoa: Candidates Line up for Run at Faleomavaega's Seat
Afghanistan: The Meaning of Service on this Memorial Day
Railroading Paradise: Pro-Rail Sierra Club Releasing Rail Documentary
Hawaii Congressional Delegation How They Voted May 27, 2014
Poll: Schatz leads Hanabusa 44 - 39
CB: This is the fourth time Civil Beat has polled the Schatz-Hanabusa race over the past year, but it is the first time that one candidate appears to be gaining ground. Our previous polls showed the race essentially tied, with a large undecided.
“There has been a movement toward Schatz,” said Matt Fitch, executive director of Merriman River Group, which conducted The Civil Beat Poll. “Outside of Hawaii, there has been a pronounced coalescing around his candidacy. Inside Hawaii, there has been some gradual movement toward him.”...
Twenty-three percent of Japanese voters said they are unsure of how they will vote, which might bode well for Hanabusa.
read ... Poll Results
Djou supports allowing vets to bypass VA for health care
SA: Republican candidate Charles Djou, an Army reservist who served in Afghanistan, said he supports a plan allowing U.S. veterans the option to choose private health care providers with their VA benefits instead of being required to use Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and providers.
Djou said National Guard personnel and military reservists already are allowed to use a portion of their benefits on private medical care; a similar program exists with Medicare beneficiaries who can obtain private health care insurance through the Advantage Plus program.
Similarly, "any veteran should be allowed to take his or her allotted veterans benefits and immediately use them at a private health care facility," Djou told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in an interview Monday.
read ... Djou Supports Vets
Obama Administration Seeks Race-Based Government In Hawaii
DC: If Obama succeeds, “what’s to prevent creating similar [self-governing racial] groups out of say, Cajuns, or Orthodox Jews or Amish?” said Gail Heriot, a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
“If you can do that with groups that are already part of the mainstream, you can balkanize the country,” said Heriot, who is a law professor at the University of San Diego.
But the proposed measure to increase legal diversity is illegal because the president doesn’t have the power to grant one group of Americans the status of a separate government, she said.
“There is no constitutional basis for conferring such status, and Congress has repeatedly refused to confer this status,” said Carissa Mulder, a spokeswoman for two members of the federal Commission on Civil Rights.
“This seems to be yet another case of the Obama administration ignoring the law to achieve its policy objectives,” she added....
Other congressional candidates stop short of backing a full opt-out....
Related: VA Hospitals: Why Single-Payer Systems Fail
read ... Akaka Tribe
Akaka Tribe to Bypass Congress?
PL: ...As Gail Heriot and Peter Kirsanow explained, this legislation, which the House passed in 2010, would have enabled the nation’s approximately 400,000 ethnic Hawaiians to organize themselves into one vast Indian tribe. That tribe would have been endowed with the “inherent powers and privileges of self-government,” including the privilege of sovereign immunity from lawsuit. By clear implication, the tribe would also have had the power to tax, to promulgate and enforce a criminal code, and to exercise eminent domain.
Existing Indian tribes have a degree of sovereignty. But this was an attempt to establish and empower a tribe where none existed, and to do so along racial lines. Naturally, as Heriot and Kirsanow explained, the attempt was really about funneling billions of dollars....
HR: Department of the Interior Considers Creation of a Native Hawaiian Government by Administrative Rule
read ... Bypass Congress?
Anti-GMO Crackpots to Submit 10K More Signatures Today
MN: Five leading members of the group who crafted and filed the initiative will turn in final supplemental signatures at 1 p.m. today at the Kalana O Maui building. The submittal will give the movement a total of 18,000 signatures, the announcement said. The group needs at least 8,500 signatures from registered voters to get the initiative on the ballot. As of last week, the movement was about 3,700 signatures short of the needed amount.
Reality: Anti-GMO ‘Yogic Flying’ Expert is Latest Mainland Crackpot to Tour Hawaii
read ... Lots of Crackpots
Crooked Sen Melodie Aduja Goes After Clayton Hee's Old Seat
PR: Former state Sen. Melodie Aduja plans to the enter the Democratic primary for the Windward and North Shore state Senate district being vacated by Sen. Clayton Hee.
Aduja, an attorney and former deputy prosecutor, represented portions of the district from 2002 to 2004. She lost a close primary to Hee in 2004 after being fined for campaign-finance violations.
read ... This District Elects People Like Me
HCDA: Saiki Bill Reduces Affordable Housing Options, Transparency
SA: "We will be damned if we take this position and there is much political risk for the governor," Anthony Ching, the HCDA's executive director, said in a handwritten note on the veto recommendation, "but to allow it to become law is to accept a contradiction in words and action."
The perceived contradiction had to do with whether the new law would make HCDA more transparent and accountable.
State departments and agencies are expected to provide comments and recommendations on bills to the governor's policy team. The documents are considered confidential, but a source, who requested anonymity, provided a copy of the HCDA's veto recommendation to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser....
Three days after the bill cleared final passage in the House in April, the HCDA privately told the governor's policy team that certain aspects of the bill did not jibe with Saiki's stated objective to "reboot" the authority and make it more transparent and accountable to the public.
In particular, the HCDA warned that a provision that requires all existing board members be terminated by March 2015 could make the transition rocky and dilute, not enhance, community representation.
The law allows developers to make cash payments, instead of providing reserved housing in their projects, a provision the authority cautioned was ill-timed....
The HCDA also complained that the bill contained no findings or justification for a 418-foot building height limit....
read ... HCDA pushed governor for veto
UH presidential fumble will diminish the University
Borreca: Still, according to today's agenda, both Lassner and Wiercinski will publicly interview for the job, and then the regents will go into executive session to discuss. The formal vote is set for June 2.
If anything, regents should instead recall the fumbles made with ousted UH President Evan Dobelle and then M.R.C. Greenwood, who left under a cloud. The political fallout in both cases was bitter and is still reverberating.
Another fumble will diminish both the university and the state.
read ... UH presidential selection looks flawed, but there it is
UH president finalists' interviews will be public
HNN: Interviews of two men vying to become the next University of Hawaii president will be open to the public.
The university Board of Regents will be interviewing the two finalists on Tuesday during a special meeting.
The board says that the interviews will be open to the public in the "spirit of transparency."
The board will hear public testimony before the interviews begin.
read ... Then they pick Lassner
KaLeo: Neither Candidate for UH Pres Meets Qualifications
KL: The search for the next University of Hawai‘i System President isn’t going smoothly.
Both finalists for the job, retired Lt. Gen. Francis “Frank” Wiercinski and current interim president David Lassner, are trying their best to convince the public that they are perfect for the position.
Both also have backgrounds that, under the rules set by the Board of Regents before the search began, should disqualify them as candidates for the position. While Lassner is serving as the interim president, many are wondering if Wiercinski, who doesn’t even hold a graduate degree, meets the minimum requirements to oversee an academic institution.
read ... Both Disqualified
Morita TVR Fine Retaliation from Abercrombie
KE: There was irony in the state Land Board's decision to levy a $31,000 fine against PUC Chair Mina Morita and her husband, Lance Laney, and order them to stop operating two vacation rentals in Hanalei Valley.
It's this: If they were under county jurisdiction, they'd still be operating with impunity. Even if they had lied on a sworn affidavit, falsified documents or never bothered to apply for a county permit at all, they'd still be open, just like all the other illegal TVRs.
If their vacation rental had been on state conservation land in Haena, they'd still be operating with impunity, like all the other illegal TVRs the state has failed to shut down there. More on that in a minute.
And most importantly, if Mina hadn't pissed off Hanalei boatyard owner Mike Sheehan and Gov. Neil Abercrombie's wealthy contributors, they'd still be operating with impunity.
Because it strikes me as rather odd, even fishy, that twice the state contacted Lance about the structures on their property — in 1996 and again in 2008 — and twice Lance responded. Both times, he heard nothing back. But now, 18 years after the first contact, and six years after the second, they're dinged.
read ... Musings: Odd, Even Fishy
Memorial Day
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