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Sunday, September 21, 2014
September 21, 2014 News Read
By Andrew Walden @ 5:38 PM :: 3813 Views

Pocketbook Issues: Ige on Defense

The GMO Debate: Meetings about non-existent food safety issues

Project SAM: Seven Marijuana Myths

Timing Isn't Everything: How to Lose Your Solar Tax Credit

Djou: Allow Vets to Use VA Benefits at Private Facilities

SA: Charles Djou, a Republican who represented the district for seven months in 2010, said throwing money at the problem is no solution. In addition to systemic, administration-wide reforms, he supports giving veterans greater ability to seek health care from private-sector providers....

Djou, a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 as part of Operation Enduring Freedom....

Djou called the ongoing VA scandal a "tragedy" and said removing some of the top brass...was a good first step.

"But that's not enough," he said. "Just replacing the leadership … is insufficient and incomplete, because if you just replace the leadership, the same scandal and the same problems we have at the VA can easily reoccur again five or 10 or 15 years from now."

He said he also supports giving veterans greater ability to make their benefits portable — allowing veterans to take the benefits entitled to them but seek care at private-sector facilities.

"It will, I think, induce some competition with the VA and force the VA to get better to provide better care and better services to our veterans," he said. "But No. 2, equally important with that, is right now we are having a flood of veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. …

"We need to find a way to fix that or address that increase in demand for services from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and the way to do it, I believe, is this program, which I'm advocating."

read ... House hopefuls split over ways to reform VA

As HHSC Collapses, Health Committee Sets Hearings

HTH: “Our goal is to have public hearings across the system to understand the operational plans and impacts of the shortfalls within each region. Following these public hearings, we can come together in the 2015 legislative session to work towards finding solutions to address the financial challenges while continuing to provide the safety net services the system is supposed to provide,” Rep. Della Au Belatti (D-Oahu), the House Health Committee Chair, said in a statement. “There is the recognition that HHSC is a statewide safety net system, especially for rural communities and the neighbor islands. We need to understand what the true costs are and then have the political will to sustain these services going forward and/or find partnerships that will allow for access to these services by all of our residents.”

read ... About the Dying HGEA/UPW Job Trust

Four Years: Hawaii Race to the Top

SA: Hawaii's $75 million federal Race to the Top grant draws to a close this week, marking the end of an unprecedented four-year investment that launched some of the most aggressive education reforms ever seen in the state's public school system....

Some of the more tangible accomplishments among the state's 255 public schools include:

» Hawaii fourth-graders for the first time scored higher than the national average in math on the 2013 National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP, given every two years. The math scores — up four points from 2011 and by seven points from 2009 — tied for eighth best in the nation.

» Overall, fourth- and eighth-graders saw NAEP reading and math scores go up between four points and seven points between 2009 and 2013.

» On the Hawaii State Assessment, the statewide math proficiency rate has gone up by 10 points to 59 percent since the 2009-10 school year. The percentage of students testing proficient in reading has increased by three points to 70 percent.

» The statewide average graduation rate has improved to 82 percent from 80 percent four years ago. The statewide college-going rate (those enrolling within two years of graduation) has gone up to 63 percent from 60 percent in 2010.

» Chronic absenteeism (students who are absent 15 days or more a year) has improved to 11 percent of students last school year from 18 percent the year before, meaning 5,500 fewer students overall were chronically absent.

» The ninth-grade flunk rate (the percentage of students not promoted to 10th grade) has dropped two percentage points to 9 percent over the past two years.

read ... HSTA Still Wants to Kill This

$90,000 Per Mile?  Job is Cushy, Roads Aren't

Shapiro: ...Most distressing was when I got home and found a press release from the Reason Foundation rating Hawaii's highways the worst-performing in the nation.

We had the most deficient pavement, the worst congestion and were the least cost-effective.

The study found that we spend $90,000 in administrative costs per mile of state road, compared to states such as Texas and Kentucky that maintain better roads for administrative costs of $4,000 and $1,000 per mile.

In other words, we have lots of state employees getting nice salaries, generous pensions and lifetime health insurance to deliver woeful results.

Road maintenance is as basic as government gets, and if the state can't do it competently we can have no confidence of anything being done right.

For the next two months, gubernatorial candidates David Ige, James "Duke" Aiona and Mufi Hannemann should be peppered with questions about how they're going to convert that $90,000 per mile into roads we can be proud of....

Background: Hawaii $90K 'Administrative Cost' Per Mile of State Roads

read ... Pitiful state of main roads reveal government gridlock

Drug Rehab Doctor Speaks Up Against 'Medical' Marijuana

KGI: Dr. Gerald McKenna, who runs the McKenna Recovery Center in Lihue said he is strongly opposed to all of the medical marijuana bills as they are written. If marijuana is intended to be used for legitimate medical purposes, McKenna said the drug should be developed in a form that is safe for people to take, such as vapor through an inhaler.

“They are allowing people to smoke a drug that is a dangerous, dirty drug, and they are inhaling it into their lungs,” McKenna said. “For medicine to be encouraging people to smoke a drug in its dirtiest form, I think, is malpractice. I’m not opposed to marijuana being used for medical reasons, although the research is slim, especially American research, as to its effectiveness, but it could well be effective for any number of conditions.”

McKenna said he regularly treats people who are addicted to marijuana. Some of them, he said, have medical marijuana certificates but cultivate marijuana plants for personal and non-personal use.

“People who are alcoholic tend to not drink during the day until the very end of their addiction — they go to work every day, they try to maintain themselves, but they drink at night,” McKenna said. “People who are nicotine and marijuana addicts start off the day with (nicotine and) marijuana, they use it on their breaks, after lunch, after work, on the weekends, while they’re on vacation, and if they’re doing this for 10, 20 or 30 years and they try to stop, they don’t feel comfortable in their own skin. They have a very difficult time stopping.” ...

Rep. James “Jimmy” Kunane Tokioka, D, Omao-Wailua Homesteads, said he will wait to see what residents say before he takes a position.

“Like the many other controversial bills that influence our district, our island and our state, the marijuana bill is something that I will send out in my questionnaire, my survey to the community, and respond accordingly,” he said.

Related: Project SAM: Seven Marijuana Myths

read ... Medicated

Faculty censure of Lassner feeble

Borreca: As it turns out, even a no-confidence resolution doesn't have the stinging power it once did.

Back in 2006, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, resigned after its faculty passed a no-confidence vote because of conflict-of-interest concerns and remarks he made about the abilities of women in science and engineering.

Today, no-confidence votes are viewed as something of a "there they go again" reaction and not a real cause for concern.

"No-confidence votes are not all that unusual in higher education," says Sara Hebel, assistant managing editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education in an email.

Hebel pointed to an article published in the Chronicle last year by Seth Zweifler noting that "voting no confidence has become a common strategy for faculty members to express disapproval in their institution's leadership."

"The broad use of the no-confidence vote, however, may in some cases be diminishing its effect," the article read....

Still, if Lassner can start holding inclusive, on-campus, open-to-the public meetings with his constituencies and the regents can pry open the door to their repeated executive sessions, some good will come from the feeble censure effort.

read ... Faculty censure of Lassner feeble

Water Board Fails to Show 'Sound Basis for Water Rates'

SA: The first thing the Board of Water Supply will need to do in the coming months is to convince the city auditor that there's a sound basis for its water rates. The second is to do far more outreach to its customers, primarily to convince them of the same thing.

Ernest Lau, manager and chief engineer, is leaving it to the agency's consultant, the accounting firm Tokumoto & Co., to brief the auditor — and thus the City Council and public — about the mathematical calculations in its rate study. That study, released in June 2011, formed the basis of the rates that went into effect the following fiscal year.

Lau asserted before Council last week that he's not an accountant and gave the committee only a broad outline of the rate-setting process. The Tokumoto accountant who headed the study was off island last week, he told the committee. But the sit-down with the auditor is forthcoming, he said.

read ... No Sound Basis

Their bowels sparkle like diamonds

MN ...if you pick up "Living Aloha: Hawaii's Magazine for a Health Conscious Community and Planet," which is a piece of pro-ban literature available all over, you will learn some cogent things abou the anti-GMO folks.

The underlying question is the evidence for or against harm, actual or possible, from using recombinent genetic methods in farming. This is a scientific question; it can be answered by observation applied to theory. Arm-waving scare stories and non-specific premonitions of disaster don't count.

Well, it can be answered by people who use evidence and understand and accept the methods of scientific investigation to make decisions. It does not appear that the people pushing the ban are that kind of people.

"Living Aloha" is supported by advertisements, and these are revealing. The largest number are for yoga classes and clinics. The second-largest number (4) are for colon cleanses.

Long-time readers of RtO (or of my "Well, balderdash" columns in The Maui News back before there was a blogosphere) may recall that I call Maui Duckburg because everywhere you go, you hear a quack. It is safe to say that the opinions of people who believe in colon cleanses on health topics are scientifically worthless....

SA: Another dull anti-GMO screed

read ... About Anti-GMO Crackpots

Homeless Leave Mountain of Trash on Slippah Island

KITV: "Predominately it's trash bags, clothing, shoes, bottles, and sometimes syringes -- it's pretty bad," said Mike Asato, with Na Alii Waterski Club....

Volunteers know it won't take long before the trash-lined shores will be back again.

"It is always happening. In a month it will be close to this again. It is a constant battle that we fight," added Asato.

Recently the state's harbor division stepped up patrols, which cut down on homeless residents camping on Slipper Island.

Google: Meth Hoarding

read ... Garbage

Chinese, Russian Navies Get New Missiles to Nuke Hawaii

TI: The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) believes the Chinese Navy is now “increasingly capable of striking targets hundreds of miles from the Chinese mainland” and the deployment of the Jin SSBN “would mark China’s first credible at-sea-second-strike nuclear capability.” ONI even believes China’s nuclear ICBM aboard the new submarine would “enable the Jin to strike Hawaii, Alaska and possibly western portions of CONUS [continental United States] from East Asian waters.” According to Stars and Stripes, China’s nuclear weapons capabilities have also been augmented by the HK-6 bomber, a nuclear-capable aircraft with a range of about 2,000 miles, and the Dong Feng-41 ICBM, capable of launching multiple nuclear warheads.

read ... Nuke Hawaii

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