Sex, Lies, and Repetitious Badgering: Meet Hawaii’s New Superintendent of Schools
UH Manoa Professor Lists Pregnancy, ‘Racism,’ ‘Misogyny’ As Professional Experience On ‘Liberated’ Resume
DBEDT: Hawaii Consumers Highest Mortgage Debt in USA
Hawaii Congressional Delegation How They Voted May 22, 2017
DoI Announces Budget for Territories, Micronesia
Pasha Hawaii Selects foreign-owned yard to build Jones Act containerships
Gabbard Bipartisan Bill: End Warrantless Collection of Americans’ Emails
2018 Senate Race: Gabbard Raises Mainland Money
CB: …Run Tulsi Run was launched on Feb. 28, 2016, after Gabbard resigned her post from the Democratic National Committee and threw her support to Bernie Sanders for president. Among the reasons for backing Gabbard, the website explains that supporters believe that she “is the most superior candidate because of her service to her country and her unquestionable reputation and integrity.”
(They want you to believe this is about Gabbard running for President.)
There is no indication that Gabbard is involved with the website. But at least two images from Gabbard’s own campaign website appear to be used, in doctored form, on the Run Tulsi Run site.
There is other internet activity regarding Gabbard in 2020, including several Facebook pages such as Tulsi 2020 (it appears linked to Run Tulsi Run), Tulsi Gabbard 2020 (it says it’s unofficial) and Tulsi Gabbard for President 2020 (launched Nov. 7 and currently featuring Gabbard’s video explaining why she will no longer take PAC money — more on that later)….
The congresswoman’s most recent filing with the Federal Election Commission, just last month, shows her sitting on a $2 million pile of cash.
But, as Civil Beat reported, it also shows Gabbard spending a lot of money on video and audio production, fundraising and political consultation. It includes dropping $12,000 in two month’s time on a Dallas-based consultant who has experience helping Sanders and other candidates in Iowa in 2016….
Open Secrets reports that, over her congressional career, Gabbard has received just over $1 million from the Honolulu area but also around $900,000 from metropolitan areas that include New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, Chicago, San Jose and Washington, D.C.
By comparison, most money for Takai and Hanabusa came from home…..
read … Really About the Senate
Maui County tax increases are just feeding government growth
MN: …Maui County residents are going to be paying more taxes in the new fiscal year to help pay for $45 million in increased county government spending.
However, the extra spending is not necessarily going to provide those taxpayers with better government service. Instead, local residents will be getting soaked with tax hikes to pay for a government that is growing faster than the private sector.
This is not a recent development. Over the past decade, Maui County government spending has increased from $3,820 per person in 2007 to $5,136 per person in the current budget. The county government has hired 300 more people over the same period, totaling 2,642 employees today, which exceeds the rate of population growth for the Valley Isle.
This year, the Maui County Council voted to raise property taxes by $26 million to pay for some of its extra spending….
read … Maui County tax increases are just feeding government growth
HIDOT Socks airport tenants with double-digit rent increases
HNN: …A representative from the state Department of Transportation told a room full of pilots and private aviation owners on Monday they are facing double-digit rent increases.
The department's Airports Division wants to raise aircraft storage (tie down) by at least 120-percent. Monthly hangar rentals would go up 23-percent at Kalaeloa Airport, 20-percent at Dillingham Airfield, and 11-percent at the Honolulu International Airport.
It's less than a previous proposal. But the numbers still don't sit well with aviators who complain about old facilities and lagging maintenance.
"One good example is in Hilo, they have a 1960 T-hangar there that the roof is rusting away, the support beams are rusted away. The walls are termite ridden and they have had a 15-percent increase on that facility," said General Aviation Council of Hawaii President Rob Moore.
Moore says his main concern is the state's lack of transparency…..
PDF: HIDOT Rent Hikes
read … Hawaii airport tenants face double-digit rent increases
Counties: ‘We Got Screwed’ By The Legislature On Lifeguard Protection
MN: …Rather than extend the current law as initially put forward under Senate Bill 562, the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Scott Nishimoto, gutted and replaced the measure with language that requires the state Attorney General’s office to defend the counties against any civil action based on an “allegedly negligent or wrongful act or omission.”
But the bill doesn’t include a mandate for the AG to defend lifeguards individually from liability for civil damages. It leaves that to the counties, who argued that the cost of those cases could be devastating….
County officials are frustrated by the sway the personal injury lawyers apparently had over the Legislature. But the Hawaii Association for Justice’s close ties to state lawmakers are raising questions.
Rep. Sylvia Luke, who chairs the Finance Committee, is a personal injury lawyer and is listed as a member of the group on its website. She did not return a message seeking comment.
Luke faced criticism in 2014 over her handling of a bill to increase access to rock-climbing spots and public trails across the state. Advocates for the measure alleged that she used her power to weaken the bill, which would have extended and expanded an existing law protecting the state from unlimited liability for accidents on public land. And like the lifeguard bill this session, the Hawaii Association for Justice was the only group in opposition.
House Speaker Scott Saiki, who was majority leader at the time the lifeguard liability bill was moving through the Legislature, is also a personal injury attorney…..
read … Counties: ‘We Got Screwed’ By The Legislature On Lifeguard Protection
Caldwell’s Zoo Lacks Leadership
SA: …the Waikiki attraction is still missing what it needs most: experienced and capable leadership….
For the last seven years there’s been inconsistent funding and enough instability that five zoo directors have cycled through.
The turnover became part of a long, rocky road that led to the loss of accreditation from the Association of Zoos &Aquariums. This is the credential that underlies, among other things, the zoo’s ability to secure animals for its exhibits. It was rescinded after three cycles of underperformance.
The chimpanzee exhibit was Council Chambers closed after a May 14 episode in which a chimpanzee attempted to escape, clambering up over the wall separating the animals from the aviary exhibit Mayor’s office. It was a 10-minute scare, and if the animal had reached a public area, staffers were told to shoot to kill it….
SA: What do you think about efforts to improve the Honolulu Zoo?
read … Caldwell’s Zoo
Shimabukuro Uses Procedural Delays to Keep Waimanalo Gulch Open While Pretending to Fight It
SA: …A final decision on the fate of the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill likely will be delayed again due to possible procedural errors by the Honolulu Planning Commission.
The state Land Use Commission is scheduled to consider the Planning Commission’s March recommendation to extend the landfill for an unspecified time, as well as arguments by opponents of the landfill to deny the extension, when it meets at 9 a.m. Wednesday in Suite 700 of the Hawaiian Airlines terminal.
But opponents are questioning the steps the Planning Commission took in coming up with its recommendation, and even city officials said they would not object to the two special-use permit requests being sent back to the Planning Commission.
After several years of inaction, the Planning Commission in March voted to recommend that the city be allowed to continue using Oahu’s only landfill until it is filled to capacity, regardless of when that might be.
The Planning Commission imposed several new conditions, including a requirement that the city select an alternate landfill site by Dec. 31, 2022, although it did not say when the new landfill would need to be up and running. Another condition requires the city to file progress reports every six months instead of annually as now mandated.
But Calvert Chipchase, attorney for the Ko Olina Community Association, and state Sen. Maile Shimabukuro (D, Kalaeloa-Waianae-Makaha) filed a motion last week asking the LUC to deny a permit and send the issue back to the Planning Commission….
(Translation: More years of delay will keep this open past 2022. And the lawyers will get paid.)
read … Caldwell’s Trash
Civil Beat, Lawyers and Anti-GMO Activists Coordinate Attack on Pioneer
JC: …Anita Hofschneider reported on the lawsuit Monday morning for Pierre Omidyar’s vanity press, Civil Beat. Omidyar has donated money to CFS, and Hofschneider and other Civil Beat reporters have written numerous articles favorable to the group. Civil Beat’s editorial board, of which Omidyar is a member, also published an editorial calling for heightened agricultural pesticide restrictions just hours before CFS and other anti-GMO groups staged a press conference demanding that Gov. Ige adopt the very same controls that Civil Beat endorsed.
In covering the pesticide complaint story, Hofschneider wrote:
The suit could fuel concerns about the seed industry’s use of pesticides on genetically modified crops and their potential effects on public health and the environment.
Oh, how handy for the anti-GMO activists. And how curious that Grilho was fired nearly 18 months ago, but only now brings suit — just one month after the antis failed to convince the Hawaii Legislature to impose any new restrictions on the seed industry. Their failure was amplified by the fact that a federal appeals court earlier had ruled that state law pre-empted the ability of activists to impose restrictions on the seed companies at the county level, requiring them to instead seek remedies through the Legislature.
Grilho’s attorney is Michael Green, who admittedly seeks high profile cases to keep building his business and brags about defending street gangs, organized crime figures, high-profile drug dealers, disgraced politicians, bad cops and other pillars of society.
In any case, CFS wasted no time in capitalizing on Anita’s story. Within a few hours, it had sent out an email blast with this breathless assertion:
It’s all over the news [only Civil Beat had reported on it at that point], and it’s serious: An Oʻahu woman has filed a lawsuit against her former employer, DuPont Pioneer, stating she was retaliated against after reporting misuse of pesticides on the company’s North Shore field test site.
KGI: Kauai Anti-GMO Operative Scores European Junket
read … Collaborative
Global Warmers Become Hysterical over Missing Prayer to Eco-Goddess
WaPo: On Thursday, a group of scientists high-priests, including three working for the U.S. Geological Survey (Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice) published a paper that highlighted the link between sea-level rise and global climate change, arguing that previously studies may have underestimated the risk flooding poses to coastal communities.
However, three of the study’s authors say the Department of Interior, under which USGS is housed, deleted a line from the news release on the study that discussed the role climate change played in raising Earth’s oceans….
That deleted line, they said, read contained a standard prayer: “Global climate change drives sea-level rise, increasing the frequency of coastal flooding.”
Instead, the USGS news release leaves the cause unmentioned. It begins: “The frequency and severity of coastal flooding throughout the world will increase rapidly and eventually double in frequency over the coming decades even with only moderate amounts of sea level rise.”
“It’s a crime against the American people,” Neil Frazer, a geophysics professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa and one of the study’s co-authors, said of the line’s removal and of other efforts to limit scientific communication from federal agencies. “Because scientists have known for at least 50 years that anthropogenic climate change is a reality.”
He added: “The suppression of this information is a scandal.”
The paper’s authors acknowledge the deletion did not make the news release wrong. But, they say, it made it incomplete….
read … Hysteria
New legislation allows University of Hawaii to cash in on intellectual property
PBN: …XLR8UH is currently the school’s only accelerator program, but Syrmos says the establishment of an Innovation and Commercialization Initiative Program, under the new legislation, could result in more.
“We hope that this bill will give us the tools to create more accelerators and therefore an ecosystem of commercializing our intellectual property,” he said. “We believe that by having this new ability of creating joint ventures, we can actually focus our acceleration activities into the medical school and life sciences and the cancer center.”
Syrmos says the bill, House Bill 847, is part of UH’s “innovation package,” and is tied to another bill passed by lawmakers this session.
House Bill 425 exempts UH faculty members from Chapter 84, Hawaii Revised Statutes, when involved in technology transfer activities at UH, which result in intellectual property and commercialization.
“These two bills go hand in hand for not only accelerators, but also for faculty to start their own businesses or startups using IP that has been created here in the university,” Syrmos said. “This is a way for us try to create an ecosystem that people feel comfortable to participate in and not only be profitable but be a great experience for students and our faculty. The idea is for most of the revenue to go back to our innovation programs to create more activity to our own startups.”…
Patent This: UH Manoa Prof Demands Colleges ‘Stop Hiring White Men’--Unless They're Trannies
read … University of Hawaii to cash in
Avoiding a Second Pearl Harbor: Why America Must Boost Hawaii’s Defenses
NI: …Fortunately, there is a relatively quick and cheap solution to this problem, one that has been proposed by several organizations and individuals interested in ballistic missile defense of the homeland. It consists of turning the Aegis Ashore test installation at the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) into an operational missile defense site….
read … Boost
Hawaii DOE Homosexual Rape Gang Tops Litigation Awards
AP: Honolulu, $5.75 million settlement: This settlement with the state of Hawaii over alleged abuse at the Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind is the highest known in a student-on-student school sex abuse case, according to Public Justice, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit law firm that tracks such cases. The class-action lawsuit, settled in 2013, contended officials at the only public school in the state for deaf and blind students knew about rapes and sexual abuse among students, failed to do enough to stop them and orchestrated a cover-up. The state denied the allegations. It said when it settled that it was instituting new procedures at the school.
GP: Another Alleged Homosexual Child Molester Sued
read … Homosexual Rape
Big Island Homeless Stay Drunk, Throw Trash Around
WHT: …Mossman is disabled by diabetes, with dreadfully swollen and bruised lower legs. On a recent Saturday he was found surrounded by all his earthly goods — a bursting luggage pack, cigarettes, a nearly empty bottle of Gatorade, an old Blackberry, his cane and a wallet stuffed with business cards, including his doctor’s.
But he can’t call his doctor. Pointing to a shiny outlet shield recessed into the concrete wall next to him, Mossman said, “They disconnected the power.” Then, brightening a little, he praised the wheels on his new pack, “The old one was hard to carry.”
He didn’t state the obvious: wheels don’t help much if you can hardly walk.
Not every story is that moving. Arlene Block, a long-time volunteer at Waimea’s Nature Park, complained bitterly about a messy camp behind Longs, 30 feet from a community trail.
“Why can’t they pick up?” she said. It wasn’t a question.
The transients’ uncollected trash is the principal complaint across North Hawaii.
The next day, three older men sat around a Waimea picnic table drinking vodka and hurling insults….
Nicky, 55, said he’d been in jail most of his life. While the other men were rational and comfortable speaking to the newspaper, this fellow interjected constantly with lewd jokes and references. He claimed that he’d mastered dozens of marketable skills, but it was hard to believe anything he said except that he’d rather panhandle than work.
Scott, a transient from Hilo, was a different breed of cat. He’d been on the road since his father threw him out of his home in West Virginia more than 30 years ago. He’s 55.
“I like my life. I choose to live this way. I’m free,” he laughed. “The only drawback is my retirement program.”
In front of him on the table was a massive, worn paperback. Scott seemed to be a sort of North Hawaii Jack Kerouac. His world was a risky one, largely outside the law and especially dangerous for women.
“Most women got a guy to protect them,” he said. “Otherwise they can just get dragged off and raped. It’s not safe.”….
read … Forced to use Antiquated Blackberry
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