June 6, 2010 News Read > Hawaii Free Press

Hawaii Daily News Read

Sunday, June 6, 2010

June 6, 2010 News Read
By Andrew Walden @ 12:35 PM :: 5478 Views

Lingle soul-searching over civil unions (ADV closes out with one more try at gay marriage)

Burns personally believed in church doctrine that life results from conception. He considered abortion "a gravely sinful act." But he also believed in the separation between state authority and church authority. No governor, he said, must ever "let his private political and religious convictions unduly influence his judgment as governor of all the people."

Burns let the bill become law without his signature.

Gov. Linda Lingle, who has a civil unions bill on her desk, has been reading about Burns as she decides whether to sign, veto or allow the bill to become law without her signature.

James Burns, now retired from the court, remembers counseling his father to let the bill become law. Gov. Burns was a former Honolulu police officer, a street cop who had seen the wreckage of illegal, back-alley abortions. (So not having civil unions is the same as having back alley abortions? That isn’t even a good try.)

SB Oi: Hawaii awaits Lingle's civil unions decision

REALITY: The Overhauling of Straight America

Advertiser writes final chapter in 154-year story

Jim Dooley documented how public officials enriched themselves by getting in on lucrative development projects, then made decisions on zoning and permits favorable to their investments. He exposed wrongdoing at the Downtown development project named Kukui Plaza that led to bribery charges against Mayor Frank Fasi. And Dooley was one of the first reporters to document questionable dealings at Hawai'i's largest private landowner, the Bishop Estate, now known as Kamehameha Schools.

(He has not been hired by the Star-Advertiser)

RELATED: The Advertiser's first editorial (Fascinating historical document. Must read. Today’s ADV editors even considered cutting out passages they considered “at best paternalistic” toward native Hawaiians. That’s why papers are dying out.)

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Black paying $125M for Advertiser (Clippers buy Lakers, fire Lakers players)

The Advertiser's newsroom was among the hardest hit. Only 28 of The Advertiser 120 editorial staffers will be retained by the Star-Advertiser.

Details of The Advertiser's sales price have been kept confidential since Black announced on Feb. 25 that he was purchasing the newspaper, its website, its nondaily publications and the printing complex it built for $82 million in Kapolei. The $125 million purchase price includes debt that Black is assuming on the printing press.

"The terms of this deal are obviously confidential, but we view the entire package as very attractive to us," Gannett President and Chief Operating Officer Gracia Martore said in remarks to Wall Street analysts in March.

The person familiar with the deal, who did not want to be further identified due to the confidentiality agreement, said the transaction includes a $40 million investment by Black's partner, Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. of Toronto.

Gannett — the nation's largest newspaper operator and publisher of USA Today — also is providing Black with more than $40 million in the form of financing for The Advertiser printing complex.

Ian Rutka, an Advertiser advertising account executive, used a sports analogy to describe Black's takeover.

"Basically, it's like the Los Angeles Clippers bought the Los Angeles Lakers and L.A. became a one-team city. Only they're keeping the Clippers players and not the Lakers players," Rutka said.

(One down, one to go?)

RELATED: Antonio Gramsci Reading List

Star-Advertiser lifts off tomorrow

The preservation of democracy is the role Black identifies as most important to the Star-Advertiser and the handful of other dailies in his chain.

"I don't know how our version of democracy would work without them," he said. "You need someone reporting on government and bringing the opposition's point of view to the community. The only people that can do that are in the big newsrooms."

(Or more to the point, if the big news rooms doesn’t report, then nobody knows…unless…it gets out through some other medium such as…uh…uh….)

Aloha, Star-Bulletin

Among its list of achievements: “The Star-Bulletin was the nation's first newspaper to endorse Obama in the historic 2008 general election.”

(And they wonder why newspapers are going down.)

Omidyar’s Civil Beat attacks human trafficking—but not at ML&P

CB: Law Enforcement Lines Up Against Human Trafficking Bill

CB: Sex Ed

Just ignore this: Green hypocrites: Case & Omidyar's Maui Land & Pine tied to human trafficking

EPA: Studies show effluent seeping off Kaanapali’s coast

(Anti-Superferry protester) Irene Bowie, president of (anti-Superferry group) Maui Tomorrow, said she would have liked to see the department comply immediately with the EPA's letter, instead of engaging in lengthy negotiations over the studies' scope and cost….

The Lahaina injection wells' depth of about 200 feet and their location near the shoreline are reasons for concern, Albright added.

"Anywhere you have substantial injection so close to the coastal environment, you could have this issue," he said. "In this case, you've got 4 million to 5 million gallons of wastewater being injected every day within a quarter- to a third-mile of the coast, and it's not being injected very deep."

(Water injection is one of the solutions being proposed as a compromise in the stream diversion case. This is a pincer movement.)

Time's running out on popular refrigerator rebates

Since the initiative was launched May 24, local consumers have purchased an estimated 7,510 refrigerators qualifying for the mail-in rebate, according to administrators of the program.

An estimated 875 rebates were still available as of Friday, though the supply allocated to retailers on Kaua'i was exhausted May 29.