Midweek: Abercrombie voted alone against anti-terrorism measures, against support for Israel
Neil Abercrombie, D-Hezbollah
Aiona: Tourism recovery reflects hard work and cooperative efforts
Djou talks to 3000 constituents in telephone talk story
Haha’ione Forum to discuss move to appointed Board of Education
HGEA endorsements: Our way or the highway on GE Tax
White van lic # NDU-549 sought in Hauula campaign sign thefts
Abercrombie plans to dump Prepaid Health care act in favor of state-run medical insurance
KITV: Abercrombie and Aiona said there will be changes to Hawaii insurance coverage under the federal insurance law.
Abercrombie said soaring health care costs may require Hawaii residents and employers alike to move into a single insurance pool.
Abercrombie said although Hawaii's law was sound and advanced for it's time, health care costs are becoming increasingly less affordable for employers to shoulder on their own.
"So it is quite clear, in terms of the Prepaid Healthcare Act, we may need to have a review and a revision of it likely," said Abercrombie.
Aiona said he will do everything he can to retain the provisions of Hawaii's Prepaid Healthcare law.
(So if Abercrombie is elected Governor, you can expect your medical insurance to be provided by the State with the same smiling efficiency that all other State services are provided. Visualize a combination of Kuhio Terrace, Halawa Prison, Hawaii State Hospital and Maui Memorial, all rolled into one, sprinkled with a mixture of Broken Trust and managed by something resembling the State Board of Education.)
SA: Foes spar over future of health care
"It was the most progressive of its time, but events have caught up with us, in the sense of costs of health care simply getting beyond us," Abercrombie, the Democratic candidate, said of the state law. "So we're most likely going to have to review whether the fundamental premise of the health care -- the division between employer and employee -- perhaps needs to have another look."
Abercrombie said the state might have to look at whether companies and workers should be placed together in one big health insurance pool.
The federal health care reform law, for example, calls for health insurance exchanges to help make insurance more affordable for individuals and small businesses.
REALITY: Hawaii Hospitals: Not Quite Catching Up To Africa
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Shapiro: Abercrombie off target on blame for schools
…he’s off base in his politicized diagnosis of why so little has happened in the six years since the (ACT 51) law passed.
“The reason the Lingle-Aiona administration was unable to implement Act 51,” he said, “had nothing to do with the merits of the act and everything to do with the fact that the Lingle-Aiona administration wanted to pursue a different course of educational reform on its own, like the unsuccessful pursuit of multiple school boards and an audit of the DOE.”
Pure nonsense. Gov. Linda Lingle has absolutely no power to set or implement policies for the Department of Education — and neither would Abercrombie; Act 51 was a creation of the Legislature, and implementing it was entirely the constitutional responsibility of the Board of Education, which as usual, was paralyzed by politics and indecision.
Lingle wasn’t seriously consulted in the passage or implementation of the law, which she called “false reform,” and the Legislature chose not to follow up in any significant way on why the BOE wasn’t fully implementing what it had decreed.
If Abercrombie wants to bring back Act 51, instead of pointing fingers at Lingle and Aiona, he should be telling us what he’d do to get those who really botched its implementation — his fellow Democrats in the Legislature and on the Board of Education — off their duffs.
RELATED: Abercrombie admits his education reform proposals based on failed Act 51 disaster
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Republican Governors back Aiona with ad dollars
The RGA's contribution has been a series of "Rise and Shine" television ads. They are something of the natural successor to former President Ronald Reagan's "It's morning again in America," from 1984.
Political observers credit the Reagan ads as some of the most effective ever. The Aiona ads, and accompanying Internet sites, are equally positive. Personally, I thought Aiona's ads were a tad closer to Billy Graham than Ronald Reagan, but still clean and effective.
Then this week the RGA started to grow talons. The new ads use Abercrombie's own TV commercials, thank Abercrombie for his service and set him up for a fast right cross, saying Abercrombie voted for higher taxes and questioning if now is the time for another spendthrift Democrat.
It was negative in the sense that it was mostly about how voters should not select Abercrombie, but nothing close to what Democratic voters experienced during last month's primary election.
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Rep Pine pledges not to run for City Council
She said she is concentrating on her re-election campaign to the state House, where she faces Jason Bradshaw, the political director of the AFL-CIO.
“I’m not going to run for the City Council in the special election,” Pine said.
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Visitor Industry Continues To Rebound: Total Visitor Arrivals Up 11%, Visitor Spending Up 30%
HONOLULU -- It's been a superb summer for the visitor industry with total visitor arrivals up in August for the ninth consecutive month.
Not only did more tourists visit Hawaii in August, they spent more, about 30 percent more, reaching $1 billion dollars, for the first time in two years.
The 680,496 tourists that arrived in Hawaii last month, represents a nearly 12 percent increase from August 2009, with strong growth in arrivals from the mainland, Canada and Japan. Better yet, they're spending money.
PBN: Hawaii's initial unemployment claims drop 16.1%
RELATED: Aiona: Tourism recovery reflects hard work and cooperative efforts
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2 Sentenced In Sex Trafficking Case: Defendant Given 25 Years In Federal Prison
Rodney D. King, 44, forced two women and two girls into prostitution by using force, fraud and coercion, prosecutors said. The forced prostitution happened in periods from April 2006 to December 2007, according to prosecutors.
"This sentence sends a strong message that this type of predatory crime that targets young and vulnerable victims is unacceptable, and we will continue to vigorously prosecute sex trafficking cases," Hawaii U.S. Attorney Florence T. Nakakuni said.
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DoE still can’t get Mililani middle School up to 180 days, plans to seek exemptions for multi-track schools
Here’s another reason to fire the entire Board of Education on Nov 2:
"With a three-track school, two-thirds of the kids are on campus, one-third is off. With a four-track school, three-fourths of the kids are on campus and one-fourth is off," said Johnson.
It's a system designed to address growing student populations.
On top of that, class sizes will increase from 23 or 24 students, up to 30.
Plus, a four-track system will add 19 instructional days to the school year, giving more classroom time as mandated by the new state law.
The schedule change would bring the number of instructional days from 152 to 171 per year.
That's still below the required 180.
School principal, Elynne E. Chung, says they plan on asking lawmakers to exempt schools on track systems.
MEANWHILE: Hawaii DoE: Cost of waste, fraud, and corruption between $191M and $431M per year
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A part of a plan to keep Kukui Gardens affordable stalls over financing trouble
Three years after a state-backed plan was engineered to prevent a dramatic loss of low-income rental apartments at one of Oahu's largest affordable-housing communities, a big piece of the plan has faltered.
The preservation plan involved building 400 new affordable units at Kukui Gardens to offset the impending loss of a similar number of affordable units when they are converted to market-rate rentals over the next 2 1/2 years.
However, financing difficulties have led to an indefinite deferral of the estimated $100 million expansion, according to EAH Housing, a nonprofit developer working on the plan.
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Feds check state's gas pipes: The Public Utilities Commission lobbied to end its oversight of fuel conduit safety
Until last year, Hawaii law assigned responsibility for gas pipeline safety to the state Public Utilities Commission.
In 1992 the PUC failed to fill a vacant pipeline inspector position despite repeated warnings. The U.S. Department of Transportation yanked the PUC's safety certification in 1993 for failure to adequately comply with federal requirements of a pipeline safety program.
The PUC successfully pushed last year to repeal the Hawaii law that gave it oversight responsibility. PUC Chairman Carl Caliboso said the agency's budget was strapped and that it was redundant for the state to do what federal inspectors were already doing.
"It became a budget issue" in a year of belt-tightening, Caliboso said. "Do we need to fund this if the feds are already doing it? Since we weren't doing it and we didn't have funding for it, we may as well change the law."
Hawaii's pipelines are now inspected by federal inspectors from the Office of Pipeline Safety, operating under the U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
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