May 25, 2011 News Read > Hawaii Free Press

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Wednesday, May 25, 2011

May 25, 2011 News Read
By Andrew Walden @ 1:27 PM :: 17188 Views

Abercrombie’s Medical Homes: Global Budget to control your Healthcare

Only 53% of House Seats change hands in 7 years

WSJ: An Anti-Israel President: The president's peace proposal is a formula for war

WaTimes: Obama’s next war -- President’s ill-considered Islamist backing puts Israel in the cross hairs

4 Schofield soldiers killed in Afghanistan bomb attack

Four Schofield Barracks soldiers were killed by a homemade bomb Monday in Afghanistan after their unit was attacked by insurgents in Kunar province, the Pentagon reported today.

Killed were: Staff Sgt. Kristofferson B. Lorenzo, 33, of Chula Vista, Calif.; Pfc. William S. Blevins, 21, of Sardinia, Ohio; Pvt. Andrew M. Krippner, 20, Garland, Texas; and Pvt. Thomas C. Allers, 23, of Plainwell, Mich

They deployed with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment and were assigned to 1st Platoon, A Company.

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Inouye, Akaka stab Hawaii in back: Call for delay in South Korea Free Trade Pact

A majority of Senate Democrats are backing a move by the Obama administration calling for reauthorization of an aid program that helps U.S. workers displaced by trade before moving ahead with three pending free-trade agreements.

Forty-one senators — (including Inouye and Akaka) — sent a letter Monday to President Obama expressing support for his decision not to submit the pending agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea to Congress until a deal is struck to extend a long-term extension of the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program, including changes made to it in 2009.

REAL LEADERSHIP FOR HAWAII: Djou renews call for Free Trade with South Korea

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Senator Hee amends latest financial disclosure, questions remain

Senator Clayton Hee has filed a new personal financial disclosure statement which now includes additional sources of income and other information previously omitted. For years, Hee has filed reports that simply reported “None” for most categories of interests for himself and his wife, shielding his financial interests from public scrutiny and apparently flouting state law in the process.

The omissions became apparent when compared to the disclosure filed independently by his wife, Lynne Waters, after she was appointed to a high-level public relations position in the University of Hawaii system earlier this year.

Senator Hee’s filing of apparently false reports was detailed here on Saturday.

The latest document appeared on the State Ethics Commission web site yesterday.

The senator’s latest disclosure statement, dated May 23, amends an earlier disclosure statement filed just two weeks earlier, but is not identified as an amendment. The earlier report, in which the senator certified that he had no additional items to report, has now disappeared.

Although now removed from the Ethics Commission web site, a copy of Hee’s original report can be found here.

It is not clear whether the commission routinely allows previously certified statements to disappear and be replaced by amended documents without public notice

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DePledge: Nobody cares about Residency

Hawaii voters have been forgiving of members of Congress who live outside the districts they represent, a vestige, most likely, of the days when the islands had only one district. Both U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, D-Hawaii, live outside their districts.

Many Republicans — and, in the case of Hirono, Kauai Democrats — have tried to make residency a political issue, but it has not had much of an influence on voters.

The upcoming race to replace Hirono in the 2nd Congressional District, which covers rural Oahu and the Neighbor Islands, will likely draw candidates from outside the 2nd District. Hirono is running for the U.S. Senate to replace U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii.

(The purpose of this column is to convince Mufi to run for CD2.)

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Rail Math Just Doesn’t Add Up

The recent lawsuit regarding rail could possibly spell the end of the controversial project.

It’s interesting to note that despite the escalating and exorbitant cost, incredibly negative impact to the aesthetics of our island, the self-admitted inability to reduce traffic congestion, the looming spectre of eminent domain and the threat to historical/burial sites, there is still support for this behemoth of a public works project.

One must come to the conclusion that the only reason for this support is steeped in the Gospel-like promise of jobs, jobs and more jobs.

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Shapiro: Public should win tug of war over control of rail authority

The Carlisle administration describes its battle with the City Council over control of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation as an issue of autonomy, but the question is, autonomy from whom?

Mayor Peter Carlisle argues that voters intended for the city's $5.3 billion rail system to be politics-free and for elected officials to keep hands off when they approved a City Charter amendment creating the rail agency.

The administration's view that the Council's role should be mostly limited to approving bond sales, with no oversight of HART's budget, would certainly keep the Council's hands off.

But when you turn the question to how autonomous HART will be from the administration, which has tried to tightly control every aspect of rail to this point, the answer might be not so much.

The administration has an advantage over the Council in picking HART's directors. Both sides made three direct appointments, but the city transportation director is also on the board and effectively gives the administration a fourth choice. The state transportation director is the eighth member, and those eight will choose the ninth.

HART's staff will be some 40 employees transferring over from the city Transit Division, many of whom have loyalties to the administration.

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Will current controversies change public opinion on rail?

And now Ben Cayetano and others have filed a suit pointing out that the EIS did not contain the requisite alternative analysis and must therefore fail, adding fuel to the legal fires burning around rail, and to mounting public concerns about how we got here. Perhaps the tide is turning?

Many people feel there has been a hoodwinking, and that had there been a proper discussion we would never had gone down this road. In any event, rail is not going anywhere without serious and continuing controversy, on the procurement and contracting issues, on the condemnation issues and, of course, on the basic question of whether to go ahead.

Why is it that this big bad project has gone so far and we have spent so many tens of millions digging a hole in the sand? The confusion has gone widespread. Why can’t we do better on a project so large? The answer: because it is so large. Ten billion does have a way of gathering flies. That's my estimate of what it will cost given the overruns Parsons Brinckerhoff had at the Big Dig in Boston.

Some say that rail will meet the fate that so many large projects in Hawaii ultimately meet. We seem to have a problem with large projects. We get intimidated somehow, and we make mistakes in planning them and also in executing them. It’s embarrassing. We seem to get distracted by a swarm of special interests, and we wind up losing our perspective. Our officials seem to disregard the larger picture and flout the greater good, despite their promises to the contrary.

We can't afford rail, and we can't afford to wait 20 years to deal with our horrendous congestion. So why are we barking up this $10 billion tree? We have to reorder our priorities and soon. We have to fix the traffic and pay our bills, and those things must come first. We don’t have the money to waste on big bad rail projects. To ignore that fact is reckless, and will put all of us in the poorhouse.

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Critics: HPD Chief Isolated, Too Close To Union

A year and a half after Louis Kealoha became the Honolulu police chief, there is high-level criticism of his leadership from within his own department and from people at other law enforcement agencies.

Kealoha has also been the target of anonymous letters critical of his management style and decisions.

One of the typed letters headlined “Hypocracy - Deceitfulness – Cronyism” arrived at KITV4 News and police headquarters late last month.

Sources said Kealoha has asked HPD mail room personnel to confiscate those “poison pen” letters. Someone has filed a complaint with the city Ethics Commission about the HPD mail confiscations, according to Chuck Totto, executive director of the Honolulu Ethics Commission.

In a statement, Kealoha said the Police Department was just following its own mail policy, which says "reasonable action should be taken for non-work related mail addressed to the police station to be rerouted or cancel future correspondence."

Kealoha's critics also complain he's too close to the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers, the police officers' union, known as SHOPO.

When the Honolulu Police Commission selected Kealoha as chief in November of 2009, he was considered the union's candidate and more than 100 officers wrote letters and emails on his behalf. Several hundred officers also lined the third floor at City Hall when he was sworn in, once again showing their support for him.

Last October, Kealoha selected Capt. Andy Lum as his right-hand man -- a position known as the chief's aide. About the same time Lum resigned as a SHOPO official, stepping down as secretary from the union's state board, Lum said.

(This is related to the recent arrest of an assistant Chief’s son and the subsequent resignation of two assistant chiefs.)

Father says son found gun at Oahu middle school

The boy will be suspended from public school for his freshman year and will attend an alternative school in the fall, Takayesu said.

The gun was legally registered to a person outside the immediate family, who reported it stolen when confronted by police Monday. The gun owner told police the gun had been missing for several months, McCarthy said.

"My son did not bring a gun to the school," Takayesu said.

He said his son told him the weapon was found on campus.

Police said they're trying to determine how the gun arrived on school grounds.

"We have a good idea, but we're investigating it," McCarthy said.

SA: Keep students' parents informed

CB: Hawaii Has Double the National Rate of School Firearms Incidents

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Is Restricting Freedom of Movement a Healthcare Solution?

Our congressional delegation is asking the federal government to consider screening unhealthy Micronesians before allowing them to fly to Hawaii or the mainland.

There's good reason for concern about the health-care costs Hawaii is asked to bear. But what kind of solution is it to limit the free movement of people who have a legal right to travel to the U.S.?

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Filipinos Overtake Japanese As Top Hawaii Group

Filipinos have overtaken Japanese as the top Asian ancestry group in Hawaii, according to new data released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The data reveals that there are 197,497 island residents who identify themselves as Filipino, representing 14.5 percent of the state's total population of 1.36 million. There are 185,502 residents, or 13.6 percent, who self-identify as Japanese.

Preliminary surveys indicated the flip had been coming for some time. (Yes, they really did write this sentence.) In the 2009 and 2008 American Community Surveys, Filipinos were estimated to have higher populations than Japanese, though the sample sizes were sufficiently small and the margins of error sufficiently high to make a final conclusions murky.

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Hawaii can play a leading role in America's quest to explore and colonize space

For the past half-century, Hawaii has leveraged its strategic mid-Pacific location, unique geographical terrain, and diverse research and business partnerships with Asian and Pacific nations to help advance our national space agenda — beginning with astronaut training for the Apollo lunar missions and the development of world-class observatories on the Big Island, and leading to groundbreaking programs in planetary geosciences, satellite communications, space-based remote sensing and other aerospace-related fields supported by the University of Hawaii, the U.S. military and tech-based companies statewide.

Looking to the future, President Barack Obama has challenged our nation to enhance humankind's capacity to "‘work, learn, operate and live safely beyond the Earth for extended periods of time."

Congress also has called for a space program that will facilitate a "permanent human presence beyond low-Earth orbit."

We believe Hawaii's phenomenal resources, capabilities and experience can again be leveraged to help realize our nation's vision for sustainable settlements beyond our home planet, and in so doing establish the Aloha State as both a major contributor to and beneficiary of global space enterprise.

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$2.6M for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

With $854,000 in stimulus funding, officials at Better Place are looking for commercial property owners interested in hosting an electric car charging station.

The company, which develops infrastructure for electric cars, plans to install 130 charging stations throughout the state as part of a push to make the Islands ready for the rollout of electric cars in Hawaii.

Their funding, which they have until May 2012 to use, is part of $2.6 million in grants that the state distributed to six companies in preparation for what is hoped to be a major rollout of electric cars next year.

Better Place officials are targeting locations such as parking lots, strip malls, hotels and tourist destinations.

AP: Hirono praises feds' move toward electric cars (The media still hasn’t mentioned the fact that all of this is Lingle’s idea.)

Hawaii Co Water rates hiked 18%

The Water Board on Tuesday unanimously approved increasing its power cost charge from $1.89 to $2.23 per 1,000 gallons. The hike is intended to assist the Hawaii County Department of Water Supply in maintaining a more balanced budget in the midst of rising energy costs.

The change, effective June 1, means a typical family of five, consuming an average 20,000 gallons of water in a two-month period, would pay a power cost charge of $44.60, or about $22.30 per month.

With the current power cost charge, that same customer would have paid $37.80, or $18.90 per month. It's a difference of $6.80 for a two-month billing period, or $3.40 per month.

Kauai to Regulate Peddlers in Parks

Kaua‘i County Council member on Wednesday unanimously approved a bill to strengthen a law regulating peddling at county parks and facilities, but they left it up to the Parks and Recreation Department to create the specific rules required to enforce it.

“There’s certain expectations of the rules and permitting, but that has to be done by the Parks Department, not by the council,”Council Chair Jay Furfaro said Monday.

Bill 2406 covers all county parks and also parks under county jurisdiction in which there are commercial activities such as surfing lessons, scuba diving and weddings, he said.

Robber Baron will not Represent Molokai

DeGray Vanderbilt, who faced criticism during the review of his nomination to the Molokai Planning Commission, withdrew his name Tuesday as the Maui County Council was set to vote.

He told council members that his withdrawal had "nothing to do with any of the opposition testimony" he faced from critics such as the Molokai Chamber of Commerce and South Maui community activist Buck Joiner….

During the council's Policy Committee meetings to consider Vanderbilt's nomination, opponents questioned Vanderbilt's Molokai residency and said he was anti-business and accused him of being confrontational. …

Vanderbilt told the council members that he's not "anti-everything," despite what was said about him in a letter from the Maui Chamber of Commerce.

He added that he believes he's on the "same page" as about 85 percent of Molokai residents, although maybe he's not the one to bring everyone together.

Outside of the meeting, Vanderbilt said there are a few others who have submitted their names to serve on the Molokai Planning Commission.

"Molokai is bigger than me," he said. (That’s big of him.)

(BTW: Is there a factory where eco-faddist Luddite trust fund babies are manufactured? Enquiring minds want to know.)

Hawaii Consumers #3 in Credit Card Debt

Hawaii consumers carried the nation's third-highest credit card debt per person in the first quarter, though fewer people were delinquent on payments than the previous year.

A report released Monday by TransUnion, one of the country's three largest credit bureaus, showed the average isle credit card holder racked up $5,303 in credit card charges at the end of the quarter. Alaska had the highest debt at $6,811, followed by North Carolina at $5,446. Hawaii's average debt fell 9 percent from $5,831 a year ago. The national average was $4,679, the lowest since the third quarter of 2000.

Much of the debt is attributed to the cost of food, fuel and housing here, which is often higher than in most parts of the country because of geographic isolation and limited resources.

TransUnion: Credit Card Delinquencies Drop Nearly 10 Percent, Continue to Move Downward to Levels Not Seen Since 1996

Council pursues Obama's library

The City Council is joining the effort to try attracting President Barack Obama's future presidential library.

A Council committee advanced a resolution Monday urging the 44th president to select Honolulu, where he was born, as the site of his presidential library.

The state House and Senate adopted similar, nonbinding resolutions last year.

"It's quite a remarkable opportunity we have living in the hometown of a guy who became president," said Robert Perkinson, a University of Hawaii professor who is spearheading the effort to attract the library. "One way to capitalize on that opportunity is to try to attract one of these institutions."

Shakedown Fails for Now: Telescope foes lose bid for legal fees

Opponents of the project sued UH and the BLNR in 3rd Circuit Court in 2004, challenging the land board's approval of the outrigger telescopes, and in 2007 Judge Glenn Hara overturned that approval, leading the University of Hawaii to begin creating a Mauna Kea Comprehensive Management Plan.

The prevailing parties then sought to recover $218,896 in legal fees and $3,277 in costs, generated by more than 700 hours of work on the case….

Telescope opponents appealed Hara's decision to the Intermediate Court of Appeals. They argued that their case fell under the "private attorney general doctrine."

That is, if the people believe that a state attorney general is not acting in the public interest, they may compensate a private attorney for doing the same work. But costs are only recoverable in a case that meets the following three-prong test: It has societal importance, it requires private enforcement with a burden on the plaintiff, and it benefits large numbers of people.

The appeals court found that the telescope opponents did not meet the test.

"We didn't meet all three prongs. If we didn't meet all three prongs, we can't get our money back," said Kealoha Pisciotta, president of Mauna Kea Anaina Hou. She disagrees with the court's ruling but hasn't decided on an appeal.

REALITY: Thirty Meter Telescope Selects Mauna Kea -- Let the looting begin!, Telescope: The Shakedown begins

OHA To publish How To guide for Shakedown Artists

OHA has committed $62,000 for Ka Huli Ao to research, publish, and distribute two primers: one on iwi kūpuna (Native Hawaiian burials) and a second on traditional and customary Native Hawaiian rights. Once the materials are completed, Ka Huli Ao will collaborate with grassroots groups on Kaua‘i, O‘ahu, Maui, Moloka‘i, and Hawai‘i Island to facilitate community outreach meetings and distribute copies of the primers.

“We are immensely grateful for OHA’s continued support of our community outreach and empowerment efforts,” explained Ka Huli Ao Assistant Professor Kapua Sproat. “This builds on the success of Ola I Ka Wai: A Legal Primer for Water Use and Management in Hawai`i, where OHA and Ka Huli Ao partnered to provide educational resources and increase capacity regarding water rights and issues, especially in rural, Neighbor Island communities. This funding will allow us to continue those efforts, now with respect to iwi kūpuna and traditional and customary rights."

Argentina: Hawaii doctor nabbed for Medicare billing fraud

Warter says on his website that he has spent 30 years "journeying between the fields of western medicine and the deep exploration of spiritual practices from around the world," doing his residency at Harvard University's Children's Hospital and later lecturing at Esalen Institute.

He has written dozens of books in Spanish and English, and his site shows photos of him meeting with world leaders from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the Dalai Lama, Pope John Paul II, Brazilian soccer legend Pele and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. The site says his nonprofit groups include the World Health Foundation for Development and Peace, Heartnet International and Gota de Miel (Drop of Honey), which aided orphanages in Latin America.

A federal grand jury indictment accuses Warter of knowingly sending about $1 million in inflated bills to Medicaid, the Hawaii Medical Service Association and TRICARE, a federally funded program that provides care to military personnel. It alleges he overbilled for sessions that didn't last as long as he claimed, and even billed for sessions when he wasn't physically in the state of Hawaii, pocketing more than $530,000 that he wasn't completely entitled to.

In addition to the federal indictment, Warter was charged in August 2009 with 37 state felonies accusing him of medicare fraud, each punishable by up to five years in prison. This February he surrendered his medical license for failure to comply with professional conduct laws, said Connie Cabral, director of the Hawaii Medical Board.

Hawaii woman accused in $50 million Chinese company fraud

A Hawaii woman accused of defraunding investors in a Chinese company is too sick to travel to face charges in court, her lawyer told a federal judge in Washington state today.

Loretta Fredy Bush, the former chief executive officer of Xinhua Finance Inc. didn't appear in court because of illness, her lawyer said.

"She is under doctor's orders not to fly," Bush's lawyer, Charles Leeper told U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth.

Leeper said it was unclear when his client will be able to appear in court.

Bush and two other former board members of Xinhua Finance Inc. are accused of taking part in a $50 million insider-trading scheme.

Shelly Singhal and Dennis Pelino made their first appearance in federal court in Washington after being charged May 10 with conspiracy, mail fraud and false statements and pleaded not guilty.

Xinhua Finance, the first Chinese company listed on the Tokyo stock exchange, provides information products focused on Chinese and international financial markets.

United States for Travel Freedom Caucus Plans to Stop TSA ‘Abuses’

Rep. Sharon Cissna, R-Alaska, made national headlines when she took on federal airport screeners this February, refusing to submit to what she said was an intrusive search and body pat down by the Transportation Security Administration. When the then 68-year-old cancer survivor, who also suffered abuse in her youth, was barred by federal security from flying from Seattle, Washington to her home in Alaska, she took alternative transportation. During the four-day journey home to Auke Bay near Juneau, she heard from several other people about embarrassing and humiliating experiences they’d had with the TSA.