Governor Linda Lingle today released two lists of judicial nominees that were provided to her by the Judicial Selection Commission to fill one vacancy each on the Intermediate Court of Appeals and the First Circuit Court (O‘ahu).  Governor Lingle is making the lists available to the public to encourage public comment on the nominees. ... The Governor has 30 days from receipt of the lists (December 11, 2009) to submit her selections to the Hawai‘i State Senate, which would need to confirm the nominees.

Meheula’s memo says: “In the late 1990s, when Ed Case was chairman of the State House Committee on Hawaiian Affairs, he repeatedly acted to reduce Native Hawaiian benefits, rights and revenues…. In the 1998 legislative session, Mr. Case proposed the 123-page ‘Native Hawaiian Autonomy Act.’ The Act would have terminated OHA and the Hawaiian Home Lands program, denied Native Hawaiians the right to self-determination and federal recognition, and reduced State liabilities to Native Hawaiians. The Act stated that its purpose is to stop the ‘continued dependence by native Hawaiians on others which prevents the development of the full potential of the native Hawaiian people.’”

Obamacare is not dead yet. Speaker Pelosi has signaled that she will quickly pass anything that comes out of the Senate, so Reid could still cave on almost everything and get a terrible bill from everybody’s prospective on the President’s desk by New Years. But Senators thinking about moving quickly should remember that the public strongly opposes this bill, and that opposition is only rising.

SB Photo 1999: Jeff Stone's sister Mari Stone Wong and his then-brother-in-law, ousted Bishop Estate Trustee Dickie Wong, needn`t be as worried as they look--they're on trial in the courtroom of Judge Michael Town.

About Hanabusa's 2002 push for developer Jeff Stone to receive $75 million in Ko Olina tax credits, Cayetano writes:

"As I watched all of this, I wondered if there were any legislators who had the guts to ask the hard questions.  There was not a peep from the Democrats--or from conservative Republicans like Slom and Hemmings who had made careers in opposing social programs for the needy, or from young legislators who were learning quickly the politics of "going along to get along."  The only legislators who raised questions about the credibility of Stone's claims were Republicans Charles Djou of O`ahu and Jim Rath of Kona, Hawai`i."

If Hanabusa enters the congressional race and defeats Democrat Ed Case in the Primary, she will face off with Charles Djou in the General Election next November.

It is easy to portray the anti-immigration sentiment as coming entirely from the political Right. But the environmentalist Left is also a big part of the anti-immigration effort. Groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a leading anti-immigration group, played a key role in two failed attempts to take over the Sierra Club in 1998 and again in 2004. FAIR and its offshoot, Numbers USA, advocate not only an end to illegal immigration and deportation of all illegals, but also reduced levels of legal immigration....

Hawaii Representatives Neil Abercrombie, D-HI, and Ed Case, D-HI, (first and second Congressional districts, respectively) both voted on December 16 to keep the felony provision in the bill. Case then voted to approve HB 4437 as a whole while Abercrombie voted against it. Case has close ties to the environmentalist Hawaii Nature Conservancy: his sister Suzanne Case is their Executive Director.

SHOW YOUR OUTRAGE & PROTEST TOMORROW!

• WHAT – AKAKA BILL SNEAK ATTACK PUBLIC PROTEST
• WHEN – MONDAY, DECEMBER 14th @ 7 AM to 9 AM
• WHERE – CORNERS OF BERETANIA STREET & PUNCHBOWL, Downtown Honolulu. 
• WHY – DEMAND A FAIR & OPEN PROCESS

The people of Hawai'i are tired of tax and spend policies that leave future generations with a huge financial burden.  Republican Charles Djou is the only candidate in this race who can bring the kind of fiscal accountability to Washington that the people of Hawai'i and the nation deserve.

Has Mufi’s strong fundraising lead and widespread appeal threatened Abercrombie’s run for governor, so much that he has to bail from one office to run fulltime for another?  Is he so afraid of his vote record and the tough votes that are pending in Congress?  Perhaps he’s embarrassed by the $3.5 million earmark he proposed for a company whose president co-chairs his gubernatorial campaign. 

...VBM concerns have been heightened by a number of disputed elections and documented cases of absentee ballot fraud....

On Wednesday December 16 Abercrombie's House Natural Resources subcommittee will vote on HR 2314, the "Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2009" better known as the Akaka Bill.  The committee will meet at 10AM EST (5AM HST) in room 1324 Longworth.

The following day at 2:15PM EST (9:15AM HST) the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, meeting in Dirksen room 628, is scheduled to vote on the companion bill--S1011.  The vote had been originally scheduled for December 9 but has been rescheduled to the 17th. 

A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.

Next week Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is expected to attach a provision to the Department of Defense appropriations bill that would increase our national debt limit by $1.925 trillion. This debt limit raise would authorize the U.S. Treasury to borrow as much as $14 trillion, which is 30% higher than the $10.8 trillion limit that was in place when President Barack Obama took office.

Headley originally was arrested in October on charges he planned attacks on high profile targets in Denmark and India that included the Danish newspaper facilities of Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper and its employees. The new charges filed in the Northern District of Illinois accuse Headley, an American citizen born in Pakistan, of helping facilitate last year's deadly Mumbai attacks that killed approximately 170 people, including six Americans, and injured hundreds.

A Pakistani newspaper reports the arrest of five foreign nationals after a raid in a town called Sargodha. The raid took place at the home of a member of the Jaish-e-Muhammad, a Pakistani movement designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2001.  According to the report, "The DPO told that these people had been living in Sargodha since Nov 30 and it was quite a possibility that they were engaged in acts of terrorism."

HEALTH DEAL UNRAVELING:  This fight isn't over yet, no matter how many times the media tries to declare the death of the public option. It'd only take one or two senators to unravel this deal, and progressive senators Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders both indicated last night that their support can't be taken for granted.   (...so sad...)

If you are one of the few Americans who still subscribes, your morning newspaper probably has a headline like this: Democrats Reach Deal on Health Plan. Don’t believe it.  Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is still light years away from producing the 60 votes necessary to pass Obamacare out of the Senate. And the few details that have leaked out about this new “broad agreement” only reveal just how desperate Reid is to get any bill on to President Obama’s desk by the New Year.

“Former OPM Director Linda Springer told FederalNewsRadio it will literally take an act of Congress to pull that off. ‘I flat out think that OPM doesn't have the capacity to do this type of role,’ said Springer. ‘Furthermore, I don't believe that OPM has the statutory authority to do it as well. But on both those counts, I don't think it would be a good call….”’

Our priorities include:

• stimulating the economy and creating jobs,
• reforming our public education system,
• developing clean energy sources while achieving energy security,
• modernizing our transportation infrastructure,
• protecting the environment, and
• creating brighter futures for our students through scholastic robotics and other STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education programs.

Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) said expanding Medicare "is putting more people in a boat that's already sinking."  The American Medical Association said it opposes expanding Medicare because doctors face steep pay cuts under the program and many Medicare patients are struggling to find a doctor. Hospitals also said expanding Medicare and Medicaid is a bad idea.

Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant under the Clean Air Act, granting itself authority for an enormous, unprecedented regulatory undertaking that would greatly expand the EPA’s power. Because 85 percent of the U.S. economy operates on fossil fuel, the EPA would essentially have the ability to regulate every aspect of life in America – and it would be able to enact draconian climate-change policies without any accountability to American voters.

Plutocrats from around the world have marshaled over 1,200 limos and 140 private planes to travel to and around Copenhagen over the next two weeks. When they are not participating in the world’s oldest profession, conferees will be negotiating over a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which obligated most developed nations to reduce their greenhouse emissions by 5 percent below 1990 baseline levels by 2012.