Ethics

Over the years, they’ve both traveled here to Washington, D.C. and testified to Congress in favor of the original text of the bill.  Now that the bill has been substantially rewritten behind closed doors, they’ve been compelled to send a five-page letter expressing opposition to the proposed changes the Committee is scheduled to consider today.  The Attorney General and Governor have only had the full text of the proposed changes for a matter of, literally, hours. Postponing until February 24^th will allow them time to fully review the changes and have their concerns understood and considered by this Committee.

The live webcasts will begin approximately 10 minutes prior to the start of the hearing.  Hearing begins at 5AM HST (10AM EST) Weds December 16.

A new poll of registered Hawaii voters, conducted by Zogby International, has found that a majority of those surveyed oppose the Akaka Bill. The poll was conducted from November 18 to 23, 2009.  Zogby International surveyed more than 500 registered voters in Hawaii.

For years (since 1999), Daniel Akaka has been trying to make the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act law. On Friday afternoon, the minority on the House Natural Resources Committee got word that there will be a mark-up on it on Wednesday. Apparently there's an agreement on the bill, but Republicans on the committee haven't seen it.  The Hill rumor is that Democrats plan to attach Akaka to the Department of Defense funding bill before this session ends — basically, sneaking it in at a busy, contentious time of year to avoid full debate.

Early last week, an agreement was reached with the Democrat Majority that Wednesday’s markup would consist of non-controversial bills that could be considered quickly.  Democrats issued notice on Friday that the Native Hawaiian bill would be added.  The Majority has had no communication with Republicans regarding this legislation since they canceled a markup on this bill without explanation in early July....

The magnitude of the changes being proposed deserve careful consideration and an opportunity for all those who may be impacted, especially the people and elected leaders of the State of Hawaii, to properly review the rewritten text.  The proposed changes have only been available to the Republican side of the Committee for a matter of days, and the State of Hawaii has had the full text of the proposed changes for only a matter of hours.

New York’s stubborn resistance to the data revolution not only harms the education our children receive; it leaves hundreds of millions of federal dollars on the table during a massive budget crunch. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant competition will distribute $4.35 billion to states that pursue modern education reforms. According to the competition’s rules, however, any state with a law that prohibits the use of test-score data to evaluate teachers is immediately disqualified from consideration. A state’s application also becomes more attractive under the guidelines if its data set matches students to teachers. Currently, New York fails on both counts.

And so does Hawaii....

The climate treaty negotiations inside Copenhagen’s Bella Center at the United Nations Climate Change Conference ground to a halt yesterday when the G-77, the largest group of developing nations, walked out. These poorer nations demanded that richer nations sign a treaty that includes a large transfer of wealth to the developing world to compensate for the developed world’s historical contribution to global warming. The G-77 countries ended their walkout after less than two hours, perhaps because global warming has had no apparent impact on December Copenhagen temperatures.

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.

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

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….”’

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.

The HSTA has conspired with the DoE and BoE to make the furloughs as damaging as possible in order to put Hawaii schools so far out of the competition that the Hawaii Legislature will see no point in trying to enact the education reforms which could help win “Race to the Top” funding.

Undeterred by the complete failure of their past job creation efforts, leading leftist luminaries are again calling on the liberal majorities in Congress and President Obama to approve billions more in government spending for a third stimulus. Yesterday, President Obama hosted a “jobs summit” where academics, union leaders, and select big business leaders made their pitch for government largess. Among the ideas reported: Teamsters leader James Hoffa called for higher barriers to trade, President Obama insisted that all future aid to states go to preserving government jobs and not tax cuts, and others pushed to bring the “success” of Cash for Clunkers to a new Cash for Caulkers program.

The Senate began debate on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R.3590) this week. Senators on both sides of the aisle offered amendments to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s huge, 2074 page health care bill. The first votes to take place concerned preventative services for women.

Mauna Loa has been producing a readout which supports Manning's predetermined goal by showing steady growth in atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1959. This record, highlighted in Al Gore's discredited movie An Inconvenient Truth, is known as the Keeling Curve. A graph of the curve is engraved on a bronze plaque mounted at the entrance to the Observatory’s Keeling Building, 10,000 feet above sea level on the rocky north flank of Mauna Loa. According to the Observatory website: "The undisturbed air, remote location, and minimal influences of vegetation and human activity at MLO are ideal for monitoring constituents in the atmosphere that can cause climate change." 

For some reason, they fail to mention the erupting volcano next door.

Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp, who told the Wall Street Journal: “Companies large and small are saying, ‘I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.’” Or Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte who tells USA Today his company is not investing because “proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs.”

During the month of November, while President Barack Obama was dithering on whether or not to embrace General Stanley McChrystal’s strategy for winning in Afghanistan, something unexpected happened in American public opinion on the war. According to Gallup, the American public switched from 42% for and 44% against sending more troops to Afghanistan, to 47% for and only 39% against a troop build up. It is unclear why the American people came to support an increase in troops last month, but it is safe to rule out strong leadership from the White House as the cause. Hopefully the President’s incoherent address to a muted West Point audience will not reverse America’s growing support for victory.

Cadets await speech at West Point

"After vacillating for months, I am happy the President has finally made up his mind to confront the Taliban and defeat Islamic radicals.  This is the right decision and deserves our nation's full support," stated Djou.  "The war in Afghanistan is a fight we must win."

The ‘Small Business Survival Index' helps business owners and investors understand the public policy burdens placed on entrepreneurship and small business, with the states ranked accordingly.

As multiple sources reported this October, General McChrystal presented President Obama with three troop level scenarios each graded by risk: 1) an additional 20,000 troops that would run a “high risk of failure“; 2) an additional 80,000 troops that would be a “low risk option” that has “best chance to contain the Taliban-led insurgency and stabilize Afghanistan“; or 3) an additional 40,000 to 45,000 troop “medium risk option.”

Chief United States District Judge Susan Oki Mollway today (Monday, Nov 30)  sentenced ETHAN MOTTA, also known as "Malu," age 40, to life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole, for his role in the shooting of three persons at the Pali Golf Course on January 7, 2004.

While Obama has been at great pains to make a show of avoiding taxes on the middle class to pay for his health care changes, his proposed increase in Medicaid eligibility will have a huge impact on the 39 states whose income cutoffs for the program are below those required in the new federal legislation.  States....will have to raise their eligibility for Medicaid under the Senate health care bill. And they will have to pay for part of the cost.

Geoff Jenkins is the self-described “front man explaining climate change.”  The UK Guardian in 2004 called him, “the man Tony Blair turns to for the facts about climate change.”  And as the mid-1990s global warming hype was being cranked up to full volume, Jenkins in 1996 formed a “cunning plan”, “inventing” temperature readings, and releasing fake “estimates” of temperature data for the year even before the year is over.

A movement without an effective strategy for defeating its opponents cannot succeed. Therefore it is important to reacquaint ourselves with the art of political war.

In 2008, three female students at the St. HOPE Academy, a charter school in Sacramento, claimed inappropriate advances had been made by Mr. Johnson, who ran the school and was running for mayor. Mr. Johnson, a former NBA star, had been plagued by charges of sexual misconduct ever since his days as a player in the 1990s.

Mr. Walpin's investigators concluded that Kevin Hiestand, the attorney for Mr. Johnson, had approached at least one of the complaining students and asked her to remain quiet. About a week later, Mr. Johnson himself offered her a payment of $1,000 a month until she left school, which she refused to accept. Erik Jones, the St. HOPE teacher who eventually reported one of the victims' allegations to the police, resigned in protest, claiming the school also had sought to intimidate the student into changing her story.

Last week, the United States Preventive Services Task Force issued new guidelines recommending that women in their 40s no longer have annual mammograms and that women ages 50 to 74 have them only every other year, instead of annually. The recommendations were highly controversial, and by week’s end most health insurers and the federal Medicare program said they would ignore the panel’s recommendation and continue covering annual mammograms. This is as it should be: the federal government collects information and makes recommendations, and Americans are then free to consult their health care providers, ignoring the government if they so choose. The problem is that Obamacare would forever change this relationship.

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

Earlier this month, the Obama administration moved to transfer alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from the military justice system at Guantanamo Bay to the jurisdiction of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Behind this move away from the military tribunal system, which delivered justice so effectively at Nuremburg, is an $8.5 million lobbying effort by the so-called “John Adams Project” launched in April, 2008 by the American Civil Liberties Union.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.   In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is poised for another Saturday night cram down, forcing a Senate cloture vote mere days before his 2,074 page bill was given to Senators. Yet again, Congress will be forced to vote on a bill that none of them have actually read. More importantly, as we pour through the details, it becomes obvious that none of them even believe the plan will do what the bill says.

...a monthly abortion premium will be charged of all enrollees in the government-run health plan.  It’s right there beginning on line 11, page 122, section 1303, under “Actuarial Value of Optional Service Coverage.”  The premium will be paid into a U.S. Treasury account – and these federal funds will be used to pay for the abortion services.

Last Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other terrorists would be tried in a civilian court in New York City rather than before a military tribunal. Pressing Holder on this decision at yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight hearing of the U.S. Department of Justice, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked: “Can you give me a case in United States history where a (sic) enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?”

Holder responded: “I don’t know. I’d have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I’ve made…”

VIDEO -- Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asks: "Where would Osama Bin Laden be tried if he were captured tomorrow?

In spite of the fact that Graham's question is hardly unexpected--having been at the root of debate over the handling of GTMO detainees for several years--Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder, whose private law firm represents over a dozen GTMO detainees, again and again fails to come up with a clear answer....

Yesterday at 3:00 p.m. ET, the Treasury Department updated its calculation of the U.S. National Debt to: $12,031,299,186,290.07. That $12 trillion record high comes just eight months after it hit $11 trillion and is only expected to rise faster considering the federal deficit for 2009 was over $1.4 trillion. And what is the leftist majority of Congress going to do tomorrow about these skyrocketing deficits? They are going to pile on the spending faster.

Today, unions are dependent on government, not the private sector, for their livelihood. Therefore, unions like the SEIU have little interest in private sector job growth. Private sector jobs don’t help fund $60.7 million political campaigns. But government jobs do.

Combing through the data on the $18 million Recovery.gov website you’ll find tons of Obama stimulus success stories from across the country. In Minnesota’s 57th Congressional District, 35 jobs have been saved or created using $404,340 in stimulus funds. In New Mexico’s 22nd Congressional District, 25 jobs have been saved or created using $61,000 in stimulus cash. And in Arizona’s fighting 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending.

But none of the above Congressional Districts actually exist....

A report released Friday by the non-partisan and independent Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency in charge of running Medicare and Medicaid, blows the lid off of every one of Obama’s claims.

"This is potentially very big news for the future of tourism in Hawai‘i. It will bring back a lot of jobs if we’re successful at bringing it about." -- Gov Lingle 

How this would be accomplished:

1.        Use 15 non-classroom days (between Jan. 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011) when teachers are paid but do not teach classes to restore all teaching days lost on Furlough Fridays beginning Jan. 1, 2010.  (For those teachers who work on a 12-month schedule, a comparable adjustment would be made.)

2.        The cost of restoring the remaining 12 days would be achieved by using money out of the Emergency Budget Reserve Fund (Rainy Day Fund).  Estimated cost to Rainy Day Fund would be $50 million.

Many claim American foreign policy acts "create terrorists", but Osama bin-laden points to the importance of words--explaining their value best in an intercepted letter to Taliban chief Mullah Omar:

It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods (of struggle). In fact, its ratio may reach 90% of the total preparation for battles.

But which words?  In Osama bin-Laden's 1998 sit down with ABC's John Miller, his last face-to-face interview with an American journalist, the al Qaeda chief explains...