Environment

Puna is one of the very few places in Hawai`i where young local families can afford to buy their own home and begin life as a family.  But environmentalists are working hard to put a stop to the inflow of locals and replicate the success they have had in making Maui and Kaua`i into exclusive havens for rich mainland transplants.

The plastic bag ban has a certain lucrative logic to it. It turns out that plastic bags gum up plastic recycling machines and reduce the resale value of bundled used plastics. So what is the solution? Improve the recycling machines so they don’t become gummed up? No. Instead recycling companies are using their clout with City and County governments all over the world to impose plastic bag bans. They will inconvenience the public rather than improve their technology.

Convicted felons are being registered. Some jurisdictions propose allowing non-citizens to cast ballots in state and local elections. But are our soldiers voting?

After nationalizing a Kauai poi factory in December, the state of Hawaii is considering collectivized agriculture. A bill before the Legislature’s House Committee on Health would establish a state farm on Maui -- to grow marijuana.

When the Army’s inevitable discovery of the DU rounds at Pohakuloa came, the activists’ agit-prop show took over the so-called mainstream media. The Hawaii Tribune Herald printed the double lie, “Radioactive find at PTA fuels fears” as its Aug. 26 headline. It is wrong on both counts: It is completely false to call DU a “radioactive find” unless it would be correct to call the potassium-40 laden protesters, “radioactive activists.” Secondly the activists are not fearful but utterly thrilled to discover that DU is present on the Big Island. As Albertini said, “This is going to be bigger than Agent Orange.”

Rep. Ed Case called the Democratic Senate Primary vote on Sept. 23, “a Choice between past and future” and explained on his campaign Web site: "This election gives Hawaii's voters a choice between the way things have been in Hawaii and national politics and the way they can and should be. I believe our political culture is broken and must change, and that this election asks voters to choose between the status quo and a better way forward."

But Hawaii Democratic Primary voters said “no.”

Gov. Lingle has done a service to autistic children everywhere by rejecting the Thimerosal claims. This is one step away from fear mongering claims which might make for a nice juicy lawsuit one day and a step towards autism research which could discover the real cause(s) and develop real treatments.

Thousands of lives are at stake but the Democrats and their trial lawyer donors care only about the opportunity for more ill gotten gains. The fact that these gains might be made at the expense of the lives of children who are infected by diseases which might have been prevented by vaccines made no longer available due to lawsuit liability is of no concern to them.

The day after Iraq’s stunning December 15 election success, the New York Times wrote, "Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the …(National Security Agency) has monitored the international telephone calls and international email messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible ‘dirty numbers’ linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications." ... the local media, and The New York Times all chose not to mention that President Bill Clinton asserted his authority to conduct physical searches "for foreign intelligence purposes" without a warrant in Executive Order 12949, dated Feb. 9, 1995, during the Bosnia War.

With Hurricane Jova and two other major other storms lined up in formation, Oahu Civil Defense planners describe a shortfall of 60,000 spaces in evacuation plans which are themselves designed to shelter only about one-third of Oahu`s population. These numbers sound bad enough, but they grotesquely understate the problem.