Dare I say it? I’m finally sick and tired of watching Hillary Clinton impersonating a chameleon as she takes on the colors of the crowd she’s with at the moment in her now desperate run for the White House. Hillary chugging a beer and downing a shot while spouting off about her love affair with guns gave me the creeps.

What’s next? A manly belch behind that beer and maybe a good fart in front of the cameras and a cheering bar room crowd? Really. Enough already, Hillary.

The pace of political change may seem slow, but sometimes I have to look back and just marvel again at one indicator of change at the State Capitol.

Back in the mid-1980s, I was executive director of Common Cause in Hawaii when a group of dissident state senators challenged the leadership over the issue of access to the budget worksheets as the final budget vote was looming. The dissidents, who had been stripped of their committee chairs mid-session in an internal leadership struggle, were trying to find out what had happened to their budget recommendations. Common Cause, an organization advocating openness and transparency, chose to join the dissidents in a lawsuit challenging budget secrecy.

But that a bit more than 20 years ago.

Now the worksheets become public as soon as they are passed by the respective houses of the legislature. Check the legislative web site today and you’ll find the original House draft of the budget along with the most recent Senate draft. There are even versions that make comparisons easier, one with only areas of agreement and the other with all the items of disagreement. So these set of documents that used to be locked between hearings and not available even to other legislators are now not only available for public inspection but available for viewing via the Internet, and the public today knows more than most legislators knew about the budget two decades ago.

That’s quite a remarkable measure of how things have changed.

I submitted letters to the State Ethics Commission this week urging the commission to look at what appear to be unreported lobbying expenditures by Hawaii Superferry and the organization National Popular Vote.

The Superferry had a massive professionally organized grassroots lobbying effort involving direct mailings to more than 100,000 island voters soliciting their signatures on a petition urging lawmakers to back the ferry. None of that whole effort was ever disclosed by the company although reporting of advertising expenses and indirect lobbying efforts (soliciting someone else to lobby on your behalf) is clearly required.

In the case of National Popular Vote, the organization launched an advertising blitz last year after Gov. Lingle vetoed a bill adopting the groups plan for essentially evading the electoral college without a constitutional amendment. None of the cost of those prime time television ads and newspaper ads has been reported, so the public doesn’t know how much was spent to manipulate public opinion or who put up the money.

Both companies did report the amounts paid in lobbying fees to John Radcliffe and Red Morris, but did not report the larger amounts on these other lobbying activities.

Of course, because our ethics laws don’t require very timely disclosure, it wasn’t until the lobbyist reports filed in January that it was clear neither company was going to fully report its activities. And by now, the Superferry’s special session and special interest legislation is well established history, and the National Popular Vote bill has again passed the legislature despite the group’s apparent refusal to comply with the lobbyist law. But I thought it was worth asking the questions in any case since there’s always a next time.

Noted: The Advertiser has a long detailed article this morning on the just released Superferry audit, with link to the complete auditor’s report. The Star-Bulletin has a comparatively short AP story. So it goes.

It was another “Stop the car!” moment as we were driving home yesterday evening. The sun was just setting, and the view across Kaneohe Bay was classic.

I don’t usually do sunsets. Most of my photos are taken during our early morning walks. Luckily I did have a camera in the car, so I stopped in a bus stop and grabbed a few shots. Just click for a couple of them.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with the area, Kaaawa is around the point to the far right of this photo and another couple of miles along the coast. And that’s Mokolii island on the far right of the photo, sometimes referred to as Chinaman’s Hat. [Note: Apparently I drove the car off the road for a while, because these photos weren’t showing properly early this a.m. Correction made by 7:30 a.m., so don’t be afraid to click for the larger version.]