i L i n d . n e t

There’s disturbing news from Kauai regarding major police over reaction to Superferry opponents who are also sovereignty advocates, apparently in official circles now considered a dangerous mix. What in the world is going on over there?

News of the video strike by Advertiser reporters brought this reply from a reader:

What’s the other side of the story, I wonder? What are the ramifications to the company if the union gets what they are asking for? Are they being unreasonable or fair, given the conditions of the newspaper industry as a whole and our economic environment? If I were in the union, I’d be concerned they were going to negotiate me out of a job — unless these questions were addressed.

And that drew a quick response from another reader:

No union would negotiate a company out of business. Bad for them since it would mean they would have no members.

There is a mutual self-interest in keeping a business open. That’s why unions in the airline industry give concession after concession.

Let’s see. I noticed this story from the Kansas City Star concerning a request for e-mails of Missouri Governor Matt Blunt. It’s interesting in light of my request for Gov. Lingle’s e-mail earlier this year, which had a very different outcome.

And the Sunlight Foundation is providing new tools for tracking federal campaign dollars, according to the Online Journalism Review.

Orbis Books, a religious publisher, has just published the latest book by Jim Douglass, a professor of religion and leading peace activist at the University of Hawaii for several years during the late 1960s and early 1970s. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters is a dense 400 heavily footnoted pages of history of the Kennedy assassination with a twist.

According to the publisher, “Douglass traces a sequence of steps by JFK–from the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, right up to the week of his death–that transformed him from a conventonal Cold Warrior to someone determiend to pull the world back from the edge of apolcalypse. These actions, including his secret back-channel dialgoue with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, caused members of his own U.S. Military-intelligence establishment to regard him as a dangerous traitor who had to be eliminated.”

When a review copy arrived in the mail a couple of days ago, I was a little skeptical, but my initial impression is that this is a book well worth reading. Douglass argues that by averting our eyes from the reality of the Kennedy assassination, we became complicit in the act and delivered a victory to those who plotted to pull it off.

Knowing Jim, this is a book with meticulous attention to detail and a compelling moral perspective. I’m looking forward to diving in.

We were on the return leg of our morning walk when this clump of Kaaawa kids were heading to school. They stopped for a photo. University classes are ending, but there’s almost a month still to go at Kaaawa School before school’s out.