May 1, 2004 - Saturday

I got down to the beach yesterday morning just in time to see a green flash. At about the same time, Meda was in the Denver airport waiting for flight back to Honolulu and it was snowing outside.

I couldn't help noticing this sentence in a Star-Bulletin story yesterday on the arrest of two Kapahulu residents for murdering friend in a dispute over missing marijuana:

Nakaji (note: the victim) and her husband delivered newspapers in Kapahulu for an independent contractor.

Is they had delivered the Advertiser, I imagine the fact would have appeared in the story. So does this mean that they worked for an "independent contractor" delivering the Star-Bulletin? If so, why not just say they delivered the Star-Bulletin?

If you haven't stopped by S-B writer Burl Burlingame's new site recently, he's got a good explanation for why the president didn't want to disclose that daily briefing memo later made famous by the 911 Commission. Good work, Burl.

With April ending, I went through my collection of sunrise photos for the month and gathered up a representative set. Just click on this beauty for the latest.

April 30, 2004 - Friday

An email came in yesterday from former UH psychology professor Helge Mansson, whose sister-in-law just pointed him to my photos of the 1968 Bachman Hall sit-in and 1970 student strike.

Mansson pointed to one photo of the crowd on its feet in Andrews Amphitheater during the 1970 strike:

In one of your photos from UH, and the protest movement, you wondered what the standing ovation was all about? For the record ( humility for all it is worth) I think it was because I stood up and said, "I will burn my citizen paper, if the American country does not let the awol come home again!"

Thanks, Helge, for that bit of political history.

I'm having a very hard time reading accounts of the mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. personnel in Iraq, including the graphic photos now being shown around the world, but it's even harder to swallow the "saw no evil" reactions of dismayed military and government officials.

Suddenly there's new concern about the role of private and unaccountable mercenaries involved in interrogations and "intelligence gathering". But hasn't this been a problem from the beginning of this conflict? Don't these folks recall those photos from Afghanistan of non-uniformed men interrogating John Walker Linde? And they obviously had turned a deaf ear to groups like the Christian Peacemaker Teams, who have collected reports from families of Iraqi "detainees" (now that's a frighteningly sanitized word, isn't it?).

And one of the young soldiers standing accused of mistreating prisoners says he had no knowledge of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners when assigned to guard duty. How can this be? Aren't each of our soldiers fully informed of the Geneva Conventions before being sent into a war zone? Something's very wrong here and it's not just at the lowest levels of the system.

I was also surprised to see a photo yesterday of two American peace activists setting themselves up as human shields against U.S. attack in Najaf. Why haven't we seen this in the mainstream press? After seeing the photos, I did find an interview with the two by Democracy Now.

My sister just headed back to California after a three week visit during which she unearthed and copied lots of old family photos. These will eventually appear on her genealogical web pages, now under construction. Here's one photo she found of me at age 19 months, with a friend. Kahala doesn't look like that any more.

Ian Lind, early 1949 click for larger photo

April 29, 2004 - Thursday

With President Bush and Puppetmaster Cheney in a secret and unreported session with the 911 Commission today, you've got to wonder if they are going to get some of the key questions, like the ones posed here about Bush's actions on the day of the attacks.

Thanks to Jeff Garland for the reference to the ACLU's collection of documents stemming from an ongoing legal challenge to provisions of the Patriot Act. Good browsing.

Facing nine cats on the prowl first thing in the very early morning is a bit much. I'm going to head out early for the morning walk and leave them to squabble on their own.

April 28, 2004 - Wednesday

How do you spell "artificial crisis"? Here we've got Gov. Lingle threatening to veto arbitrated contracts and pay raises for public employee unions because, she says, there's not enough money in the state's coffers.

But this seems to have nothing at all to do with the state of the economy. Pacific Business News reported yesterday that March visitor days hit an all-time record for the month, based on data released by the Dept. of Business, Economic Development & Tourism.

The reason that there's no money for public employees is that the legislature and the governor (this governor and the last one, remember him?) have given it all away to others. It was given away in the form of tax credits for the corporate investors at Ko Olina and the backers of so-called "high tech" projects, given back as tax breaks to Hawaii corporations so that their share of income taxes has almost disappeared, and it was given to the already well off who got a break with lower overall income tax rates.

It isn't that the state is broke. It's just that our employees were at the end of the line when benefits of the improving economy being distributed, and now that they've gotten to the head of the line, hey, "sorry, all gone".

Here's one reader's comment on yesterday's email from "oceanico" about a rally last year at the convention center:

I was one of the anti-bush peeps at that rally- and there were 25 or more of us. We were verbally and physically abused by the "patriots"-when we left, we asked for and received a police escort because we had been threatened with violence and were being followed. I did not see the media coverage so I can't comment on that.

It's always nice to have another perspective on such things.

Here's another perspective on early morning in Kaaawa. I got out early yesterday and walked out into Swanzy Beach Park to grab this photo looking up the coast towards Hauula and Laie, off in the distance. As always, click on the photo for a larger version.

April 27, 2004 - Tuesday

I'm late this morning and it's all Meda's fault. She left last night for a conference in Kansas City, sending me back home to deal with the nine cats and associated chores. So when Leo whined around the bedroom looking for breakfast at 4:30, my day began. Of course, Leo just leads the charge. The others are not far behind. I was still working on cats and hadn't even gotten to setting up the morning coffee when it was time to get my shoes and camera and head out for the sunrise.

I got back a few minutes ago, lifted Toby off the roof, gave Miki another very small serving of canned food, started the coffee, and here I am.

With Meda gone, I'm supposed to have time to kill. Instead, it's killing me. In any case, yesterday's lineup of morning dogs led the cats to request equal time, so here's another set of photos like this one of Ms. Wally as Queen of hi-tech. Just click on her photo for more.

A reader using the name "oceanico" from Maui emailed a complaint about my comments yesterday about fair and balanced Fox. The screaming caps were in the original message.

QUIT COMPLAINING...THE MEDIA DOES THIS ALL THE TIME TO BOTH ENDS OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM.

LOCALLY, I PARTICIPATED IN A "PRO-BUSH" RALLY AT THE CONVENTION CENTER LAST YEAR THAT WAS ATTENDED BY A COUPLE OF HUNDRED PRO-BUSH PEOPLE. THERE WERE A GRAND TOTAL OF 4 ANTI-BUSH DEMONSTRATORS WHO RECEIVED EQUAL TV COVERAGE BY SEVERAL LOCAL STATIONS.

HOW "FAIR AND BALANCED" IS THAT?

WHY DIDN'T I HEAR YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT THAT UNBALANCED COVERAGE?

I can't comment on the accuracy of the description of the convention center rally, but let's accept the "4 out of 200" numbers for sake of argument. To have the same proportion of counter demonstrators at the women's march in Washington would have required 20,000 or more to show up, a hundred times greater than the small group reported by Fox. This just means that the Washington report by Fox required a much greater stretch in news judgement than the local case, whatever its merits.

And so it goes on this Tuesday morning.

April 26, 2004 - Monday

Former state representative Jim Shon wrote to the FCC last week concerning declining coverage of government in local TV news.

...several insiders are reporting a memo circulated to news departments telling them not to interview government or elected officials because surveys say it is boring. This is in a town where permission was granted for single ownership of two of the four major stations!

I wonder if the FCC is concerned about the obligations of local stations to report on public affairs. Today, most of the local news consists of traffic accidents, crime, weather, and sports.

Our state legislature is currently in session, but you would never know it. In the 1990's it was common for every station to assign reporters and camera crews to the State Capitol. Today, only special events, usually highly controversial partisan political conflicts, appear on local TV. The interest in "covering" the many aspects of a legislative session has been lost.

You'll hear a similar lament from city council members about lack of coverage of Honolulu Hale as well. It's all part of a nationwide trend noted several years ago, and cerainly part of the political dumbing of America.

We caught the KHON news at 6 last night. Fox, that fair and balanced network, reported on the crowd at yesterday's march for abortion rights in Washington (a crowd estimated at perhaps a million or more), one of the largest protests in American history, but gave just about equal time to a very small group of some 200 counter demonstrators.

I spotted this one in the Sunday Advertiser's employment ads. "Wait Help & Bust Help...Friendly personality a must!!" I guess they know what the members want up there in Nuuanu.

April 25, 2004 - Sunday

Funny how extra pleasant it is when duty turns into something unexpectedly enjoyable. That's how it was a couple of days ago when Meda was contacted by a visitor from the University of Delaware, Danilo Yanich, who wanted to talk with her about his research on crime and the news media. Turned out that he was in Kaaawa for several days, but our schedules weren't making a meeting easy. Finally she invited him to meet us in front of the fire station at 6 a.m. Surprisingly, he agreed.

Meda with Danilo Yanich at dawn

He turned out to be quite a fascinating person. By day, he heads the Local TV News Media Project at the University of Delaware's Graduate School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy. You may not have heard of this project--we hadn't. But Danilo has compiled an unparalleled database of 10,600 local broadcast stories sampled from 20 media markets. The database is searchable by using any of a number of key elements, and digitized versions of each story can then be viewed via streaming media over the Internet. He's now mining this database as his long term research effort. What's behind the "if it bleeds, it leads" school of news? Danilo hopes to be able to find the answer.

Media buffs will certainly want to check out the project's publications to date.

But that's not all. By night, or maybe it's on weekends, Danilo is a member of a Balkan musical group, Sviraj, which has several cd's and a recording contract, and has played across the U.S. for well over a decade. According to a PopMatters review, he is "a former music director for the Tomov Folk Dance Ensemble of New York, teaches Balkan music and dance and was at one time the president of the national board of the East European Folklife Center."

As you can imagine, it was quite a walk and we ended up wishing we had a lot more time to spend with Danilo.

Of course, although some days we see very few of the morning dogs, that particular day was full of canines. I'm wondering what Danilo thought when Buddy started running in circles to show how excited he was, or when Axel came charging across the sand to accept his dog biscuit.

The original Ms. Tiki - click for more morning dogs

In any case, it seems like an appropriate day for another round of Kaaawa's morning dogs, including introductions to a couple of newbies. So just click on Ms. Tiki's photo or on the "Mornin' Dogs" banner to the right.

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