Source: Maui Time, Maui News, Best of Maui, Maui Activities

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This Week in Review
WEDNESDAY, Mar. 23

March 31, 2005

A coalition of local environmental groups including Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, Hawai’i’s Thousand Friends and the Sierra Club Hawai’i Chapter are calling for state Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) Director Peter Young to complete a fairly long list of tasks within two months or resign. Pissed at Young for his reluctance to ban commercial usage of the ‘Ahihi-Kina’u Natural Area Reserve and his ham-fisted attempts to dissolve the State Water Commission, the groups want Young to hire a bunch of technically proficient deputy directors and managers, set deadlines for adopting instream flow standards throughout the state and just generally do his job. By coincidence, this comes as the state House Committee on Water, Land and Ocean Resources are considering auditing Young and the DLNR…  The Associated Press is running a story today saying that Baghdad—which means “Garden of God” in Arabic—has really gone to seed. Gee, I wonder why! Now I would have thought that all the bombs we’ve been dropping and near-continuous mortar and small-arms fire we’ve been exchanging with the still nebulous insurgency 23 months after we supposedly won the war would have made the place a paradise on Earth. Silly me.  In fact, the AP reported that London-based Mercer Human Resources Consulting surveyed 215 cities worldwide, and found that the quality of life in the so-called “City of Peace” has dropped to dead last—behind even Fargo, North Dakota! But there is good news—today’s Maui News is reporting that this week the island-based 411th Engineer Battalion of the U.S. Army Reserve will be returning to Hawai’i after a year’s tour in Iraq.







THURSDAY, Mar. 24



Haven’t said this in a while—or ever, now that I think about it—but God bless Donald H. Rumsfeld. Guy has a tough, tough rep, mostly because he’s in charge of a Department of Defense that allows American interrogators to beat and torture prisoners of war, authorized a too-small Iraqi invasion force that proved unable to defeat, much less contain a growing anti-American insurgency and still swaggers even though we failed to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Osama bin Laden or a way out of this Middle Eastern quagmire we’ve made for ourselves. That being said, there’s an AP story in today’s Maui News that shows Rummy in a new, rational light. Speaking from Brasilia, Brazil—which I’m told is not at all like Fargo, North Dakota—Rumsfeld blasted the Venezuelan government’s bid to buy 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles from Russia—a move that would undoubtedly further destabilize a region of the world that already has far too many men with guns. “I can’t understand why Venezuela needs 100,000 AK-47s,” he said. “I can’t imagine if it did happen it would be good for the hemisphere.” Might be a little premature of me to say this, but I think this is the beginning of a new, more nuanced Bush Administration that finally sees the advantages of so-called “soft power”—culture, information, economic aid—over their current policy of simply bombing people. Even though they’ve had disagreements with Venezuela before, I think their opposition to the proposed weapons sale stems from a decent, honest desire to deescalate hot spots around the world.







FRIDAY, Mar. 25



My mistake. Today the AP’s reporting that we’re selling 24 F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, which is still in a sometimes cold, sometimes hot war with its neighbor India. This sale, blocked since Dubya’s pop sat in the Oval Office in 1990, was considered punishment for Pakistan’s decision to begin manufacturing nuclear weapons. But don’t worry about this destabilizing the region further, an unnamed defense official told the AP: we’re also considering selling fighter jets to India.







SATURDAY, Mar. 26



Worried that the $1 million they’ve pumped into the proposed Hawaiian Superferry might not be enough to get the boats running, the Maui Land & Pineapple Company is trying to get its employees—well, the ones it hasn’t laid off—to start lobbying government officials. “Let your elected representatives know the Superferry is important to you,” The Maui News reported ML&P Chairman David Cole as telling employee gathering this week. “It is very difficult to justify investing in new facilities if we cannot have the state connect in terms of new harbor facilities.” And people wonder why environmental types have christened the boats the “Pineapple Ferry.”







SUNDAY, Mar. 27



It’s Easter, the one day out of the year when people get together to reflect on life, death and why it may or may not be necessary to fly from Maui to Oahu and present what looks to be an unexploded mortar round to National Park Service rangers at the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. As I predict the Honolulu Advertiser will report tomorrow, the man wasn’t identified or arrested and the object was actually inert. But still, park officials evacuated more than 500 people.







MONDAY, Mar. 28



Burger King escalated the war for the all-important “big dumb fat ass” customer demographic today with their new Enormous Omelet Sandwich, according to CNN. The 730-calorie, 47-grams-of-fat breakfast “item” has a sausage patty, three bacon strips, two eggs and two cheese slices. Compared to the Whopper, the Enormous Omelet Sandwich has 30 more calories and 5 more grams of fat. In unrelated news, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson—the parent company of Cordis Corporation, which manufactures stents used in angioplasty surgery—is up a third of a point on the New York Stock Exchange.







TUESDAY, Mar. 29



You know, this whole thing about ML&P pushing the Superferry has got me thinking. Cole’s supposed to have all this political acumen, yet he’s found himself so mired in controversy that he’s pleading with his employees—still reeling from recent lay-offs and the worry of more lay-offs—to boost the ferry for him. What if last year he’d pushed for the Superferry to undergo a full environmental review instead of the quick, suspicious-looking rush we have now? The environmental activists would have lost their strongest argument. So the Superferry would have undergo an Environmental Impact Statement—these things happen all the time. Unless Cole was worried it couldn’t pass muster… Hey, I’m just saying!







Anthony Pignataro wonders why more cities aren’t like Fargo, North Dakota. MTW