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Harbin will continue to haunt lawmakers

Kudos to the Star-Bulletin and to reporter Richard Borreca for uncovering Bev Harbin's undisclosed criminal history (Star-Bulletin, Sept. 27).

How long will Harbin hold out and not resign? If she remains in office, it could be both bad news and good news.

The specter of a Harbin unsupported by her constituents and even by the governor who appointed her will haunt the Capitol and is bad news for everyone. The longer she remains in office, the longer we will be reminded of Lingle's pattern of appointing political puppets to the University of Hawaii Board of Regents and everyplace else she can.

This latest appointment is so egregious and embarrassing that I am sure the administration hopes we will all forget it well before election day. That would be the good news -- if Harbin is still in office in 2006, voters will be reminded to look for alternatives to the person who put her there.

Harbin wasn't honest about her past

In the case of Bev Harbin's appointment to House District 28, I believe Harbin is the primary villain. Although I am as partisan a Democrat as one can possibly be, I believe that Linda Lingle was almost as big a victim as the people in District 28.

I read with interest that the appointment process needs to be tightened up. Governor Lingle and Bob Awana, her chief of staff, made that clear.

But they should not have to do all these checks. To be sure, this is best practice. But when the governor asked whether or not Harbin would be an embarrassment to the administration, a truthful answer should have been good enough.

There are reasons why Harbin should resign. Lying to the governor is one of those reasons.

Price gouging is easy with isles' high prices

Since Hawaii has the highest prices for many things, we would be the perfect candidate to have the gasoline price caps. This way it would be hard to tell if the prices would be high anyway with or without the cap because of the high cost of doing business in Hawaii, or if the prices are high due to the large profit margins, which makes this cap legalized gouging.

Yes, indeed, we do need better politicians

I wholeheartedly agree with Jimmy Dolbin's Sept. 23 letter about high gas prices, where he said, "We need politicians who care about us and try and stop this greed."

Yes, we need to get rid of all those greedy politicians who drove up prices by foisting the gas cap onto us, thus giving the oil refineries legal collusive pricing and a powerful incentive to take advantage of that newfound liberty. We need politicians who care about us enough to study economics and not pass obviously flawed laws that would inevitably go sour. We need politicians who repeal bad laws, rather than denying that they've screwed up and sending pleading, ineffective letters to oil company executives (who have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits) to not rake in the huge profits allowed by that ill-conceived law.

Or, if you want the 10-second sound bite version, we need the Democrats who wrote and passed this law to get their heads out of their collective rear ends and repeal it now.

Rail will be expensive for our children

Our state and city government should think about their children before they decide to proceed with constructing a rail transit, because it is they who will have to live and pay to subsidize it in the long run. Setting aside the fact any initial cost projections will probably be two to three times less than the final cost to build the rail, experience tells us rail will fail. We already subsidize TheBus, which is a cheaper and more flexible means of mass transit. If our government officials can't get TheBus to be self-sufficient, how can they seriously think they can manage a rail system without relying on more taxes?

I spend an average of 100 minutes stuck in traffic every work day, and it's no fun, but I'm more worried about how rail will make Hawaii less affordable for my children. For our and our children's sake, we should all think seriously about the consequences of this project. Rail is not the only solution.

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