School should be about learning, not football

Father Mario Pariante has done a great job running St. Louis School. I don't feel that his punishment of the football team regarding last year's Las Vegas incident was harsh enough. School is not all about sports, it's about education. I know a great many rumors about the Crusaders' academics, and now is the time to investigate them.

James Bruhn III
Kaneohe
Via the Internet

Paper's temporary reprieve is great news

All I can say is "hooray!" about the 9th Circuit Court's decision to let Judge Alan Kay's decision stand and keep the Star-Bulletin publishing. We will be enjoying your evening paper for a little longer, hopefully forever. All the staff and writers are wonderful and I for one am very glad that all of you will be here for us.

The Advertiser is something to look at during breakfast but not to dig into like your evening paper. Everything is interesting.

Adrienne L. Wilson-Yamasaki
Wahiawa
Via the Internet

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I LOVE the ruling.

John "Keoni" Miller
St. Louis, Mo.
Via the Internet

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Paper's shutdown on hold

'Dogma' foes should save sermon for church

Director and screenwriter Kevin Smith is not forcing anyone to see his new film, "Dogma." If you want to see it, pay the seven bucks and go. If you don't want to see it, don't.

I wanted to see the film. Yet a small Catholic group was trying to stop me from seeing it and I'm not even Catholic.

The protesters outside theaters should remind themselves that the same freedom that allows them to practice their religion is the same one that allows Kevin Smith to have his say.

To the specific Catholic zealots I encountered, keep your sermons in your churches and let the rest of us think for ourselves.

Braddoc DeCaires
Via the Internet

Quotables "Nobody says anything else -- no sorry, no nothing. They didn't feel what I felt." Arsenio "Sonny" Magday 45-year-old Kalihi resident and former Straub Hospital employee Who received a $4.3 million cash settlement from Straub for medical malpractice after he was left waiting in its emergency room for six hours and a blood clot in his spine left him paralyzed from the waist down "It's like a new fast-food restaurant came to town and offered every burger at 50 cents." Carol Ai Vice President of City Mill Home Improvement Center On the effect of mainland monoliths like Eagle Hardware and Home Depot on smaller home improvement retailers like City Mill and Hardware Hawaii

Laws aren't effective unless they are enforced

A total gun ban in Hawaii is not the solution. Hawaiians probably lost their land the first time because they didn't have the tools to defend themselves.

What Hawaii needs, in addition to the best gun laws in America, is to make sure there are policies in place so that people who are a danger to themselves and society are relieved of their "right" to own firearms.

The suspect in the Xerox shootings had a history of violence and/or mental imbalance, which should have raised warning flags about his ownership of so many firearms.

Someone dropped the ball, and it wasn't this state's gun owners.

Mitch Tam

Guns are meant to kill, unlike cars and booze

I found the analogy made by T.J. Johnson (Letters, Nov. 11) to be highly illogical and irrelevant. Society doesn't hold car manufacturers or liquor distillers accountable for what a driver does with cars or liquor, respectively, because these products were not invented, marketed and manufactured as weapons. Guns are!

Sarah Foust
Makakilo

Somebody has to learn to control her mouth

As a 56-year-old native Hawaiian raised on Hawaiian homestead land, I believe Dan Inouye has done more for the Hawaiian people than any other person I can think of. Consequently, to see Mililani Trask insult our esteemed U.S. senator is an embarrassment for me.

As a veteran and disabled person, it makes me so angry to see Trask insult a highly decorated combat veteran who shed his blood and fought in a war so someone like her can insult and degrade other people.

For years now I've told other Hawaiians that Trask may fight for Hawaiians, but her mouth is an embarrassment to all. The problem is she went to college to educate her brain, but she left her mouth back in the cesspool.

My apology to Daniel Inouye and mahalo for all his kokua for so many, many years.

Art Frank
Waianae

Name-calling only puts barriers between us

It is really sad when public figures resort to name-calling. What good does it do? Is this the example we want to set for our children?

Each one of us who is connected with an organization, especially if we are in a leadership position, must realize that we have a responsibility to the members we represent.

I imagine that there are some members of the Hawaiian community who do not agree with Mililani Trask's tactics and do not appreciate her haranguing and defaming Sen. Dan Inouye.

Controversy puts up barriers between us and those whom we wish to support our cause.

Michael F. Tanigawa
Ewa Beach

Trask's insult isn't worthy of attention

As an American of Japanese descent, whose families and neighbors were being thrown into internment camps during World War II, Dan Inouye and his fellow 442nd and 100th soldiers turned the other cheek and volunteered to join American military forces.

They, like so many other young men, endured a situation so dreadful that most cannot even speak of it today.

The taking of a keepsake from a battle where your closest friends had given their lives at a time when you fully expected to die is so trivial when compared to the rest of that experience that it deserves no comment whatsoever.

In that sense, Inouye and his fellow soldiers can never be dishonored by such silly remarks as those made by Mililani Trask.

Ted Meeker
Kaneohe
Via the Internet

Legislature Directory
Hawaii Revised Statutes

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