Souki’s ready to
sock it to little guys

Souki somehow survived the 2002 election when voters attempted to throw out the rascals who inflicted the infamous "Tali-van" traffic camera program on us. Souki's Wailuku, Maui, voting base apparently didn't care that Souki was a great supporter of an odious speeding shakedown scam that drove a mere million Oahu inhabitants to foam at the mouth. In 2002, Souki got 2,636 votes to beat out his nearest rival, "blank votes," which got 1,283. Last year, he was kept in office by getting only 4,000 votes.

Souki apparently sees those 4,000 votes as a "mandate" to impose his curious, not to mention totalitarian, concepts of traffic control on hundreds of thousands of Honolulu residents who didn't get to vote against him.

Displaying the finely tuned tin ear he's developed to shield him from the annoying will of the majority, he told the Star-Bulletin's Richard Borreca he wants to bring back traffic cameras. And he hints that he'd like to see some draconian steps to get cars off streets.

"Does the community and the policy-makers have the will and courage to come up with negative incentives for owning cars?" he asked.

THAT'S AN interesting question, grammatically speaking. The term "negative incentives" is like a fleeting shaft of light hitting a dark and scary place. A "negative incentive" for owning a car, which is to say, a scary reason for NOT owning a car, could include having the car blow up every time you tried to start it. I can think of many scary things the "community and policy-makers" could do to make me not want to own a car, and none of them take much courage.

Policy-makers could make a policy that cars cost a million dollars each, for instance. Or that if you own more than one car, you have to take Joe Souki to work every day. I doubt I'd own a car under either of those circumstances.

Strangely, all of Souki's ideas for traffic control make the life of the little guy, the struggling worker, the common man and woman, much more expensive and troublesome. I guess it does take some courage (or something) for a sensitive Democrat to dump on the people Democrats claim to protect.