Timing of veterans' ID theft was ironic

Am I the only one to appreciate the irony? The Department of Veterans Affairs found 26.5 million ways to discredit "Military Appreciation Week." With more than 90,000 veterans in Hawaii, and 33,000 of them utilizing VA services, the theft of their personal data will hit home with a vengeance. We now will have to spend hours checking our credit histories, and countless hours during the next six to eight months to ensure the information we entrusted to the VA has not been compromised.

I call on Senator Akaka, the ranking Democrat on the Veterans Affairs Committee, to investigate this incident. I also call upon Hawaii veterans, at their convention June 8-10, to pass a resolution condemning the VA and supporting Akaka in this investigation.

They have plenty of money for weapons

When I heard that the U.S. budget committee has approved the foreign aid budget for 2007 of $ 21.3 billion, it confirmed my feelings: President Bush won the elections in 2004 due to a spelling error. The constituents voted for incompetents instead of incumbents. The foreign aid budget includes aid for Israel ($2.4 billion) and Egypt ($1.7 billion).

I don't mean to gripe on Israel, but why in the world are we giving billions of dollars to a nation that does not have poverty (so their Office of Statistics claims), has a bunch of nuclear bombs and refuses to sign the nonproliferation treaty?

I don't give a damn about any country that has developed nuclear weapons. If they could spend the money on devices designed to annihilate people, I don't want to give them a penny of my hard-earned money. And you should not either.

Send them a message: You want to be big boys and have nuclear weapons, then pay for it, and also pay for the services you drained to develop your killing machines. Don't count on my money. We have better places for it here.

Politicians are in bed with oil companies

At the time the governor suspended the controversial gas cap law, Hawaii's gas price was only 36 cents higher than the national average, which is partly due to the fact that there is no longer an excise tax on gasoline. The Hawaii gasoline tax is no longer anywhere near the highest in the nation, yet as of May 27 we are now 57 cents higher than the national average, according to AAA.

How much higher will Hawaii gas prices climb while the rest of the nation is coming down? The gas cap was working; now we go back to the old ways of big oil, gas prices in Hawaii go up and stay up while prices fall elsewhere. Critics of the gas cap such as the governor, Rep. Kirk Caldwell, Rep. Joe Souki and others need to answer to the consumers of Hawaii as to why they are allowing us to get ripped off.

Homeless need training, medical care

Now that Hawaii's Governor Lingle has given the homeless people $40 million for shelter, does she have any plans to help them get back on their own feet and stay there? Unless they receive medical car and vocational training, they will be expecting more financial assistant in the future. So let's provide them with an opportunity to do so. They will thank us.

Wonder what's going on in our antipode?

Your editors could have added one interesting, if useless, footnote to the article about Botswana that appeared in the Travel section Sunday: Botswana is the antipode of Hawaii, meaning that if you drill a hole from Hawaii straight through the center of the Earth and out the other side, that's where you surface.

Forty years ago A.A. "Bud" Smyser and Cornelius Downes, of the Star-Bulletin's editorial department, found the relationship while checking out a new geographic globe. The country was Bechuanaland then but was becoming the independent Bostawana. After Smyser did some checking and talked to the State Department, President Lyndon Johnson asked Gov. Jack Burns to go there that year, 1966, for the independence celebrations, and a sister relationship was born.

Certainly none of this means much to anyone today and those involved are now deceased, but it was something to ponder, even if people didn't sit around saying: "I wonder what's going on in our antipode today?"