Governor shares tactics with Bush

Linda Lingle will go down in history as Hawaii's George Bush.

She tried to evade environmental laws and cost us $40 million for useless Superferry landing barges.

When deficits arose last year, she submitted fantasy budgets. She slashed funding for the film office, which brings in 20 times its budget in business for the state.

When the Legislature balanced the budget by cutting unused positions and raising taxes on tourists and the top 2 percent, she staged a public veto, knowing the Legislature would override her. She took the Department of Education's federal stimulus money, pushed for school furloughs and blamed them on others.

She invested $1 billion of our money in risky securities that lost $200 million. She outsourced government jobs with questionable private contracts.

Her latest scam is to defer hospitals' Medicare payments and our tax refunds into the budget of the next governor.

All very Bush. Good thing she can't start wars.

Lingle out of line to criticize Higa

This is stupid. The state buys almost $1 billion dollars in student loan auction securities after someone cons the state into believing that is a good investment. Now the state is in a cash crunch because it can't find a buyer for these securities and could lose $250 million if it sold the securities today.

The decision to buy these securities had to come from Gov. Linda Lingle's office. But instead of holding a news conference to apologize to us for her blunder, she criticizes state Auditor Marion Higa for doing her job and looking into this matter, calling Higa “;unprofessional.”; Let's call it like it is, governor: You screwed up. You were conned into buying $1 billion in securities you can't unload and now you're shifting the blame onto others. Take responsibility.

Furlough Fridays endanger future

There's no doubt that special interest groups are concerned about protecting monies being potentially steered toward education. And it's understandable that those involved with the homeless, the elderly and the infirm are worried for the future of their charges. But what future are we planning for the 173,000 schoolchildren who are kept away from school while their teachers are furloughed?

On Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan testified to the House Committee on Education and Labor, emphasizing the need for change in education. The failure of No Child Left Behind to educate children and motivate teachers is now well documented. Lesser-known facts are these: Among developed nations, the U.S. ranks 24th out of 29th in math literacy, and 10th in the world in college completion.

Our children are being educated in a state with the worst school record in the nation, in a country that ranks almost at the bottom of the developed world. Yet, we are allowing our leaders to reduce learning time to little more than 23 hours each furloughed week.

Of course, there are many in our community who need financial aid, but are any of them more important than our children? Furlough the future if you dare. A confederacy of dunces will be no paradise.

Sharks deserve protection, too

Kudos to Sen. Clayton Hee for his efforts to protect sharks in our native Hawaiian waters. The comments that came from our Chinese community were not surprising as shark fin soup has been in their culture for generations. However, the human race has become more educated and sensitive to the plight of not only sharks, but whales and other cetaceans that were once hunted by the world.

The Oscar-winning documentary “;The Cove”; tells the story about dolphins that are harvested in the small town of Taiji, Japan.

I would find it hard to believe that anyone could see this documentary and come away believing that this is a cultural rite, as opposed to just a culinary one.

The flesh from the average kill of 23,000 every year is being sold as whale meat as well as being incorporated into schoolchildren's lunches. The mercury levels in these dolphins is so toxic that even small amounts are lethal to expectant mothers and children.