citizens sound off about rail

Mayor Kirk Caldwell, along with state lawmakers who soon will decide whether to approve a rail tax extension, faced a chorus of angst and frustration from residents Monday over the direction of Oahu's transit project.

At a heated town hall meeting at Washington Middle School, a mix of mostly rail opponents and community members concerned about the project's skyrocketing costs sounded off to the political leaders.

Some speakers expressed concern that extending Oahu's 0.5 percent general excise tax surcharge past 2022 would burden a community that's already challenged to make ends meet. Others questioned whether the project is being properly managed — and whether the island could afford it.

"I plead with you, the state lawmakers … I don't want this tax extension. We already have the highest taxes in the nation," Joey Brown, an 18-year-old student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, implored the panel of county and state lawmakers.

Caldwell told the crowd of 100 or so people that the rail transit system remains critical for an island that's already overrun with cars and only getting more crowded — despite the project's ballooning cost overruns and a budget gap of as much as $910 million.

"I do not want to build another freeway on this island, or another major road," Caldwell told the audience Monday. "I want to make better use of the lands that are zoned urban."

Caldwell and rail leaders have insisted that rail will need a tax extension in this legislative session to overcome the project's fiscal woes and keep construction on schedule. Legislators are weighing two bills that would grant an extension.

Gov. David Ige, meanwhile, has consistently expressed skepticism about the need to extend the tax during this session.

A group of McCully- and Moiliili-area lawmakers, including state Reps. Scott Saiki (D, Downtown-Kaka­ako-McCully), Della Au Belatti (D, Moiliili-Makiki-Tantalus) and Scott Nishi­moto (D, McCully-Moiliili- Kapa­hulu), along with state Sen. Les Ihara (Moiliili-Kai­muki-Palolo) and Hono­lulu City Councilwoman Ann Koba­ya­shi, put together the forum with Caldwell and rail officials.

The organizers were overwhelmed by about 50 written questions in addition to the constant line of residents waiting to take the microphone.

Ben Carson

Washington (CNN) Ben Carson says President Barack Obama is a psychopath.

His comment came in an exchange between the neurosurgeon who's likely to mount a bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and his chief adviser, Armstrong Williams, captured by a GQ reporter on the night of this year's State of the Union address.

Williams had said Obama looked "elegant" that night.

And Carson responded: "Like most psychopaths. That's why they're successful. That's the way they look. They all look great."

Later in the exchange, Carson accused Obama of knowingly selling the American public "a lie."

"He's trying to sell what he thinks is not true!" Carson reportedly said. "He's sitting there saying, 'These Americans are so stupid I can tell them anything.'"

It's the latest in a long string of controversial comments from Carson, who's touted himself as an outsider -- someone who isn't a career politician and doesn't carry himself as one.

His blunt comments about Obama have been part of Carson's appeal to conservatives who have detested the President during his six-plus years in office.

Carson has also compared Obama's signature health care law to "slavery," and said homosexuality is a choice because some people enter prison straight and leave it gay.

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The (early) Ben Carson was portrayed by Cuba Gooding in the movie Gifted Hands (currently on Netflix).

Ben Carson on healthcare.  Obama's longest 27 minutes.

less daily threat?

Last week, John Kerry seemed to be auditioning for the role of Dr. Pangloss.

Despite jihadi violence across the Middle East and ISIS terror in Iraq and Syria, Kerry told Congress, we live in "a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally — less deaths, less violent deaths today than through the last century."

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared to undercut Kerry the next day when he testified, "When the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years [since] such data has been complied."

From January through September 2014, said Clapper, there were 13,000 terrorist attacks that killed 31,000 people. Afghanistan and Pakistan accounted for half of these attacks. And the Islamic State ranks first among terrorist organizations.

Yet, is Kerry wrong?

Despite our outrage over the barbarity of ISIS — beheadings of journalists and aid workers by "Jihadi John," and of Christians on a beach — this century does not remotely rival in evil the bloodiest century of them all, the 20th.

From 1914-1918, nine million men died in the Great War. A comparable number of civilians perished.
At war's end came the Russian Revolution and civil war, the Red Terror of Lenin, the genocide of the kulaks, the Holodomor in Ukraine and Stalin's Great Purge of the '30s.

Stalin's butcher's bill alone has been estimated at 30 million.

From World War II, 1939-45, European and Asian theaters together, the dead are estimated at another 50 million.

From 1945-49, in the Chinese civil war between the Communists of Mao Zedong and the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek, millions more died. The 1947-48 war in the subcontinent that severed Pakistan from India also consumed millions of Hindu and Muslim lives.

Came then Korea and Vietnam, where the U.S. dead totaled well over 90,000, and the Korean and Vietnamese dead numbered in the millions. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge produced a million dead Cambodians in their first year in power in 1975.

The Biafran War of secession from Nigeria from 1967 to 1970, the Derg coup in Ethiopia in 1974 and subsequent Marxist rule until 1991, Rwanda in the 1990s, were each responsible for over a million deaths.
World War I gave us poison gas and starvation blockades; World War II provided ethnic cleansing, genocide, saturation bombing of cities and women and children, with the firestorms of Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki the grand finale.

Does not Kerry have a case?

We Americans lost more than 600,000 dead from 1861-1865, and another 600,000 died in World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam.

In this century, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the two longest wars in our history, the death toll is 7,000 — a terrible loss, but a tiny fraction of the number of Americans lost in wars during many of our lifetimes.

Let us put this peril in perspective.

Each year, 33,000 American die in auto accidents and tens of thousands die of the flu. Last week, the Center for Disease Control reported that in 2011 alone, Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, a disease this writer had never heard of, caused 15,000 deaths in the USA.

-- Patrick Buchanan, MidWeek, March 11, 2015