rail to open with 10 mile route

Local rail officials have decided that for the opening of the transit system, they won’t extend the route to Middle Street after all.

Instead, they’ve opted to stick with their planned, shorter opening route to Aloha Stadium — a distance of 10 miles. Last summer the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation announced it would revisit the logic of that opening route and the “limited ridership” it would attract.

But as project delays have piled up, the idea of waiting to start service until Middle Street comes online has become less practical. Opening to Aloha Stadium remains the better option, HART Executive Director Dan Grabauskas said last week.

The opening should now occur sometime in late 2018, HART projects.

Service along the entire 20-mile line, from East Kapolei to Ala Moana Center, should now start in 2022, the rail agency estimates. The project is about two years behind schedule following lengthy delays from legal challenges, premature construction starts and other holdups.

The Greenville Eight

Jesse Jackson, only about five years older than Trump, grew up in an era when the other children in his school taunted him for being born out of wedlock.

He sat in the back of the bus, not just metaphorically but literally. He drank out of water fountains marked "colored." He grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, but attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a football scholarship.

In 1960, when he was 19, he came home on Christmas break and, like freshmen everywhere, left a lot of work to do until the last minute. The book he needed to finish a paper was not at the "colored" library in Greenville but was at the Greenville Public Library.

So Jackson walked in, but a policeman walked him out. It may have been 1960 elsewhere in America, but in the Jim Crow South, it was still 1892.

And Jackson did a most unexpected thing. No, not marching on the library. That came later. And no, not getting the law changed to make the reading facilities in town open to all. That, too, would come later.

What Jackson did upon being tossed out of that library was cry. Real, bitter tears. He was not afraid; he was a freshman quarterback for a Big Ten football team, so he wasn't afraid of many people.

It was not fear. It was just the shame of the whole thing. The water fountains and the seats on the bus and even what book you were allowed to read.

His tears dried up. And Jackson went to work. In a few months, he and seven other black students returned to the whites-only library, got books, took seats, sat down and read.

About 20 minutes later, they were handcuffed, and they were jailed for 45 minutes.

"In the paper write-up about our arrest, I remember them calling us leftists," Jackson would say later. "We weren't left; we were right." A small joke.

The library closed and reopened two months later as an integrated facility.

On the 50th anniversary, the Greenville Eight held a reunion. Only four members of the original eight showed up, but that was OK. It made the speeches shorter.

"Somehow we all finished college," Jackson said, "and went on to replace old walls with new bridges."

-- Roger Simon, Midweek, March 16, 2016

homeless in Hawaii

[3/17/16] Lloyd Pendleton, known for his no-nonsense efficiency in addressing homelessness in Utah, is in talks with Mayor Kirk Caldwell about a move to Oahu to help reduce the highest per capita homeless rate in the country.

Pendleton and Caldwell met for the first time Friday when Pendleton outlined his ideas to get more people off the streets of Honolulu. Caldwell then told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, “I love the guy. I wanted to keep him here with us or clone him. He lived up to all of the expectations I had. He gets it.”

Pendleton — who describes his age as “75 and a half” — has officially retired as Utah’s homeless coordinator. But he constantly welcomes visitors to Salt Lake City — when he’s not touring the country speaking about how it became the second city in America, behind Phoenix, to eliminate “chronic homeless veterans” and reduced overall chronic homelessness by 72 percent in 10 years.

[7/31/15] The city is taking a new, more lenient approach to encourage homeless people to leave the streets and move into temporary and long-term housing projects that will open over the next several months.

None of the more than $20 million worth of projects -- in areas from Makiki to the Leeward Coast -- will be ready when the city starts clearing the first of an estimated 300 homeless people out of an expanding Kakaako homeless encampment next month. Only one -- the 87-bed Hale Mauliola "modular container" project on Sand Island Access Road -- is scheduled to open this year, sometime in the fall.

But when they do open, most of the new shelters will take in pets, allow people to stay indoors during the day, give them a place to secure their belongings and offer security and on-site social services, said Sandy Pfund, head of the city's new Office of Strategic Development.

[7/27/15] Gov. David Ige announced the formation of the “Governor’s Leadership Team on Homelessness” to find both short- and long-term answers, but the state’s current homeless czar won’t be part of that effort.

Colin Kippen, the state coordinator on homelessness and the chairman of the Hawaii Interagency Council on Homelessness, said he will be out of a job as of Friday.

Kippen’s email announcement Monday came just before Ige’s afternoon news conference announcing the formation of his team on homelessness.

Ige was joined by Mayor Kirk Caldwell, state Sen. Jill Tokuda, Rep. Sylvia Luke and representatives from the offices of U.S. Sens. Mazie Hirono and Brian Schatz.

The team will include Ige and Caldwell, Tokuda, Luke, Director of Human Services Rachael Wong, Council Chairman Ernie Martin, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz’s designee and U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono’s designee. It will consult with law enforcement leaders, nonprofit organizations and other interested parties to assist with implementing short-term objectives.

“The underlying issues that lead to homelessness, such as lack of affordable housing, cannot be resolved quickly,” Ige said. “Meanwhile, we cannot wait for a comprehensive, long-term solution. There are measures we can take and will take, immediately.”

Ige’s office said the team will identify and assign parcels of land to be used for the creation of temporary shelters in one or two communities; implement measures to transfer residents of homeless encampments to shelters; work with service providers to establish protocols to assess shelter residents for financial, physical, mental health and other needs; and determine costs and obtain funding to meet these objectives.

The governor said the team will meet weekly, and work on solutions involving federal, state and city cooperation.

***

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser and Hawaii News Now are joining forces to report on the ever-worsening homelessness crisis.

While both news organizations will continue to report daily stories on homelessness, we will work together on bigger projects that delve into all aspects of the issue. To reach the widest possible audience for these important projects on this crisis, you will see reports in print, online and on broadcasts.

For example, on this page of the Star-Advertiser and in Hawaii News Now broadcasts on Monday, you will find stories on homeless encampments you might not be aware of and learn details about some of them.

Through stories such as these, we hope to raise awareness among the public — and public officials — about the gravity of the situation and the need to take action to help the homeless and, by doing so, help our community.

Both newsrooms hope you, as readers and viewers, will help with this project by offering comments, observations and suggestions online and in letters to the editor. While a collaboration between two competing newsrooms is unusual, Hawaii’s homelessness crisis requires an unusual approach.

Nancy Reagan

Nancy Reagan, the helpmate, backstage adviser and fierce protector of Ronald Reagan in his journey from actor to president — and finally during his 10-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease — has died. She was 94.

The former first lady died Sunday at her home in Los Angeles’ Bel-Air neighborhood of congestive heart failure, assistant Allison Borio told The Associated Press.

Her best-known project as first lady was the “Just Say No” campaign to help kids and teens stay off drugs.

When she swept into the White House in 1981, the former Hollywood actress partial to designer gowns and pricey china was widely dismissed as a pre-feminist throwback, concerned only with fashion, decorating and entertaining. By the time she moved out eight years later, Mrs. Reagan was fending off accusations that she was a behind-the-scenes “dragon lady” wielding unchecked power over the Reagan administration — and doing it based on astrology to boot.

All along she maintained that her only mission was to back her “Ronnie” and strengthen his presidency.

Mrs. Reagan carried that charge through the rest of her days. She served as a full-time caretaker as Alzheimer’s melted away her husband’s memory. After his death in June 2004 she dedicated herself to tending his legacy, especially at his presidential library in California, where he had served as governor.

She also championed Alzheimer’s patients, raising millions of dollars for research and breaking with fellow conservative Republicans to advocate for stem cell studies. Her dignity and perseverance in these post-White House roles helped smooth over the public’s fickle perceptions of the former first lady.

The Reagans’ mutual devotion over 52 years of marriage was legendary. They were forever holding hands. She watched his political speeches with a look of such steady adoration it was dubbed “the gaze.” He called her “Mommy,” and penned a lifetime of gushing love notes. She saved these letters, published them as a book, and found them a comfort when he could no longer remember her.

In announcing his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1994, Reagan wrote, “I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience.” Ten years later, as his body lay in state in the U.S. Capitol, Mrs. Reagan caressed and gently kissed the flag-draped casket.

As the newly arrived first lady, Mrs. Reagan raised more than $800,000 from private donors to redo the White House family quarters and to buy a $200,000 set of china bordered in red, her signature color. She was criticized for financing these pet projects with donations from millionaires who might seek influence with the government, and for accepting gifts and loans of dresses worth thousands of dollars from top designers. Her lavish lifestyle — in the midst of a recession and with her husband’s administration cutting spending on the needy — inspired the mocking moniker “Queen Nancy.”

But her admirers credited Mrs. Reagan with restoring grace and elegance to the White House after the austerity of the Carter years.

Romney on Trump (and vice-versa)

(CNN) Mitt Romney delivered a sweeping broadside against Donald Trump on Thursday, laying into the Republican presidential front-runner with a sharper attack than any of the party's 2016 contenders have made against the billionaire business mogul.

"Here's what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud," Romney said. "His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat."

Romney said that "dishonesty is Donald Trump's hallmark," pointing to his "bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics."

There's irony in Romney's speech: Just four years ago, he courted Trump's endorsement -- even after Trump had led the "birther" controversy against President Barack Obama, insisting that Obama release his birth certificate to prove he is an American citizen.

Trump hit back by mocking Romney's 2012 loss at a campaign rally in Portland, Maine -- pointing to Romney's efforts to secure Trump's endorsement.

"He was begging for my endorsement. I could have said, 'Mitt, drop to your knees' -- he would have dropped to his knees," he said.

He said of 2012: "That was a race, I have to say, folks, that should have been won ... I don't know what happened to him. He disappeared. He disappeared. And I wasn't happy about it, I'll be honest, because I am not a fan of Barack Obama, because I backed Mitt Romney -- I backed Mitt Romney. You can see how loyal he is."

He said Romney thought about running again in 2016, but "chickened out."

Romney tweeted after his own speech but before Trump's that had the New York businessman made similar statements about the KKK and others in 2012, he would not have accepted the endorsement.

"If Trump had said 4 years ago the things he says today about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled, I would NOT have accepted his endorsement."

President Trump? The world shudders...

BRUSSELS » Following Donald Trump’s breathtaking string of Super Tuesday victories, politicians, editorial writers and ordinary people worldwide were coming to grips today with the growing possibility the brash New York billionaire might become America’s next president — a thought that aroused widespread befuddlement and a good deal of horror.

The Trump candidacy has opened the door to madness: for the unthinkable to happen, a bad joke to become reality,” German business daily Handelsblatt wrote in a commentary for its Thursday edition. “What looked grotesque must now be discussed seriously.”

“The meteoric rise of the New York magnate has left half the planet dumbfounded,” wrote columnist Andrea Rizzi in Spain’s leading newspaper, El Pais.

“To consider Donald Trump a political clown would be a severe misconception,” said another European daily, Salzburger Nachrichten. If Trump is elected to the White House, the Austrian paper predicted, his ideas “would bring major dangers for the USA and the world … basically a nationalist-chauvinist policy that would make America not great but ugly, and risk the stability of the international order.”

Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, said the best word to describe Israeli feelings about Trump is “confusion.”

There are certain parts of him that Israelis can relate to, such as his aversion to political correctness, his tough stance on Islamic terrorism and his call for a wall with Mexico to provide security, Gilboa said.

But others have been particularly jarring to Israelis, such as comments about Jews that many consider insensitive and his derision of U.S. Sen. John McCain’s captivity in Vietnam.

“This is something that every Israeli would reject. It’s a highly sensitive issue in a country where prisoners of war are heroes and people go out of their way to release them,” he said.

Thuraya Ebrahim al Arrayed, a member of Saudi Arabia’s top advisory body, the Shura Council, said a Trump presidency would be “catastrophic” and set the world back “not just generations, but centuries.”

Writing in the Financial Times of London, Martin Wolf summed up the mood of a good share of Europe’s business and economic elite, arguing that it would be a “global disaster” if Trump, who won seven states in Tuesday’s Republican contests, made it all the way to the Oval Office.

“Mr. Trump is a promoter of paranoid fantasies, a xenophobe and an ignoramus. His business consists of the erection of ugly monuments to his own vanity. He has no experience of political office. Some compare him to Latin American populists. He might also be considered an American Silvio Berlusconi, albeit without the charm or business acumen,” Wolf wrote.

He also said Berlusconi, a former Italian prime minister and media tycoon, “unlike Mr. Trump never threatened to round up and expel millions of people.”

Wolf’s verdict: “Mr. Trump is grossly unqualified for the world’s most important political office.”

A Japanese online commentator used much the same language, and likened the Republican front-runner to the evil nemesis of wizard Harry Potter.

Trump’s unexpected political rise reflects “elitism and opposition to globalization, but at its heart is a xenophobia and populism that comes from ignorance,” said Masato Kimura, former London bureau chief for the conservative newspaper Sankei Shimbun. “Although this is another country’s election, Japan’s allies should raise their voices to help prevent the birth of a ‘Voldemort’ president in the United States.”

In the Mexican newspaper Reforma, columnist Sergio Aguayo compared anti-Mexican sentiments unleashed by Trump to the anti-communist Red Scares of the 20th century, and accused Trump of igniting a “brown panic.”

“We must answer again and again Donald Trump, and make the U.S. government understand that we’re not willing to continue being pointed out as the only ones responsible for problems that are also caused by the United States,” Aguayo wrote.

In the moderate and predominantly Muslim West African nation of Senegal, Mame Ngor Ngom, editor-in-chief of La Tribune, a weekly newspaper, expressed hope that in the final analysis, Americans will not be “so thoughtless” as to hand Trump their country’s highest office.

“We think that the Americans won’t vote for him. They already paid the consequences with George W. Bush. … Donald Trump will fail,” the Senegalese journalist predicted.

According to Alexander Dugin, a Russian nationalist ideologue with close ties to the Kremlin, Trump “is sometimes disgusting and violent, but he is what he is. It is true America.”

In Europe, where some also feel their nations are being submerged by waves of foreign migrants and violent Islamic radicalism is a real danger, not all have condemned Trump. Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right National Front, has said that if he were an American, he would cast his ballot for Trump. Laurent Wauquiez, a French conservative lawmaker, today said Trump’s popularity is revealing of a general trend that has traversed the Atlantic.

“What it shows is that in democracies today, citizens no longer want people to tell them what they should think, what they should say. That’s what makes Donald Trump seductive,” Wauquiez told France 2 Television.

In the northern Indian city of Lucknow, one software company executive said he has been impressed by Trump’s muscular rhetoric.

“Trump looks like a tough guy,” said Rohitash Sharma. “He has clarity of idea, and he means business. He has advocated the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, if these improve the protection and safety of the country. He has a clear road map on how to protect his country from extremist forces.”

Though no fan, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said a Trump presidential win could be a political gift to Latin America’s left, which is recovering from a string of electoral defeats in Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela.

“The most convenient for Latin America is a Trump victory, because his rhetoric is so clumsy, so basic, that I think it would awaken reactions in Latin America,” Correa told a group of radio journalists Monday. “I think a guy like him would be very bad for the U.S. (but) for the progressive movement in Latin America, it could be positive.”

For weeks, a Canadian website has poked fun at Trump by inviting disaffected Americans to move to an island off Nova Scotia. On Super Tuesday, as the returns rolled in, searches for “How can I move to Canada” on Google spiked by more than 350% in four hours, Google editor Simon Rogers tweeted. A social media link posted by Toronto city councilman Norm Kelly that gives helpful directions on how to apply for Canadian citizenship received over 37,000 retweets.