Vote for Mike Hu (R), Representative for District 21 (Waikiki-Kapahulu)
Ever since his early years of public school experience, Mike Hu has been a leader in the Waikiki-Kapahulu area, singlehandedly recruiting the Pop Warner football teams and organized basketball league at Paki park and playground in the mid-60s, where he once sat between the better known politicians, Mazie Hirono and Randall Iwase, at Kaimuki High School.
However, after a year at the University of Hawaii, and curious to learn what the rest of the world was like, he spent the next 30 years living and working from coast to coast, and border to border on the US Mainland, before returning again in 1998. During that time, he worked in virtually every field of social and economic concern and activity, including teaching inner city school children with the Teacher Corps, in Louisville, Ky. Then he moved to Boston, Mass., where he was one of the pioneers in adult education, offering his “Scientific Weight-training” course at the YMCA when it was just coming to be popularly accepted.
Throughout his life, Mike Hu has always been on the cutting edge of new ideas and thinking -- frequently regarded as one of the leaders of the counterculture movement, and even the Democratic Party. Then in the 2000 presidential debate, he was shocked at the attempts of the favorite Al Gore, to intimidate and insult the challenger George Bush, as behavior no conscientious person should regard another. And that has been the unfortunate trend of politics and the mass media culture he will change.
Contributions greatly appreciated at:
Friends of Mike Hu,
3123 Esther Street
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 561-3645
Email: humikhu@aol.com
http://repmikehu.blogspot.com/
posted by Mike Hu @ 3:39 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
The 2006 election is about the governor’s race -- but it also isn’t. Not only is it the first time ever that a Republican governor is up for re-election, but every indication is that it’s a “no-contest” from every angle one can dissect it -- with a well-known, obvious favorite against opposition even their own party admits is overmatched and out of its league. It would be the same with anyone -- because it’s just Linda Lingle’s time -- like Tyrannosaurus Rex once ruled the earth. That’s just a fact, and not an opinion, preference, bias.
Sometimes, one just has to accept those facts --and change those things that can be changed -- rather than thinking that one can stand fast and hold one’s ground against a tsunami. So that is the great advantage the Republicans are working hopefully with -- rather than against. While the Democrat opposition is obvious, less so is it that the Lingle campaign can also be competing against fellow Republicans for scarce resources -- and may inadvertently be sucking up all the oxygen in the room.
As the media covers the so-called governor’s race, it is less likely that they’ll be giving more coverage to other races more deserving of their time and interest -- because the governor’s campaign releases may get published, while others deserving of attention will be ignored. It’s unfair but that is the reality one has to work with. And while one can complain loud and long about those injustices, one is better served devising strategies that acknowledge those realities and create new ones to their own advantage -- and in the case of the media, creating one’s own, and linking all one’s efforts into a critical mass and momentum.
Specifically, I think every Republican candidate has to link their own campaign to the governor’s in some complementary and mutually advantageous way. With the fall of the influence of mass media, it’s not easy to draw a crowd or a following anymore, and one of the few who does, is the governor. So I would think that those running for statewide office particularly, would be at those same venues -- if conspicuous for no other reason than for their ubiquitous nametags.
It’s amazing the number of people who think that “everybody” knows who they are, when often, these people don’t even know who they themselves are. Running for office, like everything else we do in life, is one way of learning who it is we actually are. A large part of it is defining, redefining and refining who we are -- in the campaign messages, until something sticks. It may be a witty campaign slogan, biographical piece, a ditty one can’t get out of their mind, etc. I know the Party sums it up in one word, “Hard work,” but it also has to be the “right effort,” as the Buddhists of antiquity were the first to point out and codify.
In Hawaii, we often forget that condition, and assume that “any” hard work pays off -- with the “desired” result -- rather than just “any” result. Regardless of what they are doing, I think everyone works as hard as everybody else; I think the real and decisive difference is how smart and efficiently they work -- rather than being the genetic exceptions, who the more energy they put out, the more energy they seem to have. With most others, energy is a limited resource -- as are all the others.
Because our greatest resources here in Hawaii have been free -- the sun, sea, air, nature, diversity -- we have not developed the greatest skills at valuing them properly and efficiently, just as we think the more federal monies we waste, there is no end to the largesse that our congress people can secure -- even to the disastrous effects both environmentally and psychologically. It breeds a kind of irresponsible and unaccountable personalities and supportive culture that eventually explodes onto our consciousness with predictable, disturbing regularity.
The underlying intellectual and cultural infrastructure is that nothing is related to anything else; “stuff” just happens. “Liberal” studies foster the notion that randomness is the underlying explanation for everything. If one simply goes through the motions long enough, mechanically, mindlessly, a miracle may happen. Miracles happen because one systematically makes them more likely to happen.
That is the reason for laws and government, and before that, more informal meetings of those who assemble to discuss these possibilities among themselves. Of course, many people’s ideas of what such occasions are about is to tell everybody their information -- without the realization that it might be even more productive, as opportunities to take in new information. And so these forums have often become quite contentious and unproductive -- rather than conducive to the free exchange of information, without a particular agenda.
Hopefully and confidently, you think that if you get a few intelligent people together, they can figure out what needs to be talked about -- without having to overly ritualize the discussion by Roberts Rules of Order. Everybody has their unique concerns and perspectives that one doesn’t learn about until one has such direct exchanges with others -- unlike the old mass media paradigm in which we trusted the media to report faithfully what was going on. That used to be the best way we had at finding these things out.
But with new technologies and new media, we evolve to an even higher level of information availability and reliability not controlled by the “media” itself. That makes the humble meeting of actual people once again the king of all forums -- like our monthly meeting this Wednesday, July 26, 6pm at the Hawaii Republican Headquarters.
The problem of the Democrats:
http://www.whittierdailynews.com/ci_4090274
Hatred-politics endanger Lieberman race
THIS is no exaggeration: The soul of the Democratic Party - and possibly the future of civility in American politics - is on the line in the Aug. 8 Senate primary in Connecticut.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, Conn., one of the last "liberal hawks" in the Democratic Party and a leader in efforts to find bipartisan solutions to America's problems, is being targeted for defeat by an emergent new left that's using savage, Internet-based attacks to push moderation out of politics.
If former Greenwich Selectman Ned Lamont beats Lieberman in the Democratic primary, it will represent a signal victory for the MoveOn.org- Michael Moore-DailyKos left wing of the Democratic Party and for vicious name-calling as a political tactic.
The Democratic Party already is handicapped by the fact that its liberal base amounts to just 20 percent of the electorate, while the Republicans' conservative base is 33 percent, according to decades of polling. Both parties must appeal to the remaining 47 percent who describe themselves as "moderate"- which Democrats can't do if the left triumphs.
But the left is ascendant. MoveOn's preferred 2000 presidential candidate, Howard Dean, is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the party's leaders in Congress, Sen. Harry Reid, Nev., and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, give every evidence of being influenced by the left-leaning blogosphere's obsessive hatred of President Bush.
Reid and Pelosi press conferences are dominated by Bush-bashing and virtually empty of positive proposals. Even so, mainstream Democrats are under constant Weblog pressure to "take on" Bush and routinely get attacked for being too accommodating.
Lieberman is a target primarily because he supports the Iraq war, but also because he rejects Bush-hatred and often cooperates with Republicans, even though he votes with his party 80 percent of the time.
When fellow Senate Democrats Joseph Biden, Del.; Ken Salazar, Colo.; and Barbara Boxer; endorsed Lieberman, the liberal blog Democrats.com featured this warning:
"If they read progressive blogs at all - and by now one would assume they do - \ certainly know that the Democratic `base' hates Lieberman and will be furious at his defenders."
The blogger, Bob Fertik, asked, "So why are these senators kissing Lieberman's ass/ring?" He speculated that one reason was that Lieberman could help them raise money, "in particular conservative Jewish money" and noted that "ideologically, Lieberman practically owns the `Democratic sellout' brand," which he warned Biden and Salazar to avoid.
Even before the current Middle East conflict, Lieberman was subjected to anti-Semitic attacks on liberal blogs DailyKos and Huffington Post. One commentary declared, "Ned Lamont needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an American who is NOT beholden to the Israeli lobby."
Such comments - and there are worse - aren't those of site operators Markos Moulitsas Zuniga or Arianna Huffington, but they also are not edited out as extreme or tasteless.
To his credit, Lamont himself is not stooping as low as his supporters are, though he is distorting Lieberman's record on the environment, energy and Social Security. And Lamont generally is supporting Israel in the current crisis. But as Lieberman told me in an interview, Lamont's (and the left's) policy on Iraq would have profoundly negative consequences for America's interests in the region and would embolden Iran, whose leader has pledged to destroy Israel.
"If we leave Iraq before the Iraqis are able to self-govern and self-defend, it greatly strengthens Iran's hand," he said. "Iran will take this as a sign that the U.S. does not have the will to win the war against terrorism.
"And Iran will surge into the vacuum we have left and play a dominant role in Iraq. In fact, as we think about how to check Iran in the future, one of the great balances for them will be a strong and independent Iraq. The Iranians know this, which is why they are trying to do everything they can right now to stop that from happening."
Lieberman favors "aggressive diplomacy" and economic sanctions, not direct talks, with Iran to control its nuclear program, but if that fails, "I would never say we would not use military power, air strikes, to incapacitate their nuclear program."
Lieberman is a rare remaining vestige of the assertive Democratic foreign policy typified by presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy. Though he's accused of being Bush's cheerleader on Iraq, Lieberman first called for toppling Saddam Hussein in 1993, before Bush was even governor of Texas.
Lieberman surely is out of his party's force-averse post-Vietnam mainstream on foreign policy. But the party desperately needs his voice, and American politics also needs his willingness to cooperate with his political adversaries and to act independently.
"Hatred divides the country and blinds us to the fact that we are all in this together, particularly when it comes to national security," Lieberman said. "You can have disagreement, but once you think the other side is evil - and there is a group in each party that thinks the other side is evil - we have a problem. The hatred of Bush among some Democrats mirrors the hatred of Bill Clinton among some Republicans in the 1990s. It's destructive."
And it's now up to Connecticut voters to decide whether hatred-politics will prevail.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.
In Hawaii, the poster boy for hatred politics is Neil Abercrombie.
Questioner: "What does Neil Abercrombie's hatred politics have to do with running for the Waikiki-Kapahulu seat?"
Response: "You never know when we'll be asked to vote on a resolution on sending "Aloha" to Saddam and the other tyrants of the world.
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