The civil liberties good guys scored a rare win in the government appointments game last week. The five-member Hawaii State Ethics Commission has selected Daniel M. Gluck, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Hawaii office, to be its new executive director, the commission announced on July 1. “I will work to […]
Hawai Gov. Neil Abercrombie Appoints Jeff Portnoy To UH Regents
So Jeffrey Portnoy–a longtime friend of us reporters in Hawaii–just got himself appointed to the University of Hawaii Board of Regents. The appointment, while not nearly as shocking as, say, Family Guy’s killing off Brian the dog, was also certainly more substantial as, say, Maui Mayor Alan Arakawa’s recent Memorandum of Understanding with Monsanto over […]
Turns Out State Senator Clayton Hee Dislikes Hawaii Ethics Laws As Much As Media
Today Honolulu Civil Beat posted an in-depth look at how state Senator Clayton Hee, D-Kaneohe–who recently warped a bill seeking to make permanent Hawaii’s media shield law into perverse anti-reporter junk and contributed more to destroying our state’s legal protections for journalists than anyone else in the Legislature–is also no fan of state ethics laws […]
Kauai filmmaker Keoni Alvarez tests Hawaii’s media shield law…and wins
For the past four years, filmmaker Keoni Alvarez has been compiling footage for a documentary about Native Hawaiian burial rites. That’s a sensitive subject by itself, one rife with political, cultural and historical landmines, but things got even dicier when Alvarez was pulled into a dispute over the construction of a home on Kauai’s Naue […]