One errant spark

January 14, 2023

Some details have been lost to the decades, but we remember it was a sunny Saturday afternoon and we were driving toward Kihei on two-lane Mokulele Highway when the fireworks started. The explosions beyond Maui Raceway Park appeared to be coming from the cement plant. What else was out in the kiawe and sugar cane? By the time we reached the area, booms had given way to bursts of firecrackers and an occasional rocket whistling into the air. Ignited by the blasts, a brush fire raced downwind. The cause of the ruckus turned out to be a container’s worth of confiscated illegal ...

House clerk calm in chaos

January 13, 2023

The person who deserves a standing ovation after last week’s House speaker chaos is clerk Cheryl Johnson. She has been the calm presence at the front of the House chamber, keeping order with a gavel, a poker face and a lot of dignity. Without a speaker in place, she was temporarily in charge. There was no rulebook for the role in which she found herself. In fact, there are no rules at all for the House until a new speaker takes over. The reason proceedings weren’t dysfunctional was largely because of Ms. Johnson’s ability to command respect — and even admiration — from ...

Border crisis needs solutions

January 10, 2023

The bad news at the U.S. border with Mexico keeps getting worse as growing numbers of desperate migrants pile up at ports of entry seeking refuge from violence, persecution and poverty in their home countries. To hear Gov. Greg Abbott and state and national Republican policymakers tell it, the expanding crisis is the result of President Joe Biden’s “open border” policies. An absurd assertion considering that arrests and expulsions of undocumented migrants by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol have tripled since 2020, with a record 2.7 million such encounters recorded during ...

Taking control of the skies

January 7, 2023

The scheduling meltdown at Southwest Airlines is one for the business record books, and the carrier will pay a price for months or years in damaged reputation. The only worse result for seething passengers would be to put Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in charge. Don’t laugh. Mr. Buttigieg’s department said … it will investigate Southwest’s “unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays.” It will also “take action” to hold the carrier “accountable,” as if the airline isn’t eager enough to make things right. Congress is also doing what it does best: ...

The end of election denial

January 6, 2023

Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican nominee for attorney general in Arizona, repeatedly promised to pursue criminal charges against “those who worked to rob President Trump in the rigged 2020 election.” The 31-year-old built his campaign around baseless allegations of election malfeasance and posted an image of handcuffs on social media while vowing that “a day of reckoning” was coming. In November, Arizona voters rejected Mr. Hamadeh and every other election denier seeking statewide office. A judge rejected his court challenge of the result, but the race was close enough to ...

Taking on US extremism

January 3, 2023

Whoever shot the small steel ball through the front window of the Brewmaster’s Taproom in Renton, Wash., last month wasn’t taking chances. The person wore a mask and removed the front and rear license plates of a silver Chevrolet Cruze. The police still have no leads. The bar’s owner, Marley Rall, thought the motivation seemed clear: The attack followed social media posts from conservatives angry about the bar’s Drag Queen Storytime and Bingo, slated for the following weekend. The Taproom sits in a two-story office park a 15-minute drive from downtown Seattle. It has a little ...