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The 3 types of shoppers

Years of careful observation have taught us there are two types of holiday shoppers, those who see gift-buying as a joy and those who view it as a duty. At one extreme are the Christmas elves who spend months securing the perfect presents for loved ones, co-workers and neighbors. These people have lists and hiding spots. On the other end of the spectrum are the folks who swing by Pukalani Superette on their way to the family party to buy a case of Spam or potted anthurium. One of our favorite holiday gift-giving traditions is the family White Elephant Exchange. The rules for this ...

The US fetish with guns

A year ago, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter. The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured. The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. ...

Vax mandates tricky for DOD

Just as it seemed the COVID vaccine had faded into the normalcy of our post-pandemic world, Republican politicians around the country rekindled their public outcry against the shot. GOP lawmakers wrote legislation into the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to repeal the military’s COVID vaccine mandate, which they claim hurts recruiting and retention. The White House and Defense Department say the requirement should stay. The disagreement marks the latest skirmish in in the annual fight to fund the military for the new year. Instead of larger issues of national security in ...

Aloha over road rage

Spotting a gap in oncoming traffic, the driver slowed to a stop and waved a trio of cars out from a side street. Without the simple courtesy, those drivers could have been stuck for an hour awaiting a gap in bumper-to-bumper traffic. This happened on South Kihei Road, where the construction bottleneck at Piilani Highway’s roundabout project often spills over to clog the town’s other north-south artery, but similar interactions play out all over this island every day. Waving people in, letting them turn left in front of us, seamless merging — these have long traditions on this ...

GOP and the Constitution

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy said that if he becomes the next speaker, members of the House of Representatives will take turns reciting the Constitution in its entirety on Jan. 3, the first day of the new session. It’s a stunt apparently calculated to promote GOP members as the true constitutional guardians, as they replace Democrats as House leaders. Republican speakers began conducting similar readings in 2011 and repeated them every year after their party won a House majority. Members generally jockey for position, vying to read the 2nd Amendment as a signal to their ...

Supreme Court ethics

Once again, the Supreme Court is finding its ethics under scrutiny. Last month, Justice Clarence Thomas declined to recuse himself in a case involving the plot to overturn Arizona’s 2020 presidential vote, despite his wife’s efforts to pressure state lawmakers to set aside Joe Biden’s victory there. Then the New York Times reported Nov. 19 on allegations that a decision in a 2014 case involving contraception and religious rights leaked to a high-profile abortion foe — a troubling precursor, if true, to the breach that occurred this spring when a draft opinion of its decision to ...