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Mayor entitled to transparency, too
Love may mean never having to say you’re sorry. But if you’re old enough to accept or even believe such drivel from the movie "Love Story," different rules apply in the case of Doug Chin and the City Council.
So it was nice to see the city’s managing director apologizing for failing to clearly alert the Council to a decision suspending the normal debt policy, where financing of the rail project was concerned.
However, an even more distressing admission emerged while the Council questioned Chin at Wednesday’s regular meeting. The city’s No. 2 official said he did not even tell Mayor Peter Carlisle that he had signed the letter suspending the policy.
Lots of people, including Council Chairman Ernie Martin and a Star-Advertiser editorial, had criticized the administration for being less than transparent with the public. But most assumed at least that the mayor had been clued in. Could another apology be in the offing?
America’s most deluded sheriff
Just when we thought the birthers had gone into hibernation, out emerges the nation’s self-crowned "toughest sheriff" with a theory that President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate was a computer-generated forgery.
Joe Arpaio, the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., says he owed it to nearly 250 people connected to Arizona’s tea party group to disclose his findings, although he says he’s "not going after Obama."
The question remains whether Arpaio will be as kind to the late Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser, which included Obama’s birth in vital-statistics columns in August 1961, available on microfilm in the main state library. Or will Arpaio investigate whether those verifications of Obama’s birth were flown in from Kenya?
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