Letters to the Editor

Charter school should be shut

I am baffled that anyone would want to keep a school like Halau Lokahi charter school operating ("A school in limbo," Star-Advertiser, March 10).

The mere fact that the director had five relatives on the payroll should have raised a big red flag for the overseers from the get-go. Anybody who still wants to keep this place open should be ashamed of themselves for participating in such a travesty of the educational system in the first place.

Instead of beating a fraudulent dead horse, they should be devoting their energies to finding acceptable learning alternatives for these kids. They do exist. The history of Halau Lokahi reads like a black mark on the Hawaiian educational system.

Ila Schmidt
Kalihi Valley

Counties could cut state income

The state has expressed concern that numerous Oahu vacation rental owners aren’t paying taxes on their rental income.

Moving in the opposite direction, Kauai County has been trying to eliminate more than 300 licensed vacation rentals that likely pay the state more than $3 million a year in taxes.

The Legislature is currently considering a bill (Senate Bill 409, SD1) that would allow the counties to freely eliminate those businesses and that state income.

Vacation rentals are popular because they provide nice homes for less money than hotel rooms. And once you stay in a vacation rental and see the availability, it’s unlikely you’ll sign up for a timeshare. Many of those tourists will be lost.

So, my questions: What will replace that state income? Which state legislators are willing to allow counties to freely reduce state income? When will this result in a general excise tax increase?

Mike Taylor
Princeville, Kauai

Extremists driven by Islam

America will never defeat an enemy it refuses to acknowledge. We are definitely at war with Islamic extremists. The president of Jordan correctly defined this as the beginning of World War III.

The Nazis only comprised 10 percent of the German population and look at all the damage they did and the innocent people who died as a result of their brutality.

These Islamic extremists, including ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, The Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist groups are on killing and raping sprees around the world.

Some imams in mosques in the U.S. and around the world are preaching according to a literal interpretation of the Koran (i.e., "kill all infidels,") and, in the process, are promoting recruitment for ISIS. Our government should revoke all passports of those who travel to fight with ISIS or any other terrorist organization.

Harlan Dismuke
Waikiki

Blame GOP, not Clinton

Conservatives are concerned that Hillary Clinton is a strong presidential candidate for 2016.

To shake public confidence in the former secretary of state, Republicans are mining the airwaves with misleading reports. They’re trying to link Clinton’s emails to the outcome of the fatal 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

But the record shows that the Obama administration requested money to protect American embassy, but instead, Republicans cut some $300 million from the embassy security budget.

Now Republicans are trying to make Clinton the scapegoat — or that’s how it appears on CNN, the Conservative News Network, and Fox News.

Instead of investigating Clinton, we should be looking at the emails of the conservatives in Congress who got us into an unnecessary war in the Middle East and routinely cut funding for veterans’ care and protecting U.S. embassies.

Smoky Guerrero
Mililani

TPP threatens environment

It is tragic enough that our state legislators do not recognize the threat to human and environmental health by not hearing or passing laws to create buffer zones or ban genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Now with the meeting this week on Hawaii island to discuss the creation of a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), county, state and national laws to deal with GMO contamination and pesticide restrictions will be overridden by yet another world trade agreement to advance the corporate plunder of natural resources and rights to self-government.

These global alliances that bypass local governments will have horrific consequences if not stopped before they do irreversible damage.

Melissa Yee
Seeds of Truth