Homespun Honolulu

I can’t help but be confused when I listen to and watch some of the strange things that our Country’s administrators, or potential administrators, are doing and saying.  Forgive me but I just have to shake my head at some of this stuff.

Who Makes These Rules? 

My indignation all started just before New Years when a potential walking disaster boarded an airplane on one of our airlines.  It’s safe to say that many of us were left wondering how that happened.

Howard Dicus has always seemed to have a great amount of aloha for airplanes and the airlines.  I love his ability to always put an intelligent yet un-lofty spin on things.  This article about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the aforementioned walking disaster) was no exception.

I wrote this post a couple of years ago and at the end of it you can see that I really do have a great respect and admiration for our Department of Homeland Security but, who is this woman?!? Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, said,

“…putting him on the list required specific derogatory information that was not available.”

What the *BLEEP*?!?  Hello?!?  Woman, information like you received has got to be enough to issue at least a warning and put this person on the watch list, or something!  Were you on vacation in September, 2001?  One would like to think that it is a better thing to er on the side of security overkill!  Don’t ya think? We can stop Joan Rivers from boarding a plane, but not a potential loose cannon?  Oh, wait, that was a Costa Rican airport.  Sigh.

Oh well, I guess that the Department of Homeland Security will not be hiring me anytime soon — scratch that Federal job!

This next news story made me wonder.  Sarah Palin must like the camera.  Instead of running for office, she is moving from politics to the media.  I’m sure she’ll be very good at this job with Fox and I’m actually looking forward to seeing what she does with it!  I guess that takes her out of the Presidential pool.  Doesn’t it?

It was not my intention to give so much link love to Yahoo! but they just happened to have some good write-ups that helped me make my points. Thanks, Yahoo!, for the good content.

Things are equally foggy voggy here at home.  On Sunday we couldn’t really tell if we had rain clouds, vog, or a little bit of both.  It has been that way for quite a while as you will see below.

Last, and probably the least of my cloudy curiosity, I have to share this picture and warn readers that what follows is purely speculation on my part.  Hey, I’m a blogger who must have pictures and this one was worth a thousand words!  (Okay, so maybe it only gets about a hundred words.)

Keep in mind that my paranoid brain was working overtime.  Taken on the west side of O’ahu, this picture shows some rather strange behavior going on several days before the First Family even arrived in Honolulu (yes, that thought did cross my mind).  It just seemed odd to me that a helicopter would hover so low to the ground (I was sitting in my car when I took this).  Looking for hit men?  Snipers?  Escapees?  Drug dealers?  The area was curiously void of homeless people so it got me thinking that maybe they cleared the area.  I don’t even know if that was a military ‘copter, there was too much vog as you can see.  It was just weird.

Maybe I need Sudafed to uncloud my brain.

I didn’t know it had a special day.  I just always thought it was a fundamental right that was established many, many years ago.  But then, I’m spoiled-rotten.  I’m an American and for us it is a rudimentary kind of ingredient, or the foundation even, of our media as we know it today — both written and televised. 

Bloggers Unite!  So, why are we talking about it?  We want all journalists to have that same spoiled-rotten, power-of-the-pen that we have, no matter where they are in the World!

Here’s the goal:

Objective:
World Press Freedom Day is annually observed on May 3 to inform the international community that freedom of the press and freedom of expression are fundamental

The United Nations General Assembly declared 3 May to be World Press Freedom Day[1][2] to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of the press and remind governments of their duty to respect and uphold the right to freedom of expression enshrined under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and marking the anniversary of the Declaration of Windhoek, a statement of free press principles put together by African newspaper journalists in 1991.

Did you guys know that this was celebrated every May 3rd?  I didn’t know that.  We’re supposed to know this stuff.  I wasn’t paying attention.  The rest of the World is supposed to know it too!  Freedom of the press and freedom of expression is a human rights issue — we’ve got it and we’re not giving it up!

I wouldn’t want it any other way and I want to “feel” what journalists, bloggers, and the literary wizards of the World are trying to share.  To clip a writer’s wings is just wrong.  Happy World Press Freedom Day!  Let’s keep it that way.