Redstate

Anybody hear what the whip counts are?  Do they expect cloture to pass?  Do we know if the Democrats are going to be unanimously behind this?

Given that there are 5 GOP co-sponsors on this, how many more do we expect to lose?  We can afford 14 defections assuming no Democrats vote against it.

In other news, the related bill in the House has not even been reported out of committee.  While the Senate should still defeat this at the earliest opportunity, does anybody know what the prospects of passage are on the other side?

No one knows in the Senate.  The bill has previously passed the House of Representatives -- with the Republicans in control.

includes a wall to separate the Natives from the Americans it won't get out of committee.

There is no other answer.  

How is this distinguishable from the semi-sovereignty that has been given to Native Americans in the contiguous 48?  Why is it so much worse?  I really don't know much about the issue.

Hawaii voted to become part of the Union. The Native Americans did not.

Hawaiians have largely assimilated into their communities.  Native Americans have largely stayed on reservations.

Native Americans were brought into the country with a series of treaties allowing them to keep their forms of government to some degree.  Not so with the Hawaiians.

The bill, S. 147, would create a race based separate government on the island of Hawaii. Not only that, but its chief sponsor of the legislation said today, on the floor of the United States Senate, "the governing entity will make a decision as to what happens to, uh, to independence or returning to the monarchy."

A United States Senator has the unmitigated gall to stand in the Senate of the United States and propose passage of a bill that would create a race-based government that would then get to determine whether or not to remain in the Union! Did't we fight a %^$%^#$43 war over this question once?

This piece of racist BS does not deserve a vote and if there was anything approaching intellectual honesty in the Senate they would tear this thing up and vote to remove Senator Akaka and send him home. What's next, Slavery Reparations? Oh, wait ...

How recent was that vote???  My word...

Lord, help the United States of America.

... remember back in 2001 when the anthrax-in-the-mail scare hit Capitol Hill? The white powder wasn't anthrax, it was Rohypnol and it did get released into the Capitol; these bozos all breathed it in deeply.

why William Walker's pistols were just stolen. I see a filibustering expedition in the near future...

in trust for Native Hawaiians and their causes. In a sense, there is a shadow government now administered by Bishop Trusts, and much of the state's property is leasehold. From what I recall about earlier drafts of this legislation, it required substantially more Hawaiian heritage to be part of the independent "homeland" than the bill before the Senate. With that much land involved and a fairly lax standard on what constitutes "native," this would amount to de facto independence for most of Hawaii.

because the hard core Hawaiian nationalists who supporter this bill anticipate that it will be the first step towards Hawaiian independence. In other words, the stars and stripes lose one star. That's bad, very bad.

"no cloture or die" line in the sand advocated in this journal, if the bill does achieve cloture, is it likely to pass the Senate? Does anybody have a head count right now?

I am as solidly against this bill as anybody, but I tend to think that defeating it is the most important thing right now, not recriminations if we lose a cloture vote.

Don't fall into that intellectual trap of accusing of corruption anyone who disagrees with you.

It's pretty slimy, especially without any evidence, because how is a person supposed to prove a negative?

if it's corruption per se.  I don't care why they're doing this.  It's such a bad idea that I could never excuse it, accept it, or get past it.

If you don't care, why bring it up?

Just seems like a really cheap shot, when there are a boatload of solid arguments to make against this racist, divisive, unconstitutional, questionably enforcable, unamerican proposal.

For some reason, everyone agrees that this legislation is hard to count on.  People keep wavering back and forth.  Akaka and Inouye are making lots of deals to get support for it.  The Alaska delegation is willing to trade Hawaii for ANWR.  

No one knows.

just to be rid for good of the 2 idiots they send year after year to the Senate.  (of course, I've thought the same thing about Mass. from time to time.)

I don't ever remember a time in my 50+ years when the US Senate seemed to be, as it now does, a hot bed of anti-Americanism.  Disgraceful.  Resolved:  the US Senate should be abolished.  Discuss.

a long time ago.  Only at Pearl Harbor does it look or feel or sound like a part of the US.  Other than the Navy, the economy is tourism and transfer payments, read welfare in its many forms.  As much of the signage is in Japanese as in English and being on the streets of Honolulu will make you really, really glad you don't live in Japan if you have a typical American's sense of personal space and courtesy.

The pricing and distribution structures are controlled by the shipping companies, which are a Jones Act protected monopoly with the corruption usually attendant to such monopolies; something we here in Alaska also have to contend with, though our natural resource extraction industries have helped to reduce the monopoly control exercised by the ports of San Francisco and Seattle.  Basically, if you'd like an object lesson in what happens when government has too much control, Hawaii is a good place to get it.

In any event, it is a beautiful place to visit, but I doubt you'd want to live there.

She knows exactly how to solve the Hawaii problem: give it to Tomo.

as "Hawaii separatism." People need to know that that is where this leads.