Sunshine in the Rain
Let's take a quick journey to the far side of the Sun
I meant last night’s rant to be my last word about our highest ideal in Hawaii: karap (corrupt). But writing in haste as always, I forgot to mention our messiah du jour, state senator Jarrett Keohokalole (The One Party).
Keohokalole is running for Congress:
Throughout [his] campaign, Keohokalole has touted his efforts to pass state legislation designed to blunt the impact of Citizens United and make it harder for corporations and other artificial entities, such as unions, to influence Hawaiʻi’s elections.
Known as Act 11, the new law has been widely praised as a means to bring more transparency and accountability to the electoral process and limit outside influence on local races. Already it faces significant hurdles and has been challenged in court on First Amendment grounds. The law also doesn’t take effect until 2027, which means it has no bearing on this year’s election.
Indivisible Hawaiʻi Statewide Network, a progressive group that endorsed Keohokalole in part because of his role in getting the bill passed, has described the legislation a victory of “sunshine over dark money.”
Dark money that is … you guessed it … supporting Keohokalole:
Future Progress, a Washington-based super PAC, reported spending $75,000 on digital advertising last week in support of Keohokalole, who’s challenging U.S. Rep. Ed Case in the Aug. 8 primary.
So far it’s been the only super PAC to weigh in on the race. Where its money is coming from, however, remains a mystery since the super PAC won’t be required to disclose its donors until after voters have cast their ballots.
Who got that $75,000 for digital advertising?
The new filings with the Federal Election Commission show that Future Progress hired the same media vendor, Hamburger Group Creative, that Keohokalole has been using to run his own digital ad campaign.
Hamburger Group Creative was founded by Martin Hamburger, a D.C.-based consultant who has a long history of playing in Hawaiʻi politics, including as a consultant for the Pacific Resource Partnership [PRP] during the 2012 Honolulu mayor’s race.
PRP is a major force in Hawaii politics. It got its man into the mayor’s office in 2012 - Kirk Caldwell (The One Party), who supported our expensive train to nowhere and became Maskless Mayor I1 during CONvid.
PRP is getting its man into the lieutenant governor’s office this year. And whoever becomes lieutenant governor becomes governor.
Federal law prohibits candidates from coordinating with super PACs, and Hamburger said there is a firewall within his firm that makes sure there is no crossover.
Brian Foucart, the treasurer for Future Progress, declined to comment.
John Hart, a professor of communication at Hawaiʻi Pacific University, described Future Progress’s decision to hire Hamburger’s firm as “sloppy.” At best, it forces Keohokalole to answer uncomfortable questions about dark money, Hart said. At worst, it shows a potential violation of campaign rules.
“The most charitable thing I could say is that the optics on this are terrible,” Hart said. “It obviously looks bad. I think most voters are going to look at this and go, ‘Hmmm.’”
Most? As a member of the highly English-proficient propaganda class, Prof. Hart forgets that most votaz (voters) read almost nothing in English or any other language. I just got official govmail with an envelope in Ilocano, Chuukese, Marshallese, Korean, Mandarin, and Vietnamese as well as KKKolonialist word vomit (a.k.a. English). Is anyone discussing Keohokalole’s Act 11 in Ilocano or Hawaii’s hundred-plus other languages?
Act 11 looks like a virtue signal. It doesn’t affect the current election. It could be branded ‘unconstitutional’. It might not be enforced even if it is ‘constitutional’. Its real purpose may be to make Keohokalole look like a hero. This prog org still supports our supposed savior:
Indivisible Hawaiʻi Statewide Network, a progressive group that endorsed Keohokalole in part because of his role in getting the bill passed, has described the legislation a victory of “sunshine over dark money.”
Lisa Gibson, an organizer for the group, said the fact that a super PAC is getting involved in the race between Case [the other One Party candidate; nobody cares about the elephants, much less independents] and Keohokalole just goes to show how essential Act 11 is to protect Hawaiʻi’s elections.
The fact that super PAC supports Mr. Anti-Super PAC doesn’t bother her at all:
She added that Indivisible Hawaiʻi has “full confidence” in Keohokalole’s promise to eliminate dark money from elections.
“We trust that he will take whatever steps necessary in this situation to remain true to this campaign promise,” Gibson said.
LOL, “trust”. Sucker! Gibson has the Sun in her eyes. Let’s take a journey to the far side of the Sun. Who’s behind the “sunshine over dark money”? I looked up Keohokalole’s last campaign at opensecrets.org2:
Don’t you love how his top contributor is “Organization unavailable for these records”, giving almost three times as much as his number two donor, a union? Number three is also a union. Why is a chiropractor tying for fourth place with two unions and a real estate investment trust? Was there chiropractic legislation on the horizon in 2024? Yes. Brave AI:
[… Hawaii] Senate Bill 389 was introduced [on 15 January 2025] to expand the general excise tax exemption established by Act 47 (2024). While Act 47 originally exempted physicians, dentists, and pharmacists, SB389 aimed to extend this tax exemption to chiropractors, optometrists, and audiologists for services purchased under Medicare, Medicaid, and TRICARE.
If I ran for office, you think any of those organizations would be funding little old me, a nonmember of The One Party with no chance to be elected and no will to do what they want?
Keohokalole is just another party member. He’s building a brand - but I doubt he will live up to it. He’s been in politics since he was 29 in 2014. Assuming the government doesn’t collapse, he could still be in politics when he’s 79 in 2064.
Still shining.
Still blinding the suckers’ eyes.
Do the suckers want to see? Remember what Lisa Gibson said after the revelation about Keohokalole:
We trust that he [Keohokalole] will take whatever steps necessary in this situation to remain true to this campaign promise.
Addendum
I left out how I came up with the title and subtitle of this post.
Indivisible Hawaiʻi Statewide Network’s praise of Keohokalole’s bill as “sunshine over dark money” reminded me of one of my favorite songs, Bodies without Organs’ “Sunshine in the Rain”:
And my desire to see what was behind that “sunshine” reminded me of a movie whose premise has stuck with me ever since I saw it on TV over forty years ago, back when sci-fi movies would air at night on weekends:
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (also known by its original title Doppelgänger) is a 1969 British science fiction film […]
Set in the year 2069, the film concerns a joint European-NASA mission to investigate a newly discovered planet which lies directly opposite Earth on the far side of the Sun. The mission ends in disaster and the death of one of the astronauts, following which his colleague realises that the planet is a mirror image of Earth in every detail, with a parallel and duplicate timeline.
That concept was new to me as a child, but I just learned it goes way back:
A Counter-Earth, or Antichthon (Greek: Ἀντίχθων), was hypothesized by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Philolaus (c. 470 – c. 385 BC) to support his non-geocentric cosmology, in which all objects in the universe revolve around a "Central Fire" (unseen from Earth and distinct from the Sun which also revolves around it).
His successor was Rick Blangiardi, Maskless Mayor II.
Blangiardi was ‘independent’ - I put that in scare quotes because despite having no party affiliation, he was still very much part of the CONvid machine. He was no Stonebraker.
I’ll have to wait to see the numbers for his current campaign.