AND WE WERE GOING TO TAKE THE DAY OFF

AND WE WERE GOING TO TAKE THE DAY OFF: When is news not news? When it's in our local newspaper in an article penned by journalism’s worst enemy, Leo Azumbuja.

Yes we're tired of criticizing his "work" (note the quotes)- it's too easy.

But today’s article proclaiming that the SuperFerry bill that has been hanging around the legislature is still alive is so disturbingly inaccurate that it constitutes journalistic malpractice.

If you're going to cover the legislature the first rule is to know something about the process and then look at the legislative calendar.

Because despite Azumbuja's lede proclamation that "(t)he economic crisis that refuses to leave the Hawaiian Islands has not been sufficient to sink the idea of a state-run interisland ferry system" the fact is that today is what is known as "Second Decking Deadline" when as "Civil Beat" put it today

The House and Senate must get their respective bills in final form today in order for the measures to be voted on next week and make second crossover April 14.

The deadline to get bills to the House Clerk is 10 p.m., but the Senate Clerk had not announced its deadline as of late yesterday.

Next up: conference committee, which will pretty much consume the last two weeks of the month.

If Azumbuja had bothered to look at the status he'd have noticed that on March 23 it was referred to the Senate Ways and Means (WAM) Committee where it died after failing to be scheduled for a hearing. And since hearings must be noticed 48 hours in advance the bill will not receive an okay from WAM.

He would have also noticed had HE had read the bill, as he accused 16th District Representative Dee Morikawa of failing to do- he'd have noticed that the current bill was amended by the house with a "defective date" of July 1, 2030.

Of course like any bill it can be pulled by the full body for a vote. But that virtually never happens, with last year's civil unions bill being an exception that had even long time legislative correspondents scrambling to find the last time it had happened.

Of course most anyone who really cared about the SuperFerry Bill had, most likely, received a notice from anti-SuperFerry Activist supreme Dick Meyer of Maui last week that the bill was apparently dead after not showing up on the final WAM hearing notice. But for those who rely on the Kaua`i "newspaper of record" to record the actual record it's the same sad story written by a man seemingly incapable of telling one accurately.