I stand here today - in the shadow of my parents' and grandparents' accomplishments - because of their willingness to sacrifice and look to my future.
When our economy is truly healthy, and everyone rises with the tide of prosperity, then issues such as the lack of affordable housing, homelessness, and hunger are greatly diminished.
It's about grass-roots campaigning, meeting voters face-to-face, and above all, listening to what they have to say.
I challenge the leaders of public education to stop issuing mandates from the state office and to focus on empowering schools and delivering resources to the school level.
I do know that homelessness is related to housing, and we haven't been producing housing in the numbers that our community requires - a lot of the escalating costs of housing is related to the fact that supply is way short than demand.
Loss prevention experts report that professional shoplifters calculate the value of the merchandise they are stealing to keep it under the threshold amount to avoid serious penalties and prosecution as a felony.
When it was first proposed, I was willing to support it as a 'transitional fuel' because it had some clear advantages for Hawaii. Much has changed since then. LNG will no longer save us any money.
As a new governor, I intend to assure our partners that we appreciate them and will continue to work with them to strengthen the cultural, social and economic bonds we share.
I can sign all of the emergency proclamations I want, but that's not going to fix the infrastructure in urban Honolulu.
There will be no name-calling when I disagree with anyone, no disparaging remarks toward anyone, no taking sole credit for collective achievements or blaming others when things go wrong.
I think it would be more beneficial to protection of species if we could focus our efforts rather than paint a broad-brush area that is so enormous that active management is very, very difficult.
I believe that those closest to the children should be making the decisions about how funds should be spent, what the curriculum should look like, and what's the best way to help our students.
Any time and money spent on LNG is time and money not spent on renewable energy.