Blog: www.kgmb9.com/howard

Video Headline: Japanese Visitor Arrivals

Japanese arrivals for the Golden Week holidays are down about 15% from last year. That means about 6,000 fewer visitors. I've seen other media say Japanese tourists decided to take a trip elsewhere -- that's wrong -- Golden Week traffic was down to most destinations. Hawaii did better than some.

And if you look at these numbers for Japanese arrivals over the past week, you can see that beyond Golden Week we're still down from year-ago levels -- except yesterday when we got almost 200 extra visitors from Japan.

We used to get four, five thousand visitors a day, so, yeah, business is down, but we're still getting two or three thousand people arriving on planes from Japan every day. That's a lot of people and some them even still ride the Oli Oli.

Video Headline: House Approves Farm Bill

There are two ways this story can be told, so I'm going to tell it two ways. First, here's how CBS will report it to the entire nation. The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved the farm bill, which contains 40 billion dollars of price supports and crop subsidies for midwestern grain farmers. Those farmers are already making record profits and President Bush says he will veto the bill. But the House margin was victory was big enough to override a veto, and the same is expected when the Senate votes on the bill today. Senators Obama and Clinton both support it; Senator McCain opposes it. Opponents will points to pork provisions, like the mandatory sale of part of a national forest to a ski resort, and a tax break for wealthy racehorse breeders.

But from a Hawaii point of view, the news in the bill is that after generations of propping up midwestern farmers, the government will spend billions to support specialty farmers who grow fruits, vegetables, nuts, flowers and landscaping materials. All of these are very big in Hawaii. The more help our farmers get, the more choices we'll have to put good on our table that was grown locally and still has all its nutrients.

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