BREAKING NEWS
REVEALED:  MASSIVE NEW BIPARTISAN
PROPERTY TAX HIKE FOR RAIL OPERATIONS

Dear Hawaii Republican:
 
Hawaii's news media and both local parties are downplaying some pretty urgent news about a just-revealed, previously secret property tax increase to keep Oahu taxpayers from rising up.
 
We already know that Oahu taxpayers will probably need to endure at least five more years of the punishing, price-increasing 'rail surcharge' of the excise (sales) tax, which costs $200 per year per taxpayer to cover the skyrocketing construction price tag of building the rail project. 
 
What we didn't know before this week is that the rail transit money pit will require a massive, permanent increase in property taxes which is nearly ten percent -- just to subsidize the City's round-the-clock operations and maintenance of this money-losing, public works boondoggle, since only 30% of those costs are estimated to covered by farebox collections.
 
Democrat mayor Kirk Caldwell's budget flunkie told the City Council"Based on broad calculation, if you need to raise $90 million it will be an overall increase of 9 percent in property taxes."
 
Well you can bet that the ACTUAL property tax increase will be more like 15 to 20 percent, since it was these SAME DEMOCRATS who deliberately and drastically underestimated or fraudulently "lowballed" the true exploding cost of building the rail project.
 
Sadly, in 2015 and 2016, this fleecing of taxpayers is occurring with the complicity and outright support of Hawaii's top Republicans.  At the state legislature last year, GOP house members Fukumoto (their leader), Cheape, McDermott, and Pouha all jumped aboard the Rail Cartel's gravy train along with eager tax-hiking Democrats.  And just this week, over at the City Council, PRP's puppets -- including "Republican" Kym Pine and her greedy colleagues, all of whom pocketed over $100,000 from supporters of Rail and the related Hoopili mega-development in Kapolei -- knowingly supported the excise tax hike full aware that the massive coming property tax hike was a silent and permanent partner in the arrangement.
 
That's right, these elected Republicans are actively pushing for you to pay a higher excise tax AND for you to permanently pay higher property taxes to fund major campaign donor PRP's wasteful, overpriced rail system.  In HIRA's forthcoming 2015 Legislative Scorecard, the votes of all 76 members of the state legislature on the Rail Tax Increase, including Republicans, will be revealed.  You deserve to know where everyone stands.
 
So, where is the Republican Party?  Is the Hawaii GOP fighting back on behalf of Republicans, who like all others were unaware of a nearly 10% hike in property taxes back when Oahu voters cast ballots narrowly in favor of rail back in 2008??  The answer is a very big NO.  Under chairman Fritz Rohlfing, former chair Pat Saiki, and top officers Miriam Hellreich and Ted Liu, Hawaii's GOP is officially neutral on Higher Taxes and the Wasteful Rail Project.  Your party organization is doing nothing to mobilize against this giant ripoff.  Members of the compliant, do-nothing state committee (district chairs from around the state) simply grabbed their ankles and closed their eyes while pretending that stopping terrible public policy had nothing to do the rationale for a political party's existence.
 
It's deja vu all over again.  When liberal Republicans Gene Ward, Cynthia Thielen and Kym Pine supported Obamacare  and cheered on the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars on the local 'Connector' exchange until even local Democrats knew it needed to be shut down, and when Beth Fukumoto's and her entire RINO GOP caucus voted to turn Hawaii into a Sanctuary State by unanimously supporting the issuance of driver's licenses to 40,000+ illegal aliens in Hawaii, our party did absolutely nothing to push the other way.
 
Over and over, RINO's at our state party and RINO's in elected office are helping Democrats to stab taxpayers in the back, even though Republicans elected to office in Hawaii should NOT be voting like Democrats.  Democrats are the problem.  The GOP is supposed to be the solution.  In the case of the notorious rail project, we MUST stand up against wasteful spending, the punishing taxes, and the obvious corruption throughout City government. 
 
But if Hawaii's Republican Party continues to sit on the sidelines like it has -- refusing to be fiscally conservative and refusing to be socially conservative -- then there's no reason at all left for island voters to even consider replacing Democrats with Republicans; either by the dozens or even one at a time.  GOP silence and/or complicity equals worthlessness in the minds of voters.  That's why every two years, we see the steady decline in the number of elected Republicans in Hawaii.
 
The membership of the Hawaii GOP must take action to turn things around.  Our party is worth saving.  Hawaii is worth saving.  We must put real Republicans ( conservatives) in the driver's seat.   Click HERE to join Hawaii Republican Assembly (HIRA) today and become part of the solution.  Republicans can only fight back if we first rescue our party from the liberals who hijacked it.


MORE BREAKING NEWS:
ARE ROHLFING AND HELLREICH RESIGNING
TOMORROW TO SAVE THE PARTY AND 2016 ???
 
News broke overnight that tomorrow's special meeting of the Hawaii GOP's state committee at party headquarters on Kapiolani Blvd. might involve several resignations of top party officers embroiled in party scandals.  In fact, this might be one reason why the party has wasted an entire year since the last election doing nothing at all except laying low.
 
Widespread concerns that the documented corruption of party chair Fritz Rohlfing and national committeewoman Miriam Hellreich (all witnessed firsthand by do-nothing national committeeman Ted Liu) will kill the political chances for island GOP candidates in 2016 have crescendoed since incriminating audiotapes surfaced late last year.  The recordings clearly reveal an extensive pattern of corruption by party leaders, including revelations that Hellreich used fraud to deliberately and knowingly solicit party donors, while party chair Rohlfing stole thousands of dollars behind the back of the party treasurer -- monies used to grease the palms of Mike Lilly, the politically-humiliated former attorney general for George Ariyoshi turned Democrat union attorney for partisan, anti-Republican labor organizations in the Hawaii GOP's misguided and unauthorized vendetta against the whistleblowing conservative organization Hawaii Republican Assembly (HIRA).
 
We'll wait and see what happens when the deck chairs are rearranged.  Either way, the Hawaii GOP's state committee already adopted a budget for 2015-2016 which guarantees that island Republican candidates don't have a prayer of unseating a single Democrat this year.  Not a single penny has been allocated for political advertising, mailings, canvassing, or anything at all which educates and persuades voters to choose R's over D's.
 
The plan seems to call for flat-footedness and big losses in 2016, as Rohlfing's party has undertaken zero voter registration and zero voter identification and zero new coalitions in the past 14 months since the 2014 election.  In fact, a recent audit of Rohlfing's party budget revealed that 2,500% more money will be spent by the Hawaii Republican Party in 2015-16 hiring ambulance-chasing lawyers trying to silence the conservatives at HIRA through lawsuits in the courts than will be spent on a single TV or radio ad in 2016 explaining why Democrats need to be defeated.
 
With the Hawaii GOP now worried about the impact of its own widely-publicized and ongoing corruption on the 2016 elections, speculation is running rampant that top party leaders are finally preparing to resign tomorrow.  It would explain why they've dropped the ball and haven't been motivated to organize and publicize the annual precinct caucuses which were supposed to get under way only days from now.  On the other hand, RINO's might circle the wagons around embezzler Rohlfing and fraudster Hellreich in an embarrassing show of orchestrated "unity" that Democrats would love to showcase if they ever needed to.
 
The politically fatal combination of corruption and incompetence at Hawaii GOP headquarters undercuts any hope of Republican candidates finding success in unseating corrupt, incompetent Democrats.  In fact, the combined effect of Rohlfing's embezzlement, Hellreich's fraud, and the state committee's brazen inertia plays right into the hands of Democrats by making the 2016 election just another wasted opportunity for the island GOP; with nothing done to substantially improve the prospects of Republicans to win less than ten months from now.
 
You know, it's damned near impossible to make a case against Democrats while fraud, embezzlement and corruption by top GOP leaders is ongoing and remains unaddressed.  Indeed, noted candidates like the hardworking  Jaci Agustin and her Rohlfing-aligned campaign manager Jack James (pictured here)  might as well hang it up now if Rohlfing, Hellreich and their defenders are still around by Election Day.   Even the RNC's esteemed chairman Reince Priebus understands that the incompetence of Rohlfing, Hellreich, and Saiki is unacceptable. The Hawaii GOP has no organization and so party leaders will doom our candidates.
 
BOTTOM LINE:  The rumors now swirling about tomorrow's resignations of Hawaii's corrupt, incompetent GOP leaders  really need to be true in order to save what little hope there is for 2016.

Mahalo,

HAWAII REPUBLICAN ASSEMBLY (HIRA)

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The Hawaii Republican Assembly (HIRA), an affiliated chapter of 
is the conservative standard-bearer of the Republican Party of Hawaii 
and the leading advocate for conservative solutions in the islands.

We are not an official arm of the Republican Party of Hawaii (RPH). 
We are the conservative base of the Republican Party. 
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