Hey Liberals — You Can't Throw Stones in Your Glass Houses

Dear Democrats,

Spotlight Dispatch, generated August 5, 2026. The Hawaii State Capitol sits in a reflecting pool of its own. This one is full, still and immaculate — which is the point. Nothing about it looks broken from here.

A lot of you shared my letter about the Reflecting Pool this morning, and I meant every line of it. So now I owe you the other half. I went looking to see whether the thing I was describing only happens on one side. It doesn't.

On July 24 a grand jury in Honolulu indicted Sylvia Luke, the Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii, for conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery by a public servant, and falsifying candidate committee reports. Four others went down with her, including her own campaign treasurer. Her governor — Josh Green, a Democrat — said she "needs to consider formally resigning to address this matter and so that the state of Hawaiʻi can move forward." That isn't Fix News talking. That's the top Democrat in the state.

Here is what prosecutors say happened. Sit with the picture, not the charge.

January 20, 2022, a table at Morton's Steakhouse. A businessman named Tobi Solidum tells Luke, "By next week we'll have 35 — so it will be halfway to our 70." His stepdaughter hands her two checks, five thousand each. Five days later Luke directs a House committee to take up an emergency appropriation. The money goes to a Covid testing program and Solidum's company clears more than $7 million. She doesn't report the checks for years — not until a reporter at Honolulu Civil Beat asks about them.

There was a fourth person at that dinner. Ty Cullen, a former House Finance vice chair who served under Luke, was wearing an FBI wire.

Now the careful part. Everyone named here has pleaded not guilty. An indictment is an accusation, not a verdict, and lawyers in Hawaii say this one may be hard to prove. I'm not convicting Sylvia Luke on my page. I wouldn't want it done to me.

I'm asking you to look at the shape of it.

And at the one thing here that needs no jury at all.

There's a bill in Hawaii called SB 2530. It would bar government contractors — and their immediate family — from donating to candidates. It had support in the House last session. It died in the Senate, over a disagreement about how far the ban should reach into a contractor's relatives.

Read that again with the dinner in your head. The bill died over whether it should cover a contractor's relatives. The checks at that table came from the contractor's stepdaughter.

Nobody has to prove anything in a courtroom for that to be true. A bill didn't pass, in a chamber your party runs, over the exact loophole the indictment describes — four years after two other Hawaii Democrats went to federal prison in the case this investigation grew out of. You had the warning. You had the draft. The door stayed open.

So, one point, and then I'll stop. You can't spend this week calling them the party of no-bid contracts and donor money and officials who blame somebody else, while your own Lieutenant Governor is under indictment and her treasurer stands charged with falsifying the reports that would have shown the money. Pick one. You can't have both. Stones don't travel well from inside the house.

The good news is real, and it's why I'm writing to you instead of about you. Two Hawaii state representatives — Kanani Souza, a Republican, and Della Au Belatti, a Democrat — are petitioning the governor right now for a special session to pass the contractor ban. Souza put it in one sentence: closing the loophole makes sure "legislators are not being influenced in ways that they should not be."

So pass it. Before the trial starts and it looks like a reaction instead of a principle. Then you'll have earned the sentence you've been trying to say all week, and I'll be the first one to print it for you.

I'm leaving the bigger argument out of this on purpose — what happens to any government, of any party, when nobody's watching. That one isn't about Democrats and it deserves its own page. It's coming.

— Michael

The Official Internet Press Secretary

Spotlight Dispatch · August 4, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com