Board of Education Chairman Garrett Toguchi is living proof of the argument by former Govs. George Ariyoshi, John Waihee and Ben Cayetano that the elected BOE needs to be replaced by an appointed one because it's mired in politics and hopelessly ineffective.

Toguchi has spent several weeks stoking a pointless war of words with Gov. Linda Lingle over his dead-in-the-water plan to end a few furlough Fridays, while making zero progress in coming up with a real solution to resolve this state embarrassment he helped engineer.

He's pushing the Legislature to fund a scheme he cooked up with the Hawai'i State Teachers Association to take most of the $50 million Lingle offered from the rainy day fund to end all furlough Fridays and instead use the money to end only a handful of furlough days.

It's a waste of time because even if the Legislature does what Toguchi and the HSTA want, Lingle has the legal authority to withhold funding for any settlement that she thinks costs too much or doesn't meet her demand that schools be reopened on all the furlough days.

Lingle's hands are less than clean after she signed off on the teachers' contract that enacted the unpopular furlough plan.

But she's right to insist on a global resolution rather than a piecemeal deal that drags out the drama, and whether Toguchi likes it or not, the governor is holding most of the legal cards and any settlement will have to go through her.

It's time for Toguchi to stop acting like a business agent for the HSTA with his political finger-pointing and start representing the schoolchildren he was elected to serve.

I did my patriotic duty and joined most of my countrymen in watching the Super Bowl, but for much of the first half all it did was make me feel old.

I barely watched a down of NFL football this year after age and distance forced us to disband the Big Island football club that kept me interested for more than 30 years with our 25 cents-a-game bets.

I didn't recognize the celebrities in the high-priced commercials. In one, two current basketball superstars played a game of H-O-R-S-E while Hall of Famer Larry Bird stole their lunch; they didn't know who Bird was and I didn't know who they were.

The halftime show featured an uninspired performance by The Who, who couldn't seem to find the tune as they labored through their classic hits that have since become the theme songs for CBS crime dramas. It seemed fitting that their set was followed by a commercial for "CSI."

Aging rockers have become the norm at Super Bowl halftime since Janet Jackson's infamous costume "reveal." Surely there must be a more contemporary performers who still have their pipes and can be trusted not to show America their tatas.

Mostly, the stark Roman numerals of Super Bowl XLIV represented the passage of time.

I flashed back to watching the first Super Bowl between Green Bay and Kansas City 43 years ago with my friends from Hilo High.

There were no satellite broadcasts of same-day Mainland sports in Hawai'i back then. Special arrangements were made to fly in the tape from Los Angeles after the game and Hawai'i fans had to get through the day without hearing the score.

To put the time that has since passed in context, it was two years before the late Frank Fasi first became mayor of Honolulu. If memory serves, the TV exec who arranged to fly the tapes to Hawai'i was Cec Heftel, who also passed this week.

Super Bowl I was a one-sided contest in which Green Bay dominated, but it was honest football without all the commercial hype.

I had to admit that once we got past halftime, so was Super Bowl XLIV.

The Saints started to make it interesting with a second-quarter rally against the favored Colts,  and it became a helluva football game when New Orleans started the second half with a gutsy onside kick that decisively turned the tide.

In the end, you had to feel good seeing the joy in a great city that was almost washed away four years ago, and it was hard to feel too old in a celebration of rebirth.

Cookies served without milk left a taste of frustration as we "flASHback" on the week's news that amused and confused:

• Students protesting school furloughs delivered cookies to the Capitol to remind the governor and lawmakers that they're future voters. If half of their parents voted, they'd be spending Fridays with Mr. Kotter instead of Mrs. Fields.

• The state ordered a student art exhibit on "furlough Fridays" removed from Capitol corridors as too political, then relented and let it stay. As if the kids needed more reason to doubt the sanity of the adults who locked them out of school.

• Former Govs. George Ariyoshi, John Waihee and Ben Cayetano shared their secret for making the troubles in our schools disappear: Retire and let it be someone else's problem.

• The state's bond outlook was lowered to negative because our per capita state indebtedness of $3,675 is  four times the national median. Gov. Linda Lingle always said she'd leave Hawai'i in her debt.

• President Barack Obama had to apologize for the second time in a year for bad-mouthing Las Vegas. Just think, if the Legislature passes one of the gambling bills in the hopper this year, we can get the president dumping on us, too.

• The state elections office reported heavy traffic on the first day candidates could take out nomination papers for the 2010 election. To prevent gridlock, a separate HOV line was set up for Democratic lieutenant governor candidates.

• City managing director Kirk Caldwell far outpaced potential opponents by raising $327,928 for a campaign to succeed Mayor Mufi Hannemann. Most voters never heard of Caldwell, but donors are attracted by his catchy campaign theme: "Get your train contracts here."

• The Hawai'i-based TV series "Lost" kicked off its final season. Next year, viewers looking for a big cast that's totally lost will have to make do with 'Olelo's gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Legislature.

• Kona Councilman Kelly Greenwell, who once proposed releasing Guantanamo terrorism suspects on the Big Island, says he may not seek re-election because of frustration with the Sunshine Law. You've got to love a law that both lets in the light and takes out the trash.

And the quote of the week ...

... from Frank F. Fasi after his final campaign in 2004:

"I think I've had it. The last hurrah has taken place."

There's always one more. R.I.P, Mr. Mayor.

Three former Democratic governors have issued a welcome call to turn outrage over "furlough Fridays" into a positive commitment to finally mend our failing public schools and put "Hawai'i's Children First."

Now we'll see if public officials who hold the keys to reform have more respect for their kupuna than they've shown for the keiki they locked out of classrooms two Fridays a month.

George Ariyoshi, John Waihee and Ben Cayetano  offered a three-point fix for the schools  that includes replacing the dysfunctional elected Board of Education with one appointed by the governor, giving principals greater authority and mandating more class days.

They say the discussion must ultimately include streamlining the education bureaucracy, pay for performance in the school system, more stringent accountability and better support for charter schools.

The governors powerfully spelled out the failure of our schools — bottom-skimming national test scores, the fewest class days in the country, military families avoiding Hawai'i assignments because of the poor schools, students unprepared for college or good jobs.

They also shot down the usual excuses about local  students handicapped by poverty, poor language skills and special education needs, noting that we're near the national average in those areas and schools elsewhere with similar challenges are doing better than we are.

Hawai'i's per-student funding is 13th highest among the states, with an annual expenditure of about $16,000 that exceeds the annual tuition at most Hawai'i private schools.

Ariyoshi, Waihee and Cayetano made a strong case for change, but the test will be whether they're  willing to put in the elbow grease — or have the clout — to persuade Democratic office-holders to make it happen.

Democratic legislators of this generation are more respectful of their campaign donors than their elders and the teachers' union, which has led the opposition to restructuring the school system, was the third leading donor to legislative campaigns in the last election.

"Make no mistake, powerful interests will fight to protect the status quo,"  the governors acknowledged. "Virtually every governor over the past 50 years has tried in one way or another to decentralize or reform the DOE. Each effort has had broad support from the public, but each failed because the system fought back against effective reform."

Defenders of the status quo are  already voicing the familiar refrain that the problem isn't governance, but resources in the classroom. What the former chief executives understand and they don't is that good governance is exactly the way resources get to the classroom.

The aspect of the Hawai'i civil unions fight that disappointed me most was the defense of discrimination issued by Honolulu Catholic Bishop Larry Silva.

Silva conceded that it's discriminatory to allow opposite-sex couples to marry while disallowing the same for same-sex couples, but added,  "not all discrimination is unjust. Some is quite justified because it is based on reality and truth."

The problem, of course, is that we hold to many different faiths in our community with different views of reality and truth. The best public policy in our diverse society doesn't hew  to one faith as the only truth, but finds ways to accommodate all faiths.

The marriage debate is an incendiary mix of religion, politics and law, and the path to accommodation is to separate the three.

The most obvious answer is to get government out of the marriage business and put all committed couples — heterosexual or same-sex — into civil unions that apply legal rights equally while leaving churches free to sanction ceremonial marriages or not as they wish.

Ultimately, this would have to be enacted on the federal level to put an end to the local skirmishes such as our battle over HB 444 that have resulted in a hodge-podge of conflicting state laws.

The guiding principle should be to find an accommodation that avoids discrimination, not a rationale to justify discrimination.

I take a closer look at the politics behind the Legislature's bailout on HB 444 in my column in the Opinion section of today's Advertiser, "Lawmakers dodged vote, but to no avail."