Today is the leap day of the leap year, and I was tempted to treat it as a day that didn’t exist and use it for some serious goofing off.

But as usual, there was an abundance of news that amused and confused in Hawai’i’s week that was and I couldn’t turn away:

• Gov. Linda Lingle was invited to a meeting at the White House with her GOP ally President Bush on the final day of a national governors meeting. Lame duck canapés were served.

• Two months after Lingle proposed that the state buy the 880-acre Turtle Bay Resort to preserve it as open space, she’ll finally get together with owners next month to discuss what they want for the property. I’m guessing they’ll favor cash over beads.

• Incredibly, the governor and the Board of Education are still fighting over who will pay for drug tests for public school teachers mandated in their latest labor contract. How about tests to see if the battling politicians are taking their Ritalin?

• Sen. Daniel Inouye apologized for dissing Punahou as “not a school for the impoverished” in a dig at Buffanblu alum Barack Obama’s localness. Inouye might have stuck to his guns if he’d noticed the story that Punahou is increasing its annual tuition to $16,675.

• The Department of Education is getting rid of 266,000 pounds of recalled ground beef purchased for school lunches. We should keep it handy for the next time one of the Honolulu Zoo’s tigers gets out of its cage.

• The City Council deferred a bill that would have required homebuilders to make their structures more environmentally friendly. Members decided that green smiley faces on the roofs wouldn’t really accomplish much.

• Experts hired by the city recommended that Honolulu’s $3.7 billion transit system from Kapolei to Ala Moana use steel wheels on steel rails. No big surprise. I predicted a year ago that roller-coasters would turn out to be the best technology for this project.

• The Hannemann administration told the City Council it’s in no rush to put recycling bins in city parks, touting “passive recycling” in which residents scavenge through the trash for redeemable cans and bottles. We’ll be the first city to feature dumpster diving in our sustainability plan.

• The city is trying to determine if the Koko Crater hiking trail and a nearby shooting range can coexist. Only if hikers don antlers at the trailhead.

• Honolulu police are putting video cameras on their Tasers to film incidents in which unruly suspects are zapped with 50,000 volts of electricity. Talk about fright flicks that will make your hair stand on end.

And the quote of the week …

… from Jim Barahal of the Honolulu Marathon on the difficulty of identifying finishing runners and their times after a computer broke down:

“We had to find the found before we could find the missing.”

I’m a little concerned that this actually made as much sense as anything else I heard this week.

Happy Leap Year.

Democrats are getting most of the presidential attention as Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slug it out for their party’s nomination while Republican Sen. John McCain has sewn up the GOP nomination and awaits an opponent.

But the Democrats would make a mistake to confuse excitement with momentum; the latest Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll contains a lot of encouragement for Republicans.

It’s not so much that McCain is running slightly ahead of both Obama and Clinton in overall popularity — horse races don’t matter much until after Labor Day, if then — but that voters agree with him on most issues, including the pivotal war in Iraq.

McCain, a leading defender of current Iraq policy, holds his own against the critical Democrats on the war, and runs 37 points ahead of the Democratic frontrunner Obama on the larger issue of terrorism.

This will be the biggest challenge facing whichever Democrat runs against McCain in November.

Sixty percent of voters think it was a mistake to invade Iraq, and President Bush’s approval hovers at a dismal 35 percent as the war grinds on.

But this doesn’t mean that national security still isn’t of paramount concern to voters, or that they trust the less experienced Democrats to be tough enough to hold terrorists at bay.

While most Americans don’t like wrongly invading a foreign country, they like it even less when we’re attacked ourselves.

The Democrats need to be careful that they don’t win the debate with McCain over whether or not invading Iraq was a blunder, but lose the bigger argument over what needs to be done going forward to keep our country safe.

A coalition of public-interest groups is working hard to stop the Legislature from revoking a $1,000 cap on corporate political donations per two-year election cycle that lawmakers say they passed by mistake.

Both Houses are pushing bills (HB 2455 and SB 2204) to allow corporations to donate the same amount as individuals for a two- to four-year campaign period — $2,000 to $6,000 — and the House measure is up for final reading tomorrow.

But campaigning to save the $1,000 limit is a coalition of citizens groups that includes League of Women Voters of Hawaii, Common Cause Hawaii, Voter Owned Hawaii, Sierra Club Hawaii Chapter, Hawaii’s Thousand Friends, Kokua Council, Advocates for Consumer Rights, Hawaii Pro-Democracy Initiative, Citizen Voice, Progressive Democrats of Hawaii and Americans for Democratic Action/Hawaii.

The coalition, which calls itself “Stop The Tsunami,” said that corporate money perverts the Democratic process and stricter limits are a good thing, whether passed inadvertently or not.

“On what basis can a democracy allow corporations to make campaign contributions?” said Barbara Polk of the Hawaii Chapter of Americans for Democratic Action. “Allowing the deep pockets of corporations to fund candidates greatly dilutes the impact of individuals on the political process.”

Each session, lawmakers must take a side on conflicts between the public interest in cleaner elections and an end to pay-to-play in Hawai’i politics and the private interest of their well-heeled donors in exerting an outsized influence on elections.

Legislators favor their own interests and those of their wealthy benefactors almost every time, and look for them to follow the pattern with these bills.

Voters have never punished them before for putting their self-interest ahead of the public interest, and lawmakers are betting they won’t start now.

***

My column in the Opinion section of today’s Advertiser, “Recapping Obama’s candidacy, Hawai’i style,” takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the presidential race so far.

A proposed $200 million deal between the Lingle administration and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to settle OHA’s claims for its share of revenues from ceded lands formerly held by the Republic of Hawai’i is said to be closer to passage after three legislative committees worked over the language.

The revised deal would still give OHA $13 million in cash and control of four state parcels worth $187 million, including the land under Hilo’s Banyan Drive resort area and property in the Kaka’ako Redevelopment district.

One of the key changes, according to lawmakers and OHA attorneys who worked on the revisions is that any mention of the word “settlement” was eliminated from the bill to minimize the possibility of future lawsuits.

Now there’s the kind of work we’ve come to expect from the Hawai’i Legislature — the state shells out $200 million supposedly to resolve a problem and it ends up that nothing is settled.

It’s little surprise that Ralph Nader’s massive ego couldn’t resist one last chance for a brief moment in the national spotlight, and he’s running for president again.

What would be a surprise is if he has any impact whatsoever in the November election between Democrat Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain.

Nader gets attention because of his perceived spoiler role in the 2000 election, when many Democrats believed he siphoned off enough Democratic votes in what was otherwise a dead heat to doom Al Gore and throw the election to George W. Bush.

But 2000 was a different time. Bush and Gore were probably the most lightly regarded presidential candidates ever to run against one another in the modern era, and Nader was a convenient way for disenchanted Democrats to show their contempt for the choice they’d been given.

But Nader’s basic premise that there was no difference between the Democrats and Republicans came to be seen as a lot of hooey after 9/11 and the imperial Bush presidency that emerged, and he wasn’t taken at all seriously when he tried to inject himself between Bush and John Kerry in 2004.

All he’ll accomplish by running again this year is to further demean his legacy as a significant iconic figure in American public life.

Nader has put up important accomplishments as a consumer advocate and public-interest organizer, for which he deserves respect. But as a presidential candidate, he’ll be remembered like the late Minnesota Gov. Harold Stassen as a once-serious person who let himself become a perennial joke.