I’m taking off early for the holiday, but I leave you with a “flASHback” on the weekly news that amused and confused:

• Local bankruptcies are up, tourism is down, layoffs are up, housing sales are down, fuel costs are up, stock prices are down. You know it’s a tough economy when even our ups drag us down.

• Barack Obama spent the week proclaiming his faith and arguing with a religious leader over the Bible. Is he running to succeed George W. Bush or Billy Graham?

• A fellow senator says John McCain grabbed a Nicaraguan official’s shirt and pulled him from his chair during diplomatic talks. No wonder Obama doesn’t want to to sit across the table from his GOP rival at campaign forums.

• Engineering professor Panos D. Prevedouros says he’ll challenge Mufi Hannemann for Honolulu mayor. This’ll be the first time Hannemann runs as the candidate with the easier-to-pronounce name.

• Prevedouros barely got the attention of Hannemann, who was busy simultaneously fighting with current Gov. Linda Lingle and former Gov. Ben Cayetano over rail transit. Looks like the mayor has already moved past 2008 and is power-lifting to prepare for 2010.

• House Majority Leader Kirk Caldwell says voters shouldn’t decide rail transit because we find it “easier to tear something down than to be constructive.” If that were true, we’d tear down the Legislature. Wait … that would be too constructive.

• Some City Council members want to make drivers pay a toll for the congestion we cause when we venture downtown. Baskets for campaign donations would be placed on streets to the city center.

• The state says Aloha Stadium will look so new after a $185 million renovation that “it’ll be just like when you walked into the stadium the first time.” I don’t think so. The first time I walked in, it was in baseball configuration and the Islanders were playing.

• Honolulu police have new Tasers with video cameras attached to film rowdy suspects getting zapped. These will raise the bar for horror flicks that make your hair stand on end.

• Officials are tightening permit requirements for weddings on state beaches. The parties will now have to pass a sanity test.

And the quote of the week …

… from Sen. Daniel Inouye on the sinking economy:

“If there was a time when the phrase ‘Let’s get together, let’s work together’ makes good sense, now is the time.”

If he pulls off that miracle, he’ll be the next Hawai’i saint after Damien.

Somebody sent me a small collection of Buddhist-Jewish poems and one of the bits of combined wisdom from two of my favorite faiths really hit home with my mood of the moment:

Zen is not easy.
It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have?
Bupkis.

I invite you to meditate on these words that leave me without anything else I can think of to say today — a situation I hope will change before I join Jerry Burris this afternoon for a discussion of local politics and the Legislature on Town Square with Beth-Ann Kozlovich at 5 p.m. on KIPO 89.3FM.

Bills in the Legislature to ban genetic taro research based on cultural and religious objections by native Hawaiian growers strike me as a dangerous incursion by the state into religious business.

Hawai’i banning taro research in a bow to cultural emotionalism is really no different from the Bush administration kowtowing to the Christian right on stem-cell research.

It’s hypocritical for Democratic lawmakers who criticize Bush for crossing the line between church and state to do the same.

That said, if we’re going to have a bill, the latest version put forth by the House Agriculture Committee is probably the closest thing to a workable compromise we’re going to get.

SB 958, which originally would have placed a 10-year moratorium on all genetic taro research in Hawai’i as sought by Hawaiian growers, shortens the moratorium to five years and limits it to local strains of taro.

Hawai’i researchers would be free to work on varieties from other regions of the Pacific where taro is also an important staple but is threatened by pests and diseases.

Hawaiians, some of whom view taro as a religious ancestor, aren’t satisfied with the compromise because they claim it could still contaminate local strains.

But the University of Hawai’i is an important regional research center for taro, which is also indigenous to other parts of the Pacific. Hawaiians don’t own the plant and have no right to control how others choose to grow it.

We’ll see what happens in the Senate, which has been more willing to pander to the growers and cross the religious divide.