text: Hawaii, like the nation as a whole, desperately needs a decent Republican party that hews to its progressive founding principles - the party that championed the rights of slaves, broke up the corporate monopolies, created the EPA and advocated for universal health care. A party that Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt or even, dare I say it, Richard Nixon could be proud of.  You can be all those things and still advocate for a bootstrapping, small government, low tax agenda. Hawaii WOULD be better if those arguments were cogently made in our legislature.  But the GOP of today is abject in its subservience to corporate and theocratic interests, spiteful in its embrace of racism and misogyny, and wicked in its willful rejection of science – wicked because in refusing to act on climate change it threatens all humanity.  There are progressive Republicans like Rep. Cynthia Thielen, but the recent history has been that the tea baggers who run the Hawaii GOP have been chasing decent Republicans away.