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The Civil Beat Editorial Board comments briefly each Monday on multiple matters that caught our attention in the previous week’s news.

REUNIFYING FILIPINO FAMILIES. When Mark Takai took office this past January, having been elected last November to the U.S. House of Representatives, many issues might have drawn his focus for his first piece of legislation.

But the freshman representative and lieutenant colonel in the Hawaii Army National Guard chose one that addresses a deep pain felt by thousands of families of Filipino military veterans in Hawaii and around the nation: .

Limits on the number of Filipinos allowed to immigrate to the United States has long been a major impediment to bringing together veterans who fought alongside U.S. forces in World War II and their children and families back in the Philippines. An estimated 6,000 Filipino WWII vets live in the United States.

It’s a challenge Sen. Mazie Hirono also knows well. She’s been pushing for a change for years and has met many Filipino families who have struggled within the U.S. immigration system for decades without success.

President Harry Truman once described looking after the welfare of the Philippine WWII veterans as “a moral obligation of the United States.” Thanks in part to the efforts of Hirono and Takai, that moral obligation will finally be met — not through a new law, but in the form of an executive order announced Wednesday by the White House.

In the absence of any congressional effort to reform the much-criticized U.S. immigration system, the president earlier this year asked the State Department and Homeland Security to lead an interagency effort in developing recommendations for immigration reform.

Under the executive order, the agencies will create a program allowing certain family members of the Filipino veterans, on a case-by-case basis, to emigrate under parole status, thereby avoiding the deeply backlogged general family immigration process, which can take decades.

“These are people who are eligible for an immigration visa by virtue of their U.S. citizen family member, who also happens to be a veteran who served in the second world war,” a White House official .

Filipinos are one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the United States. Over the past decade, they’ve surpassed Japanese to become Hawaii’s largest ethnic group, comprising more than 25 percent of this state’s population.

For many of those families, time is running out to be reconnected with their aging WWII veteran relatives — a fact Takai and others recognized in January in calling out the veterans’ right “to live out their years surrounded by their family members.”

Hirono praised the president’s move, but called resolution of this issue “long overdue.”

“For many years, I’ve fought to end the visa backlog for the sons and daughters of Filipino World War II veterans, whether through legislation or other avenues like (Wednesday’s) announcement by the president,” said Hirono in a statement. “We made a promise to these individuals, and expediting reunification with their children through parole brings us one significant step closer in fulfilling that promise.”

SHARK-JUMPING WITH TRUMP. Billionaire media clown Donald Trump’s presidential bid has never been considered terribly serious by political observers, and his incendiary comments in recent weeks — he has aimed at Mexican immigrants — have done little to enhance his standing.

But Trump’s attack on U.S. Sen. John McCain over the weekend has likely transformed his campaign from bombastic sideshow to one that many are demanding be shut down for good.

Speaking at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa on Saturday, , who had recently accused Trump of “firing up the crazies” through irresponsible remarks on immigration.

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of the storied military veteran, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam after his Navy plane was shot down. “He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured, OK?”

Fellow GOP candidates who have tiptoed nervously around Trump in recent weeks as he’s in Republican presidential polls took off the gloves and swung hard. From Sen. Marco Rubio to Gov. Rick Perry to Gov. Jeb Bush, they blasted Trump, with several saying it’s time for him to .

Irony alert: Trump’s attack came as media accounts throughout the week focused on that Trump, son of a wealthy real estate developer, received to avoid service in Vietnam. That made the Twitter reaction Saturday of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — also a presidential candidate — perhaps the best focused of the scores of blistering tweets aimed at The Donald over the weekend. “After Donald Trump spends six years in a POW camp,” wrote Jindal in 140 characters or less, “he can weigh in on John McCain’s service.”

The whole affair brings to mind the old TV sitcom “Happy Days,” specifically the episode where Fonzie jumps over a shark while water skiing, giving rise to the infamous phrase “jumping the shark.” As Wikipedia describes it, jumping the shark is “the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality, signaled by a particular scene … (that uses) some type of gimmick in an attempt to keep viewers’ interest, which is taken as a sign of desperation.”

While hell might well freeze over before anyone sees signs of contrition or humility from the self-promoting reality TV star, we hope this shocking display of disrespect drives his campaign permanently to the sidelines. While the chances of that happening are likely just as poor, here’s hoping the GOP voters who are inexplicably drawn to Trump will quickly find other candidates whose conduct and positions deserve their support.

IN MEMORIAM: THE COW. By now, you’ve likely heard of the pregnant mother cow that got out of her pasture on Thursday afternoon at Rocker G Livestock Ranch and wandered into traffic on Farrington Highway. Honolulu police shot the animal to death after a bystander spooked it, causing the cow to become agitated, according to police.

cops closed the roads…the shot the cow.

— fenelle (@fenellius)

of the otherwise gentle animal stumbling sadly to the ground made its way around social media over the past few days, causing many to wonder whether it all really had to go down this way. Ranch owner Bud Gibson didn’t blame police, that his cow went into “survivor mode. She is defensive. At that point you got to take the next step, which we don’t like to do — you have to put her down before someone gets hurt.”

Perhaps. But we’ve personally seen plenty of drivers more agitated by Farrington Highway traffic than the cow, and wonder whether asking police to holster their weapons until this typically docile creature could be led back to the peaceful confines of her pasture would have been a better strategy.

Too late for anything but second-guessing, unfortunately. And so, let’s observe a moment of silence in honor of a sweet animal that didn’t deserve the awful circumstances of her life’s final minutes. Rest in peace, Bessie.