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Sentence fragment: Another convicted briber has been released from prison after a little more than six months, which doesn’t seem like very much time in the slammer for a crime of corruption. Maybe the cost-benefit analysis really does work for these guys.

An astute observer called The Sunshine Blog with a sighting of Bill Wong, who bribed people at the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting. Wong was walking around his yard last weekend which caused the astute observer to slam on their brakes.

Convicted of giving cash to DPP workers to prioritize his clients’ permits ahead of the department’s notorious backlog, Wong was sentenced last summer to a year and a day in prison.

He reported to the facility on Jan. 17, meaning that a full sentence would have kept him in until Jan. 18, 2025. But the math didn’t quite work out that way, thanks to changes to federal sentencing guidelines, and his sentence was reduced to nine months, Wong’s attorney Bill Harrison said.

In addition, Wong’s original sentence allowed him to be released up to 54 days early for good behavior, and he received more days of credit for early release for work he performed in prison, Harrison said.

Harrison confirmed that Wong was released from prison on Aug. 1. Wong now begins a three-year probation period, and his architecture license has been revoked.

A Hawaii senator’s “political evolution”: As partisan warfare scorches America’s political landscape, a few leaders stand out by focusing on crafting solution-oriented policies. In a New York Times Q&A for “The Ezra Klein Show,” Brian Schatz comes across as one of them.

Hawaii’s senior U.S. senator does something even more unusual on the podcast: He questions the wisdom of traditional progressives when it comes to the scarcity of housing and talks about how to get past problems that his own Democratic Party may have exacerbated by helping anti-growth advocates restrict development.

“We have created the scarcity on purpose,” , referring to the tendency of “a few people who already have homes to hijack the whole process above the needs of the many. We’re actually making it nearly impossible for people to build anything.”

Schatz recounted coming home to his former state Senate district in Manoa after the most recent Hawaii legislative session in which lawmakers pushed to allow denser development in existing residential areas — something “I’m strongly behind.”

“I was at Safeway, and I was running into people who contributed to my first campaign with 15 bucks, people with whom I went to high school, and they were not happy,” he said of the NIMBY crowd that wants nothing to change in their comfortable subdivisions.

“And that’s one of the things that I think the progressive movement has to grapple with.”

Klein noted that environmental activism is sometimes thwarting clean-energy projects, and the senator agreed.

Those projects, he said, are “going to be stopped by local communities and state governments and oppositional mayors and other NIMBYs.”

He goes on to warn against the overuse of historic preservation rules to thwart development and even questions whether affordable housing requirements are all that effective.

Brian Schatz still has his partisan chops and will never undergo the blue-to-red political transformation of, say, Tulsi Gabbard (actually, hers was red-to-blue-to-read, but you know what we mean).

He didn’t hesitate, for instance, to tell Klein that Democrats are trying to solve problems while saying of Republicans, “all they do is scapegoat.”

But The Blog does find it refreshing to read about, as Klein describes it, the senator’s “political evolution trying to change the party on the issues that matter most to voters — particularly affordability.”

Guiding the way: Sure, the primary is now over, but there’s another election in November. Still need help figuring who is running and what they stand for?

Voter guides surface every election with the goal of informing voters on partisan issues. The Blog recently reported how the has a guide to help voters learn where the candidates stand on legalization.

Here’s two more, and from groups often on opposite ends of the political spectrum.

​T��� asked candidates whether they support existing protections that prohibit discrimination against sexual and gender minorities, public access to science-based sexual health information, safer sex supplies and biomedical HIV prevention, and increased access to gender-affirming care.

Candidates were also asked if they support a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would repeal a provision of the state constitution granting the Legislature authority to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples.

Most of the candidates that responded to the survey — nearly all of them Democrats — said they did indeed support the ConAm. Here’s the HHHRC survey results:

The second guide is from the . It’s over 40 pages long, so The Blog will just .

Many Democratic Party candidates did not respond to the HCC survey, but many Republicans did.

Sample question for federal candidates: “What is your position allowing biologically male individuals to compete in women’s sports?” Many candidates are opposed, the survey shows.

Sample question for state House and Senate candidates: “What is your position on young people (under 18) requiring parental consent to access abortion services?” Many candidates are in support.

The Blog recommends you bookmark these voter guides and others on your browser. Look for an updated 2024 Election Ballot on Civil Beat sometime later this month. And we’ll again roll out our Candidate Q&As in the very near term.