A story in Columbia Journalism Review critiques business reporters and the business press for contributing to the subprime mortgage meltdown by paying little attention to regulators during the period where strong regulatory action could have avoided the current financial damage.

That’s certainly the case here at home. Other than prolific gadfly Jeff Garland and the Akaku folks on Maui, when was the last time reporters paid much attention to the various layers of regulation at the Dept. of Commerce and Consumer Affairs? That kind of reporting doesn’t happen often, and certainly doesn’t happen on a regular basis. DCCA is nobody’s beat. How about local insurance regulators (can you name the insurance commissioner?) or banking regulators? Securities commissioner? Who? What are the folks at RICO up to? If it’s not a case that results in a press release, we rarely hear much about their activities.

But I suppose the contemporary media approach is to dismiss most of that as the kind of insider stuff that won’t interest readers or viewers. Better for the public to remain ignorant than risk being bored. Or so goes conventional wisdom.

Check out MortgageFraudBlog.com for a running tally of fraud cases making it into the courts as well as other related info. It makes possible a quick overview of some of the criminal underpinnings of the mortgage crisis.

I noticed one blog’s entry yesterday concerning that Chinese infiltration of U.S. intelligence operations in Hawaii via an outsourced translation contract that was titled, “All your base are belong to us“. I remember getting a comment and cultural history of that little insider joke several years back.

Oops. Now I’m going to find myself on a bunch of automated watch lists because that link contains the word “bomb”, taken from the phrase, “someone set us up the bomb.” Is there some way to put this kind of link in italics or quotation marks to signal that it’s just a joke? Heh heh. Big Brother probably really is watching.

Someone has added a few Christmas decorations to a tree on the beach at the other end of Kaaawa. We go by there every day and enjoy the little spots of added color. Somehow they are able to survive both the weather and the people. Thanks go to an anonymous donor.

And the sun is rising at about 7:06 a.m., which will drift later to about 7:11 over the next month before starting that long run in the opposite direction. It means that we’ll be walking mostly in the dark most mornings for the next couple of months.