Advertiser columnist and former Star-Bulletin managing director, Dave Shapiro, left the humor out of his column today as he took on the state of local news reporting.

Local TV news operates from a narrow frame of reference in which the typical newscast has become a recitation of the police blotter, the best daily melodrama from the courts, a few staged political sound bites, a soft feature and three weather segments per half hour — whether there were exceptional meteorological happenings or not.

In other words, easy hits that require little serious reporting. It’s no surprise you won’t find news to cover if you don’t dig for it.

And Dave predicts the consolidation of the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin will lead in the same direction, concluding that “the void in the amount of news and information on public affairs available to Hawai’i readers and viewers is going to be striking.”

And did you catch the Frank Rich column in the NY Times over the weekend in which he argues that the angry reaction to health care reform is most reminiscent of the reaction to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and reflects similar political dynamics.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that a right-wing militia activist called for his followers to break windows at Democratic Party offices, and then appeared to take credit when it happened in a number of places.

And, it appears, not unrelated to the weekend raids and arrests of members of an extremist group of a self-described Christian army in the Midwest.

Andrew Arena, head of the FBI’s field office in Detroit, said the case ”is an example of radical and extremist fringe groups which can be found throughout our society. The FBI takes such extremist groups seriously, especially those who would target innocent citizens and the law enforcement officers who protect the citizens of the United States.”

And so it goes.

Coming up: The Senate Committee on Judiciary and Government Operations is hearing two sets of resolutions this morning at 9:35.

SR 92/SCR 193: URGING THE OWNER OF THE HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN TO PROVIDE SUFFICIENT TIME TO FIND A NEW OWNER FOR THE NEWSPAPER TO PRESERVE TWO INDEPENDENT DAILY NEWSPAPERS IN THE COMMUNITY.

SR 26/SCR 37: URGING THE GOVERNOR TO USE AND CONSIDER GENDER EQUALITY WHEN APPOINTING JUDGES AND JUSTICES TO HAWAII COURTS

And Second Decking, the next major deadline in the legislative calendar, arrives on Thursday, April 1. In order to have a chance of passing, bills have to pass out of their final committees in the second chamber and be “decked” by the end of the day so that they can voted on the following week. Bills that originated in the House will have to be decked by the Senate, and Senate bills decked by the House. Then we’re on the home stretch of the session.