With a reality-television farce for a presidency, Americans can’t help but be sucked eyeballs-elongated into the churning daily descriptions of federal buffoonery, cronyism and disruptive change.

Whether you are aghast or delighted, you undoubtedly are watching all of this national drama with mouth agape. While that’s great for cable television ratings and newspaper subscriptions for the country’s largest publications, this surging supernova of democratic dysfunction simultaneously blots out many local issues that also should be demanding your attention.

Even if you’ve kept up with the most-recent apex controversies – such as Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s ill-advised trip to Syria, the public payoff of the ex-police chief, rail budget disasters, etc. – countless other local stories are being buried or covered up through shrinking access to public information as well as centralized attention on the shiniest of orange-tinted objects.

To help counter monomania, I’ve picked out a few closer-to-home curiosities to bring back the fickle public glare in this direction. Feel free to add more in the reader comments below.

• Impending threats to the church-state divide: Apparently, when a higher power isn’t deciding Super Bowls or educational curriculum, “the Lord” is busy contemplating and intervening in Office of Hawaiian Affairs decisions.

Chairwoman Rowena Akana recently was ousted from her job, but not before she told the OHA board about her meeting prep and spiritual support, which included opening her Bible to Ezekiel 3, and reading about the “stiff-necked,” “hard-headed” and “hard-hearted” people who wouldn’t listen to her.

Akana warned “if they don’t listen up soon, God will require of them their souls.” She then added, “You can reorganize this board however you will. But the Lord is with us today.”

While religious references occasionally surface in public discourse about non-religious topics, most public officials understand the critical need for separating church and state in all matters fundamental to this polytheistic nation in terms of its pragmatic everyday business. Yet as this country veers back into spiritual debates on the national level, locals also will be tempted to try such God-fueled boundary exploration.

• Revenue streams and journalistic resources: Not to be impiously prudish here, but is the Honolulu Star-Advertiser really so desperate for money that it needs to publish full-color advertisements on the back of its sports pages – adjacent to scores for high-school activities – as illustrations of the city’s wide selection of “adult” DVDs, clubs with “dancing girls” and “massage” parlors?

I understand we’re not living in the idealized 1950s here, but the concept of a “family” newspaper seems to me to include the idea that I shouldn’t need to explain to my 9-year-old daughter over breakfast why those women in the newspaper like to dance around a pole.

If a bit of moral high ground could be taken there, and some revenue is lost, I recommend rebalancing resources by cutting the “Pa’ina” and “Keiki Athletes” sections of Oahu Publications Inc.’ sister-tabloid MidWeek. Pages and pages of awkward group photos at social gatherings/public events and snapshots of kids playing sports really doesn’t classify as journalism of any significant sort in an age of social media.

Couldn’t that ink and paper be used for something a bit more substantive in support of a stronger democracy? If nothing else, for page fillers, how about just running the full Office of Information Practices opinions about its worst offenders, outing them as obstructors of open public discourse?

• Students deserve respect and credit, too: Along this transparency vein, local media organizations also make themselves look weak and petty when they don’t attribute original journalistic work from competing sources. That seems to be a common practice on Oahu, so I want to give belated kudos to the group of University of Hawaii journalism students that broke a bouncy social-media story recently, only to have that work appropriated by “the pros.”

These students have been part of a larger team developing a digital media organization dubbed Ho’a Oahu (which I advise).

Last semester, they ran across an illegal trampoline at Pounders Beach on the North Shore. They tried to get basic journalistic questions answered: Who put the trampoline there? Is the trampoline allowed to be there? Is this creating any public safety hazards?

But they were put off by spokespeople for the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, including communications specialist Deborah Ward, who only agreed to answer questions via email and told Ho’a reporter Danielle Vallejo at one point: “You are just a student. You take what we give you, and that’s that.”

Despite such friction, the students created this story package, with photos and video, and it was a social-media hit, garnering 40,000 views on Facebook. Then along came Hawaii News Now – with its dubious practice of claiming “exclusive” stories – to produce this piece, by reporter Jobeth Devera, on the same subject.

Compare the two, and then think about the craftsmanship of this HNN line: “The state said it removed the trampoline once before, but another showed up, and now droves of visitors are flocking to the quiet, relatively empty area, all thanks to the internet.” Why did the state remove it? Who is “the internet”? Could Devera contort her piece more to avoid giving credit where credit is due?

This line, though, is the face slapper: “State officials told Hawaii News Now the trampoline will come down for good, once the department receives the proper funding.”

Even though they didn’t get the responses they wanted, the Ho’a student journalists at least asked some tough questions in the face of this assertion, such as: How much would this removal cost? Who would pay for it? When might it happen?

Devera instead appeared to blow those concerns off, writing “No word on when that will happen,” which sounds a bit like maybe we could just send the bill to Mexico, tacked to the tab for the border wall.