Where is Obama’s home for the holidays?

Well, the chattering class back in Washington, D.C., is chattering again about the "Waikiki White House," which lately has been the commentariat’s term for President Barack Obama’s vacation abode each holiday season. All the other lame quips about being at a luau or doing a hula are making the rounds again. It’s becoming a Christmas tradition, like mistletoe.

Of course, they’ve got the location wrong, but the alliteration sounds better than the "Kailua Kompound." And unless the brinkmanship over the payroll tax dispute ends pretty soon, it looks like this may be the first Noel for the president in the actual White House. Maybe he and John Boehner can watch football. Bah, humbug.

For charter school, a long list of no-nos

The state’s performance audit of Hawaii’s public charter schools was pretty brutal. And Carl Takamura, Charter School Review Panel chairman, has a point: People may wrongly dismiss the entire school system, which posts some successes, as bad.

But the local board for Myron B. Thompson Academy, which got the lion’s share of the attention in the audit, said the school did nothing wrong.

Just flipping through the report suggests otherwise. Chapter 2, which chronicles the criticisms, includes 12 exhibits, eight of them dealing with this one academy. The phrases "improper temporary employee contract," "purchase order improperly authorized" and "check improperly signed" were among the red flags.

It would be easier to accept nuanced explanations if the local board owned some measure of the failure.