Despite emphatic warnings, it didn't rain much last week. Hanalei got socked, but that happens often enough there so that people know what to do. That poor guy in Hau'ula lost his room attached to his sister's garage. But other than those instances, across the island chain, it wasn't the punishing blast we were told to prepare for.

It's not that the National Weather Service got it wrong or that the media hyped the potential for damage. Well, OK, but not much. The advisories from the National Weather Service were real, though there was lots of coverage of city crews clearing East Hono- lulu stream outlets and references to the massive flood that roared through Niu Valley in 1987. But in most places, the big rains never showed up last week.

There was, though, a perceptible eagerness in the stories. For KGMB's relaunched newscast, a whopper storm would have been a chance to show off their weather team as the go-to source whenever the clouds get dark or there's an earthquake in the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Bad weather provides all sorts of opportunities for marketing oneself as the go-to source. In some circles, that marketing is called politicking, and the current economic storm is providing a great opportunity for all sorts of aspirations.

In the "furlough Friday" debacle, points were scored not by actually fixing the situation, but by sympathizing with those affected and chastising those responsible. In the Police Commission chief selection controversy, there's the tasty opportunity to stand safely on the side and point to what's happening. The pandemonium over swine flu vaccines is another "storm" full of opportunity for comments and info boxes.

The genius of the ploy is to be urgent in warnings, earnest in describing the dangers and to seem very, very concerned about everybody's well-being. But you don't have to fix anything. Fixing stuff is hard, left to people with guts and special training. Sometimes fixing stuff is impossible. But that doesn't mean big problems can't be personally useful for image-building purposes.

If the object is to keep people safe and to better the prospects of Hawai'i's future, then warning about the dangers of impending forces is an honorable civic duty. But when it is done primarily for self-promotional purposes, people can smell it a mile away. We can tell when it's raining and when it's not.