This week, The Wall Street Journal exposed that Obama V.P.-vetter James Johnson had obtained favorable loan rates with the help of Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide’s now sub-prime-disgraced CEO.

Yesterday, Portfolio’s Dan Golden advanced the story, finding a “Friend of Angelo” program that doled out special treatment to prominent Washington hands, including Senator Chris Dodd, whose day job includes overseeing the lending and banking industries as Chair of the Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

In 2006, the Philadelphia Daily News’s Will Bunch, writing in The American Prospect, uncovered that Rick Santorum, then Pennsylvania’s junior senator, had gotten a loan that he probably wasn’t qualified from a politically connected bank. (Note how I just described him as Pennsylvania’s “then” senator.)

Keep digging. As the journalism joke goes, “One, two, trend…”