It’s a little early to pronounce State Auditor Tom Salmon politically cooked and ready to have the loser’s fork stuck into his carcass.

But just a little.

Salmon, of course, is the elected Democrat who took the political risk earlier this year of becoming a Republican in a state where that is generally not considered a shrewd career move.

Last week he made the personal and political mistake of driving his car after he’d had too much to drink.

Monday he went on the radio to talk about it and botched things up totally.

Asked the obvious question by Jane Lindholm on Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition, Salmon refused to say how much he’d had to drink before a Montpelier cop pulled him over Friday evening. The question, he said, was not “germane.”

This dictionary (American Heritage Second College Edition) defines “germane” as “having a significant bearing upon a point at hand; pertinent.”

Under that definition, what could possibly be more germane than asking an elected official who has had too much to drink just what he had been drinking, and how much?

Especially considering that he had earlier said he’d been drinking red wine.

Asserting that his goal was maximum “candor,” Salmon practiced maximum evasiveness. He wouldn’t say forthrightly that he planned to plead guilty when his case comes to court next month, leaving the impression that he was hoping for some other outcome.

To top it all off, before the brief (maybe five minute) interview ended, Salmon got potty-mouthed. If he thought the vulgarity would mark him as a regular guy, he was wrong. It marked him as vulgar. It also raised the question of…well, to come right to the point…of whether he’s something of a dope.

Maybe he’s the brightest guy around. But the context here is politics, in which appearance often outstrips reality. A candidate who comes across as kind of dense risks getting the reputation as a candidate who’s kind of dense. Once acquired, this reputation is hard to shake.

To be fair to Salmon, he does not appear to have been falling-down drunk. His breathalyzer test measured a blood alcohol content of .086, not far above the .08 legal limit.

Still, above the limit is above the limit. It doesn’t look good.

For two reasons, Salmon could still get re-elected next year. First, it’s early. Assuming there is no repeat performance, voters could forgive even if they don’t forget. A candidate who gets the vote of everyone who has ever driven after a drink too many would probably win in a landslide.

Second, one can never underestimate the facility of Vermont Democrats to nominate a turkey to run against Salmon. The Democratic leadership is no doubt trying to recruit a good candidate. But that leadership has limited power to control events. Anybody can enter the primary, meaning anybody can win it, including a turkey.

Right now, though, the Auditor’s re-election prospects seem bleak.

Oh, the other guy who wasn’t exactly impressive in handling this kerfuffle was Lt. Gov. and Republican gubernatorial candidate-designate Brian Dubie, who had nothing but praise for Salmon at Saturday’s Republican convention. Not a hint that he disapproved of what Salmon had done.

The appropriate response in the family, the fraternity house, maybe the Elks Club. Not in politics.

Enough of that. Now let’s turn to that other kerfuffle, the one about that letter to the editor of the Burlington Free Press, the existence of which the Freep is trying to deny.

The letter, by Ethan A. Sims (apparently the highly respected, much-honored professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Vermont, though the News Guy was unable to reach him for confirmation) which appeared to suggest that, while hunters were out trying to shoot a moose, anti-hunters might want to shoot the moose-hunters.

At least that’s how a great many hunters understood it. Preferring to be predators rather than prey, these hunters and their organizations not unreasonably became upset, deluging the newspaper with so many angry letters to the editor that the editors surrendered.

Abjectly. Not because they apologized, which was defensible if perhaps not necessary. But because they removed the letter from the newspaper’s web site archives.

It became, then, an un-letter, rather the way some one-time associates of Stalin who fell out of favor (and soon thereafter of sight) had their names and photographs purged from the history books, becoming un-persons.

Because no one here was killed, tortured, or exiled, the editors hardly sink to Stalinism, or other aspects of Bolshevism except in their obvious toadiness. Theirs is the spirit not of the independent journalist but of the ever-obsequious courtier.

Besides, this not being Soviet Russia, suppression doesn’t work. Anyone with a desire to see the letter and an Internet connection can find it. Here it is:

On this beautiful day we learn that about 1,251 hunters are taking to the woods with legal permits to “pursue prized quarry.” Certainly the members of various humane organizations do not approve. I suggest that before the next annual killing season, other residents be awarded legal permits to kill hunters who will be out to kill these beautiful, non-destructive animals. Or the government could just rule out all this primitive killing.
ETHAN A.H. SIMS
Shelburne

As another letter-writer noted last Sunday (a letter the Free Press editors, to their credit, printed), Sims obviously didn’t really want anyone to shoot a moose hunter. His letter was Swiftian satire, modeled on Jonathan Swift’s famous Modest Proposal (1729) suggesting Ireland’s poor ease their penury by selling their children to be eaten.

Not that hunters should be blamed for insufficient attention to Dr. Sims’ literary playfulness, which would have alerted them to his motivation. Hunters feel put upon these days because everybody does. It’s the American way to think everybody’s out to get us, whoever “us” may be. In fact, a very small percentage of the American people actively oppose hunting, and they have not been taken seriously by most of the rest of us (the News Guy is a very pro-hunting non-hunter) at least since the anti-hunting group PETA called for New Yorkers to change the name of the Fishkill River, apparently unaware that “kill” is Dutch for “river,” and so the name is not evidence of anti-piscatorialism (though perhaps of redundancy).

The editors could have explained that Sims was not in fact urging the murder of anyone, simply expressing his own anti-hunting views in a sardonic manner and with some literary flourish. Such a rational response, however, does not come easily to courtiers. Instead, the paper apologized for running a letter “advocating for violence against hunters,” which the letter does not do.

(OK, since this site is beating up on the Free Press again, this is a good place to note that Sunday’s package on the Lake Champlain Bridge, with stories by Terri Hallenbeck and Matt Sutkoski, was first class journalism.)

Announcing the potential refinancing of Burlington Telcom’s debt last week, Burlington Mayor Robert Kiss proclaimed that the latest development “confirms that the use of pooled cash has not been, and is not, an increased risk to the taxpayers of Burlington.”

This is false. The taxpayers of Burlington could have lost the $17 million the city (via its “pooled cash” funds) loaned to BT. In fact, they can still lose it, because the refinancing by Piper Jaffray, a Minneapolis-based underwriting company, has been announced, but not completed.

Kiss’s claim was in the news. The truth of its inaccuracy was not, not in John Briggs’s story in the Burlington Free-Press nor in Ken Picard’s account in Seven Days’s on-line Blurt blog. As far as could be determined on line (and not searching until Sunday) no other news report mentioned Kiss’s quote, absolving them of the obligation to correct it.

Do not misunderstand. The point here is not to condemn Briggs, Picard, or any other reporter, Here some clarification is in order. Recent criticisms of Vermont news coverage on this site have not, for the most part, been directed at the working reporters, and if they have been interpreted that way, they must have been imprecisely worded. In Vermont and elsewhere, a shrinking corps of reporters is doing its best under difficult and increasingly frustrating conditions. Whatever is wrong with news coverage is not – at least not primarily – the fault of the working reporter.

Or maybe even the working editor, who has fewer reporters to assign, (though one incident this past weekend shook one’s sympathy for at least some editors; details below).

No, the trouble here transcends individuals, or individual news organizations, or Burlington Telcom or Burlington. Or Vermont, for that matter, though it is certainly prevalent here. It is the confusion of journalism with stenography, the erroneous impression that if a reporter has accurately quoted a news source, the reporter has done his/her job.

Not if what the news source said is demonstrably false, he/she has not. Reporters are not supposed to take sides between Smith and Jones, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. They are supposed to take sides between truth and falsehoods. Otherwise we end up – as we often do – with “Opinions As to Shape of the Earth Differ” stories.

Opinions may, but that only proves that some opinions are wrong. Here are three truths: (1) The earth is round, or, if you wanna be picky, an oblate spheroid; (2) Life on earth developed some 3.7 billion years ago and evolved, (a tad of oversimplification here) via a combination of genetic mutation and natural selection until culminating (so far) in the emergence of human beings; (3) When some of said human beings lend money to others, there is always the possibility that the receivers of said money won’t pay it back. That’s one reason there is a direct relationship between the price of the money (the interest rate) and the perceived risk that it might not be paid back.

In this case, if the loan is not repaid, Burlington taxpayers will be out 17 million clams. Meaning the use of pooled cash has been, and is, an increased risk to the taxpayers of Burlington, precisely the opposite of Kiss’s claim.

In fairness to the reporters, the standard operating procedure in these matters is to get someone else – in this case a banker or an economist — to make the correction. Kiss held his press conference at 4PM on Friday (as Picard aptly pointed out the usual time for issuing bad news, not good) giving them little if any time to call anyone.

Still, in this case (and in many others, (which is why this post is being written) reporters need not rely on an expert to make the correction. Every reporter ought to be enough of an expert to make this elementary correction, and ought to have the authority to do so. Allowing the mayor of the state’s largest city to make an obviously false – and politically self-serving — statement is not good journalism. At the very least, the reporters could have noted that every loan entails some risk, alerting the reader that Kiss’s statement was, at a minimum, questionable.

Again, the “villain” here is not the individual reporter. It is the prevailing journalistic outlook that distorts the admirable values of objectivity until it degenerates into blandness and, in the final analysis, misinformation.

Now, to those editors, compassion for whom was growing in the News Guy’s heart.

Until Saturday morning, when the Free Press led the paper – not the sports page, but the front page – with a football game.

Now, some background. This condemnation does not come from what the News Guy’s late friendly acquaintance (really), George Corley Wallace, used to call one of those pointy-headed intellectuals who doesn’t know how to park his bicycle straight, and would rather catch butterflies than watch football (didja see that Michigan state-Purdue game Saturday? A corker)..

Au contraire, the News Guy has liked football since his father took him to the first intercollegiate game between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869. (Well, OK, the 1945 version at Princeton’s then-beautiful Palmer Stadium. It got less beautiful when seating capacity was increased in the 1970s, and was demolished in 1996).

But a lot of news was made last Friday far more important than Essex trouncing Rutland. Furthermore, in addition to being poor journalism, the choice was probably not even good business. Yes, a lot of folks like football. But not that many, if you look at the polling. Nine percent call college football their favorite sport; no doubt fewer really follow the high school game. The notion that putting the game in the most prominent spot on Page One would either increase circulation that day or build long-lasting loyalty in Essex appears to have been based on vague hunch more than hard evidence.

A Vermont worker who earns more than he or she would doing the same job in another state probably doesn’t earn much money.

But a Vermonter who earns less – perhaps quite a bit less – than he or she would plying the same trade elsewhere could be an affluent professional person.

That’s because low-wage jobs in Vermont pay better than they do nationwide, while high-income jobs pay less.

According to a report done for the Legislative Commission on the Future of Economic Development by economists Tom Kavet and Jeff Carr, “lower paying occupations in Vermont, such as those in the food preparation and serving business, have wages about 15% above the U.S. average… Many professional and more skilled labor occupations, such as doctors, lawyers, computer and technology professionals and educators, however, receive wages well below…the average U.S. wage.”

Not that doctors, lawyers, and professors are earning less than waiters and janitors. They’re earning a lot more, even in Vermont. It’s just that they could earn more elsewhere.

So why don’t they go elsewhere? And for that matter, why do those waiters and cooks earn more here than they would someplace else?

Kavet said the answer to that second question is easy: Vermont has a higher minimum wage than either most states or the Federal Government. The minimum wage in Vermont is $8.06 an hour, 81 cents above the $7.25 federal minimum and six cents higher than the minimum in Massachusetts. Unlike the federal or most other state minimum wages, Vermont’s is indexed according to the U.S. Consumer Price Index, meaning it goes up with prices. (This year, prices went down, so the minimum wage will stay the same through 2010. Under Vermont law, the minimum does not go down).

The higher minimum does not raise pay only for those earning it. Workers who rate a slightly higher wage (such as someone who is doing the same job as the minimum-earner, but has been with the company longer), will receive $8.25 an hour or so in Vermont, not the $7.50 or so they would get in most states, and so up the next few notches in the wages structure.

OK, that’s pretty simple. But why do the upper-income professionals earn less than they would elsewhere?

Maybe they’re not much good, minor league professional doctors and lawyers who couldn’t cut in the Big Leagues of Boston or Philadelphia?

Considering the national rep of Fletcher Allen Health Care, Dartmouth Hitchcock (some operations in Vermont), and other medical centers, that doesn’t seem like a good answer.

Far more likely is the one Kavet offers: Some people just want to live in Vermont, and they are willing to earn less money in order to have more…well, more of several possibilities: quiet, safety, places to ski or hike or bike or such, being surrounded by beauty (or at least not being surrounded by the ugliness of shopping malls, office parks, and highway interchanges); an old-fashioned sense of community.

In this pigeon-hole-happy society, it’s probably important to declare who is not being described here. These (somewhat) less-greedy professionals are not part of the “Live simply so that others may simply live” crowd (and have you noticed how many of them are pulling in so much dough from their ‘live simply’ books that they can afford McMansions and Hummers and a few have probably got them?). Or like that guy in New York (not worth looking up the name) so intent on reducing his footprint on the natural world that he went a year without using toilet paper and then wrote a book about it.

No, these are people who live rather comfortably. According the Kavet and Carr’s research, a general practitioner physician in Vermont earns only about 80 per cent of what he or she could earn elsewhere. But that’s 80 percent of almost $180,000 (in 2008), or $144,000.

Not a bad living, even if the physician doesn’t have (as many do) a professional spouse whose income brings the household total well above $200,000.

Nor are these “marpies,” (middle aged rural professionals) University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson’s term for the “back-to-the-landers” who flocked to Vermont a few decades ago and stayed in the state, if not necessarily on the land. Today’s “underpaid” professional in Vermont are younger and more practical.

What, then, to call them? Let’s see: they’re professionals who prefer quality of life to big bucks. But PEPQUILBs doesn’t sound right. What about, Vermonters eschewing extreme wealth?

But VEEW is no good, either. So for now, let’s just call them “Quallies,” though if you can think of a better handle, submit it. This could be your ticket to fame and fortune.

Now, at first glance, the very existence of “quallies” would seem to violate a basic law of economics. By and large, economists say, people respond to incentives, which usually means money.

But not always. St. Michael’s College economics professor Herb Kessel noted that when people voluntarily accept lower salaries in return for what they consider better lives, they are acting in a manner “very consistent with economic theory.” In this case, it is the theory of “compensating wage differentials.” Some workers, for instance, are willing to do jobs even if they have dangerous or unpleasant “attributes” (coal mining) if the pay is high enough.

But “the attribute can be a positive or negative one,” Kessel said, making it sensible for people to accept lower salaries in return for other, non-economic, benefits.

It isn’t that people don’t know they could earn money elsewhere, or that most of them regret their decision to move to Vermont despite the lower pay scale. St. Michael’s sociology professor Vince Bolduc, Kessel’s partner in preparing the “Pulse of Vermont” studies for the Vermont Business Roundtable, said one question they asked respondents was whether people who had taken a pay cut to move to the state would do it again.

“A majority said yes,” Bolduc said.

That could help explain why Vermont has more professionals per person than the country in general, even though they make less money here. With 1,800 physicians, for instance, Vermont has a doctor for every 350 people. That’s not enough, but it’s better than the nationwide rate of a physician for every 375 people.

No one seems to know for certain whether there are more “quallies” per person in Vermont than in most other states. Kessel said he thought so, but had “no hard figures” to prove it.

But it would be consistent with some other “hard figures,” such as the disproportionately high percentage of Vermonters who work in the arts (not necessarily as their main source of income), write for a living, have a college degrees, or are self-employed (though that last category could mean that lots of folks can’t find a paying job).

Finally (for today; this subject is worth revisiting) might awareness of a disproportionate number of “Quallies” be reason enough to change state policy? After all, they would seem to be an economic resource. They may have less money than they would if they worked in Pennsylvania or Colorado, but they have more than most folks. They use it to hire workers, buy goods cars and clothing, eat in restaurants. It would seem to be in the state’s interest to try to hang on to the ones who are here and attract a few more.

This requires, said Professor Kessel, maintaining “a rich, dynamic, cultural environment,” in addition to maintaining environmental standards. Vermont has relatively strict environmental regulations, one reason some business leaders complain about the state’s “business climate.” But considering who lives in Vermont, Kessel said, “environmental protection becomes part of business development.”

Then there’s the possibility that what is often considered “economic development” might be counter-productive here.. A new shopping mall anchored by a bog box stores, for instance, is often considered beneficial to a local economy. But “Quallies” may not like the mall because it: (1) is ugly; and (2) could destroy the economic viability of the nearby town or village center, quite likely one of the reasons they came to and stay in Vermont.

Then again, not everyone is a “Quallie.”

And there really has to be a better word for them. Submit your suggestion. Entries will be posted here, and readers may vote for their favorites.

Oh, as to the donations requested last week (click here for details): They are coming in steadily (that’s the good news) but slowly (that’s not).

To repeat: If you think this web site is worth keeping around, look up near the top right corner under “pages, click “donate,” and do your best.