Sometimes the most important questions are the ones that don’t get asked, even by reporters, whose job it is to ask that next question.

Usually this failure to ask is more inadvertent than deliberate, and nothing in today’s post should be interpreted as criticism of any reporter. The first example, in fact, comes from a good story by reporter John Briggs on the front page of last Monday’s Burlington Free Press headlined, “Frustration grows over downtown scene.”

The story was about how panhandlers in and around Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace are harassing passers-by and angering store and restaurant owners who want those passers-by to shop and eat at their establishments.

No one has been hurt, but, Briggs wrote, merchants say the situation has become “unpleasant…and may seem threatening to potential shoppers and tourists.”

If anything, Briggs exercised excessive journalistic caution in attributing that conclusion to the merchants. The panhandling, often aggressive and vulgar, simply is unpleasant, and might well seem threatening, especially to women, children,  the frail or the elderly.

As a result, city officials are considering various steps, including passage of laws against blocking the sidewalks. The city council has already passed an ordinance prohibiting smoking in or near parks or recreation areas.

The story did an especially good job in dealing with the political and sociological tensions surrounding the dispute. The panhandlers, many if not most of them drug addicts, homeless, unemployed and perhaps unemployable, have their defenders and advocates who claim the business owners, and the council members working with them (merchants vote; street people do not) are indifferent to the plight of the poor and dispossessed.

Quite possible. And those poor and dispossessed are their fellow citizens whose humanity need not be belittled. But the needs of the non-poor, non-dispossessed should also be taken into account. Forget the merchants for a minute, who obviously have an economic self-interest here, and just consider all the folks – just regular folks, not particularly rich or poor or influential or even important (except in the sense that everyone is important )– who are walking along the sidewalks to shop, eat, sightsee or just meander.

They ought to be able to do this without being assailed by assertive drifters who clog the sidewalk and shout obscenities. This is not a free speech issue. Anyone has the right to set up a soapbox in the park outside City Hall and proclaim the most unpopular opinion imaginable. To the passer-by offended by that opinion, the only response – or at least the only American response – is: Who cares? Be offended. It’s the price for living in a free society.

But sidewalks are, as their name suggests, for walking, and those using them as they were intended to be used have a reasonable expectation that they will be neither impeded nor insulted. Regular folks have rights, too.

Reporter Briggs also did a good job pointing out that the problem had gotten worse because of the recession and because the local agencies that help addicts, the mentally ill and the homeless were stretched to their capacities and beyond. But now comes the question not asked:

Isn’t this what happens when the state cuts its social service budget?

At this point, that question can’t be answered definitively. It would take a great deal of research to make a direct connection between those budget cuts and the increase in the number of troubled panhandlers in downtown Burlington.

But for the last two years, the Legislature, prodded by Gov. Jim Douglas, has cut the budget of the Human Services Agency to hold down taxes and to maintain spending on schools, transportation, and other functions. They did this despite warnings from, among others, law enforcement officials (including Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling) that the result would be more troubled or homeless people on city streets, creating problems that would have to be dealt with by local governments.

These cops seem to have had a point.

The other question wasn’t asked up at Morses Line.

This was last month, in another perfectly good Free Press story, this one by Matt Sutkoski, about the dispute between the Rainville family and the Department of Homeland Security’s effort (apparently about to be abandoned) to take part of the family’s farmland to expand a little-used border crossing station.

Among the sources quoted was a spokesman for the government agency who explained that no major improvements to the facility at Morses Line had been made for 70 years, and that the crossing station  “fails to provide the tools we need to guard against the threats to our national security.”

The question which should have been asked there was: Our What?

Because officials at DHS and its various sub-agencies have been throwing around that “national security” explanation almost every time there’s any debate about Canadian border policies. But the examples they give are invariably about attempted drug smuggling or foreigners trying to sneak into the U.S. to get a job or find a relative.

Stopping those activities is part of DHS’s job. But they have nothing to do with “national security.” The nation’s security is not threatened by a pot (or even heroin) peddler or an illegal farm worker. “National security” deals with threats to…well, the security of the nation, from foreign powers or – these days – from terrorists.

Since September 11, 2001, not a single terrorist seems to have entered the United States from Canada, and there is little reason to think a terrorist could get into Canada any more easily than he or she could come directly to the U.S.

“There’s lot of misunderstanding on the relationship between borders and terrorism,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Since 2001, Alden said, “there have been about 25 terrorist plots inside the US, involving 58 individuals. Thirty were US-born citizens, 11 were naturalized citizens, one had dual citizenship. Nine were legal immigrants or visa holders. Only six were here illegally and maybe one more, from the Middle East.”

Furthermore, he said, “illegally” meant only that they had overstayed their visas, not that they had snuck across a border.

“For the vast majority of incidents, the border was completely irrelevant,” he said.

There’s no guarantee that someday a terrorist won’t try to sneak over the border from Canada, as Ahmed Ressam, the so-called “Millennium Bomber” tried to do in 1999. He was caught at a border crossing station in Washington State. But that was before September 11, 2001. Since then, Canadian authorities have tightened their surveillance of refugee applicants, which was Ressam’s status at the time.

But like other anti-terrorism experts, Alden said that far more important than watching the Canadian border was working cooperatively with Canadian intelligence agencies.

“The level of intelligence  sharing with Canadian authorities is the best we have with any country,” he said. “It’s a very , very close and cooperative one. The US and Canada are trying to do the same things to keep these people out of North America altogether. They use similar systems to try to screen overseas passengers.”

If, as now seems likely, the Morses Line border station is closed, something will be lost; there will be less coming and going across the border for both business and social reasons.

That’s too bad. It has nothing to do with national security.

For medical reasons, there will be no News Guy post today.

No, nobody’s sick. Just one of these time-consuming, medical-diagnostical-procedural things that occasionally have to be dealt with.

Or, in our current grammatical-pedant mode, things with which one occasionally must deal?

Either way, check back in Monday for healthy substance.

Now that the Legislative session is semi-officially over, the 2010 campaign for governor has semi-officially begun.

Of course, it semi- semi-officially began in January of 2009 (no, that was not a typo; that was 2009) when Sen. Doug Racine of Richmond said he would run.

But like two of his opponents – Sens. Peter Shumlin of Putney and Susan Bartlett of Hyde Park – Racine was otherwise occupied until May 13, when the Legislature adjourned, but with the proviso that it “reconvene on the ninth day of June, 2010, at ten o’clock in the forenoon if the Governor should fail to approve and sign any bill and should he return it to the house of origin.”

So technically the Legislature remains in session, which created a minor political flap when the campaign of Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie’s, the unchallenged Republican, solicited contributions from lobbyists for an event scheduled before the official adjournment. Realizing its error, the campaign promptly unsolicited.

But technically shmecknically. For all practical purposes, “The Ledge” (a term coined by the late Molly Ivins to describe the version down in Texas, but too good not to be given wider currency) is over, and the attention of the state’s politicians – and its journalists – can shift to the campaign. It has.

It will be a long campaign, and because brevity is a virtue, today’s exercise will focus on just two features, the second of which is an early assessment of how the campaign is going.

It is not going well.

But first, a warning of sorts. Each of the various players in this comedy-drama has his or her own role. The role here is to ride herd. This web site hereby appoints itself a (one of many, it is to be hoped) campaign truth squad. Every word said or written by every candidate or released in his or her name will be examined, be it in a speech, an interview, an advertisement, a web site communication. Misstatement, miscalculation, deception will be exposed.

Mercilessly.

And gleefully. The News Guy is indifferent as to who wins the August 24 Democratic primary or the general election in November. He is hostile – very hostile — to factual error, unsupported assertions, misuse of data, conclusions based on conjecture rather than verifiable truth, cheap shots, meaningless cant, and will take great joy in calling them out.

But not with a petty, “gotcha” attitude. Nits will be left un-picked. Minor errors, inconsistencies, and slips of the tongue during interviews or debates are…well, minor errors, inconsistencies, and slips of the tongue. The point of this exercise is not to catch candidates in the kind of trivial flubs everybody makes in spontaneous speech. It is to stop them from substantively misleading the electorate.

Now, as to this business about the campaign not going well.

OK, it’s early. There’s plenty of time left for improvement. The early signs, though, are not encouraging. Judging from the campaign web sites (which is where most of the activity takes place for now), the candidates seem to be heading toward a campaign which will be: (a) dominated by pabulum; and (b) about nothing.

Or, to say the same thing in different terms, about itself.

In fairness to Vermont politicians, this politics of the self-referential (post-modern politics?) is a nationwide phenomenon. All over the country, races are being won or lost not according to any candidate’s vision of the future or position on substantive issues, but on who ran the less honorable campaign (“He did.” No, he did.”) and whose commercials were more misleading.

The scary, early, signs that Vermont may be headed in that direction came in the flapette between the campaigns of Democrats Matt Dunne and Secretary of State Deb Markowitz following Dunne’s call for all the contenders to reveal their personal financial assets.

Racine agreed. Shumlin called the idea “Montpelier parlor games.” Bartlett said voters are “concerned about their future and the future of Vermont, not the details of my finances.” But the Markowitz campaign launched a counter-attack against Dunne.

“If this was anything more than political posturing Sen. Dunne would have used his 11 years in the legislature to make this Vermont law,” campaign manager Paul Tencher said. “He also would have advised his opponents of his request before holding a press conference.” (all this according to a May 14 story in the Times-Argus).

He did both, shot back Dunne’s campaign manager, Kevin O’Holleran.

Apparently he did. In 1994, Dunne was a major backer (though not the sponsor) of H-830, which would have required the kind of disclosure he now supports. It failed.

On the issue, Dunne would appear to have a strong case. In both politics and government (except for the Legislature) Vermont’s disclosure and transparency requirements are weak. In many states candidates now have to reveal their financial assets. In theory, there is always the possibility that a candidate could hold huge blocks of stock in say, Entergy, or Corrections Corporation of America. If so, voters ought to know that.

But Bartlett is right, too. Voters care about what the candidates plan to do in office, not their portfolios. In her case, she and her husband reported income last year of less than $100,000. Assuming they don’t have the most incompetent financial advisor in captivity, they don’t own enough stock in anything to rise to the conflict-of-interest level. Neither, in all likelihood, do the other contenders.

Yet this is so far what the campaign is about. Whoever thinks it’s about anything else is invited to check the web sites and look for specific proposals or substantive ideas.

Good hunting.

Well, Bartlett may have one, worthy of future consideration. Check it out here. But for the most part, the sites are full of tedious jargon and tired slogans designed only to offend no one. As a result, they also interest no one.

Two items deserve special mention. Dunne’s web site notes that “at age 22,  Matt’s neighbors elected him to the Vermont Legislature,” which is probably not true. Because what it says is that all of Dunne’s neighbors were 22 when they elected him to the legislature, which seems unlikely.

Then there is the latest advertisement on Dubie’s web site. It’s called “Pure Vermont” and manages, in three minutes and 26 seconds, to say almost nothing. But at the end, walking along a lakeshore, Dubie and his wife tell each other they love one another.

It could be along five months.