No big deal. Happens to everybody from time to time.

He will return Wednesday with renewed vigor.

A writer of clear prose (not running for governor of Vermont)

The News Guy has been summoned away (though not physically) on other business matters.

(No, they’re not very profitable, either, but can not be ignored).

He will return Friday with substantive (meaning, not just political) information.

But there is just enough time and energy left for one apology and one observation.

The apology goes to Julie Waters, who was called Julie Walters in a recent post. Ms. Waters, in her amusing corrective comment, suggested the News Guy might have gotten her confused with an actual Julie Walters, an actress.

Nope, this was strictly an eyesight malfunction, the existence of actress Julie Walters having been previously unknown in this precinct.

The observation comes after perusing Tuesday’s Burlington Free Press “Comment and Debate” page in which all six candidates for governor answered the question, “What changes, if any, would you make to how we pay for public education, how much we pay and how the public school system is structured?”

Actually, this is one observation in five parts:

–Part One: Is the Free Press aware that no more than 14 people could possible be reading these answers?

–Part Two: As has been mentioned here before, the writing of these answers, simply as writing, is execrable. Any candidate writing these answers him/her self should cease, desist, and hire a professional writer. Any candidate whose answers are already being written by a professional writer should  fire said writer and hire another.

(And Susan Bartlett, or perhaps the Free Press, should hire a proofreader. She said  school costs were rising because of “personal.” Surely she meant “personnel.”)

–Part Three: But to those of the 14 (perhaps eight) who can wade through the stilted prose, all six candidates have some sensible ideas, having to do with consolidation, distance learning technology, bulk purchasing, and other possible efficiencies.

–Part Four: Sen. Peter Shumlin, in his answer as well as on his television advertisements, calls for universal pre-kindergarten education. That can be expensive. Have his four Democratic opponents challenged him as to how he plans to pay for this? If not, why not?

–Part Five: Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie said that “our problem is simple: we spend more than we have.”

No, we do not. The schools are financed from the General and Education Funds, neither of which is in arrears. Obviously, Vermont spends less on schools than it has. Otherwise, it would have nothing to spend on anything else.

Sounds as though Dubie was using evocative language to suggest that the state spends more than it should, more than its taxpayers want to spend, perhaps even more than it can afford to spend on schools. These are all plausible, if debatable, assertions.

But politics ain’t poetry. Its language should be literally accurate, not an experiment in hyperbole.

But give Dubie some credit. That was one of the few simple, declarative English sentences by any of the six.

All are invited.

The host will be Sterling President Will Wootten.

The moderator will be…well, ahem, uh, as long as you asked, the moderator will be the News Guy his very own self.

Please do not throw tomatoes as the moderator. He will be doing the best he can. But he could use some help. What would you ask the candidates for governor if you had the opportunity?

Some of the issues that should be brought up may seem obvious – taxes, schools, jobs, Vermont Yankee. Except that they all seem to agree on taxes, schools, and Vermont Yankee. And it isn’t clear that governor can do much about jobs.

Remember eight years ago when candidate Jim Douglas’s slogan was “Jim =Jobs.” Sounded good, but even before the Recession, private sector job growth under Douglas was pretty close to zero.

Not necessarily his fault. Campaign rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, state government policy may be irrelevant to job growth.

Or maybe not. Anyway, if anyone has probing, specific, substantive questions he or she thinks someone should ask one of these folks, here’s your chance to suggest them to someone who is going to do the asking. And who will appreciate the submission whether or not he uses it.

(star break)

MEDIA NOTE—Not censure, this time, but praise. In the continuing discussion about the role of hydro power in the state, Vermont Public Radio did what news organizations are supposed to do – spent some money, sent reporters to cover the news.

VPR reporter John Dillon went 600 miles north of the border who where Hydro-Quebec, from which Vermont utilities just agreed to buy a whole mess of power, has built a huge dam which will divert 70 percent of the waters of the Rupert River to help generate that power.

As Dillon pointed out, the Rupert is just one of three rivers which will be part of a system of four dams, 74 dikes and a new tunnel carved through a mountain, all powering four new generating stations still farther north.

At the same time, VPR’s noon Vermont Edition went to Montreal where host Jane Lindholm presided over a spirited and informed debate between Claude Demers, Hydro-Quebec’s science communicator, and  Daniel Breton, founder of  a Quebec environmental organization.

One angle VPR didn’t deal with, and neither has anybody else. Hydro-Quebec gets criticized from folks on the left side of the political spectrum for those immense dams which have flooded thousands of acres of land, with damaging consequences for both the natural world and the Cree Indians who live in northern Quebec.

Another big corporation abusing the land and indigenous folks in the thirst for profit for the stockholders, no?

No. Hydro-Quebec doesn’t have stockholders. It’s owned by the Province and the people thereof. It is, in short, a socialist institution.

(star break)

More (mostly) good news: Some additional ammunition for the argument made in the post titled Not So Bad (June 4) that life in Vermont is…not so bad.

Maybe even pretty good.

The latest issue of  Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine named Burlington one of the “ten best cities for the next decade.” Praised  for its “creativity and entrepreneurship” Burlington was tagged the eighth best city for both living and working over the next several years. Austin, Texas, was first.

In addition, recently released  (or, perhaps more accurately, hitherto ignored) Census figures confirm that Vermont is one of the most affluent states, with a relatively low poverty rate, and one of the lowest rates of child poverty in the country. The statistics are from 2008, the most recent available.

Only eight other states have child (under age 18) poverty rates in the same low category as Vermont: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Utah, and Wyoming.

For the total poverty rate, Vermont was in the second best category, ranked with 13 other states with rates between 10.2 and 13.1 percent (Vermont’s was 10.4). Seven states, including New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Maryland, had lower rates.

As is true almost everywhere, Vermont’s under-18 poverty rate (12.8 percent) is slightly higher than its overall rate.  But not everywhere. Chittenden County’s total poverty rate was 9.6 percent, but the child poverty rate was 9.2 percent.

But that was unusual. In the other 13 counties, the under-18 rate was either slightly or not so slightly higher. Even Addison County, which had the lowest total poverty rate (9.5 percent had a slightly higher rate (10.6 percent, for those under 18.

Both the highest rates and the biggest differences between total and child poverty were in the Northeast Kingdom. Caledonia County had an 11.8 percent total poverty rate, with 17.1 percent of its under-18s in poverty. In Orleans County, the overall rate was 14.3 percent, with a 19.3 percent poverty ate for those under 18.

And in Essex County, the poorest in the state, 14.8 percent of all persons lived below the poverty line, but the under-18 rate was 23.8 percent.

That puts Essex at a level comparable with some of the rural counties of the Southeast and Southwest, the poorest areas of the country.

None of this is a big surprise. But it deserves more attention than it has been getting from either officials or observers. That latter, that’s us. More attention will be paid, starting with maybe a few questions to these candidates at Thursday’s debate.

The Ultimate Political Scientist (Machiavelli)

“Why are Eric Davis and Garrison Nelson the only political scientist ever consulted about Vermont politics?” a reader asks. “They can’t be the only political science professors in Vermont.”

The question struck home. Not because there is anything wrong with either Davis (who was quoted in the post on which the reader was commenting) or Nelson (who wasn’t only because he couldn’t be reached). They are both fine fellows as well as respected professors (though Davis is now technically a professor emeritus at Middlebury),

No, the comment struck home because the News Guy, in his earlier, Washington incarnation, was a co-founder and one of the only two members (the name of the other will remain secret to protect the guilty) the IDNCNO society.

The initials stood for I Do Not Call Norman Ornstein.

And what, prithee, was wrong with Norman Ornstein?

Not a thing. Like the above-mentioned academics, a fine fellow. Intelligent, good-hearted, and precisely the person a reporter should call for a story about the inner workings of Congress, about which Ornstein is a rare and thoughtful expert.

What inspired the IDNCNO society was that Washington-based political reporters, which both us co-founders were, had started calling Ornstein for expert commentary on all matters political, including matters about which he knew no more than…well, than the reporter calling him.

What the IDNCNO society was ridiculing, then, was not Ornstein, but: (a) continuation of the outmoded contrivance wherein a reporter had to call a certified expert to provide the analysis the reporter wanted to provide him/her-self; and (b) the creation of a list of “usual suspects” to provide said expertise.

In the case of the post about which the reader was commenting (The Five Musketeers,June 2, available earlier on the VT Digger site), reason (a) above is not relevant. In this case, the News Guy, not having been in Vermont that long, needed the expertise of some folks with more experience in the state. But reason (b) speaks right to the reader’s remark that Nelson and Davis can’t be the only two quotable political scientists in the whole state.

They are not. To begin with, there is Nelson’s University of Vermont colleague, Associate Professor Anthony Gierzynski, who has been quoted by the News Guy in the past. Perhaps the Vermont press corps in general has minimized Gierzynski as a usual suspect (making him an unusual suspect?) because he is unabashedly partisan, having actually run for the Burlington City Council as a Democrat.

But considering that he lost and no longer lives in Burlington, the statute of limitations for that offense might have expired. Besides, he’s probably not the only one. Next time the News Guy needs to quote a Vermont political scientist, he will scour the state college system faculties.

In another recent post (That Unasked Question, May 31 the News Guy noted, in connection with Burlington store owners wanting to get “street people” out of the neighborhood, that “merchants vote; street people do not.”

With some justification, a commenter objected. Merchants, he wrote, “as well as other members of the public who are permanently housed possibly vote in higher numbers (but) it would be untrue to state that the (homeless) ‘do not’ vote…at all.”

Nothing “possibly” about it. Reams of data make clear that voter participation by the homeless is tiny. But it is not zero. The political point of that sentence – that merchants have a lot more electoral clout than street people – was correct. But saying they “do not” vote was overdoing it.

In a generally intelligent commentary on Vermont Public Radio the other day, teacher-historian Vic Henningsen, said that, “in 1968, when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite delivered a downbeat report on American progress in Vietnam, public opinion rapidly soured on the war.  President Lyndon Johnson lamented, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

A good story and an old one. Too bad it’s probably not true. As W. Joseph Campbell reports in his new book, Getting it Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, (and reported on May 21 by Jack Shafer in Slate, the alleged remark first popped up in the late David Halberstam’s book The Powers that Be, which was written almost ten years later, and which did not actually quote Johnson.

There is no evidence that Johnson ever saw the program or watched a tape of it. And long after Cronkite’s report, LBJ was still calling for a “total national effort to win in Vietnam.”

Speaking of presidential remarks that never got remarked, Thomas Jefferson never said, “that government governs best which governs least,” or anything like it.

Henry David Thoreau said it some years after Jefferson’s death. But of course he didn’t mean it. Thoreau really hated the Mexican War. He regularly rode or walked the public roads to pick up his mail at the Concord Post Office without ever complaining about the highway system or the mail service.

GOOD COLUMN: Outdoor writer Lawrence Pyne in the Burlington Free Press noted Sunday that the celebrated “Pete the Moose” has been saved (though perhaps not permanently), but at the cost of possibly endangering the state’s wild deer herd.

Pyne also pointed out the legal/legislative travesty involved. Without holding hearings, three lawmakers – Newport Republican Rep. Duncan Kimartin and Democratic senators Bobby Starr of North Troy and Susan Bartlett of Hyde Park – slipped language into the budget bill transferring authority over the animals at the “game farm” where Pete now resides from the Fish and Wildlife Department to the Agriculture Department.

“Worse,” Pyne wrote, “they also essentially transferred possession of those animals to the preserve’s owner, in direct disregard of the long-standing public trust doctrine, which holds that wildlife is a publicly-owned resource.”

Maybe even worse than that. It was legislative (meaning political) interference with legal proceedings, an inverse bill of attainder granting amnesty not just to the moose but to those who broke the law in its behalf.

BAD COLUMN: Last month, Vermont Business Magazine ran a piece based a survey by the Arno Group of Stowe which “asked more than 3,000 Vermont businesses in February to complete a 37-question survey (and) received 254 responses, largely from companies with fewer than 20 employees.”

Not enough response, as the Arno Group knew, calling it “not necessarily representative of the Vermont business community as a whole,” and therefore without “statistical validity.”

So kill it. No doubt. No discussion. No story.

Finally, to a comment which seems to have disappeared from this site, perhaps because of the clumsiness of the fellow running it.

The comment was about the promise in Campaign Kickoff (May 26) to ride herd on statements by the candidates for governor, but “not with a petty, ‘gotcha’ attitude…” bothering about “slips of the tongue” or “the kind of trivial flubs everybody makes in spontaneous speech.”

Before it ended, the post chided Democratic contender Matt Dunne for some improper English on his web site. The reader who commented said, essentially (the comment being lost, it can not be quoted), that making fun of a candidate’s grammar was a good example of petty “gotcha” journalism.

OK, the News Guy confesses to being finicky about the English language, his stock in trade after all. But the error was not a “slip of the tongue” or a “trivial flub” made in everyday speech. It had been written, and presumably edited and read over. Somebody should have caught it.

And check’s Dunne’s web site. They fixed it.

First, some housekeeping:

Look up to your right, above where it says, “Pages” and below the blue bar.

There’s the link to the VT Digger web sit.

The News Guy and VT Digger are going to be doing a little more cooperating. The News Guy will write some stories for VT Digger and occasionally run stories from the VT Digger site on this one.

Today’s (Wednesday’s) post originally appeared at VT Digger last Friday. Here it is, slightly tweaked, for News Guy readers.

What’s that? From the more perspicacious among you, one hears the question: Isn’t this cheating? After all, if we could have read this on another site some days ago, aren’t we missing out on one original post?

The defendant pleads semi-guilty with extenuating circumstances. First, this will not happen very often. Second, the News guy is now engaged in some complex, time–consuming research on a few potentially significant posts.

Oh, and OK, with the candor on which this site prides itself, yeah, this is also the time of year when a fella wants to spend a little time outside. Readers should understand. Are you Vermonters, or what?

OK, enough housekeeping. On to politics:

Some questions about the Democratic primary for governor:

–How did there get to be five (count ‘em—5) bona fide contenders?

–Didn’t anyone in the Democratic Party see that this could be a prescription for defeat and try to talk one or more of the five into running for lieutenant governor or…or whatever?

–If not, why not?

It isn’t that multi-candidate fields are unprecedented. Middlebury College political science professor Eric Davis said he could remember two occasions when several candidates vied for a major nomination in Vermont.

Six Republicans ran for the U.S. Senate nomination in 1980 when Sen. Pat Leahy was seeking his second term, and four Democrats ran for the open U.S. House seat in 1988, the one Rep. Jim Jeffords vacated to run for the Senate, Davis said.

But those were federal races. Besides, as Davis pointed out, “in both instances, the winner of the large-field primary lost the general election.”

Even if not unprecedented, five candidates for one nomination is unusual, especially because none of the five is a fringe candidate with no hope of victory. Right now in Maine, for instance, there are seven Republicans running for governor, but polls show that four of them are stuck with less than four percent of the vote with just a week to go (though with 47 percent undecided, anyone could win).

The Vermont contest starts off with no apparent front-runner. And unlike many multi-candidate fields, which feature two or three “serious” contenders and a wacko candidate or two (almost every state has its version of Vermont perennial candidate Peter Diamondstone) all five are mainstream Democrats with impressive credentials—three senior state senators, the incumbent Secretary of State, a former legislator who ran statewide once before.

Still, all that explains only what is happening, not why. To get to the ‘whys,’ return to those questions at the beginning, which can be combined into one question with a simple answer.

There are five Democrats in the race because all five wanted to run and there was no way to stop them.

“The problem with Vermont Democrats is that there’s been such a build-up of ambition after eight years of Jim Douglas that the minute he announced he wasn’t going to run, those horses were out of the barn,” said long-time Democratic strategist Steve Terry.

Despite the crowded field, from each candidate’s perspective, running now made perfect sense.

“If history any guide, whoever wins this year will end up serving at least six years,” said Davis, meaning that a politician with ambitions to be governor “really didn’t have much choice.”

Especially, Davis said, because all three Vermont seats in Washington are filled by strong incumbents who are likely to stay in office for several years. That makes the governorship the only realistic option.

So each candidate acted on his or her own, asking no one’s permission.

There’s nothing peculiar to Vermont about this phenomenon. All over the country, politics are becoming more candidate-driven, with party organizations diminishing in importance. Outside of a few outposts—Chicago, Newark, some counties in rural Texas and Kentucky—the days when a few movers and shakers made political decisions in a smoke-filled room are long gone, and not because hardly anybody smokes any more.

If Vermont ever had the kind of strong party structure where a few political leaders and major contributors could select a candidate—or scare one out of a primary race – it was long ago, Davis and Terry agreed.

“The parties never amounted a damn,” Terry said. “It’s all been individual. “

In Montpelier eateries (and drinkeries) one hears snatches of conversation wondering why party leaders didn’t “crack some heads,” as someone put it, to get one or two of the candidates out of the race. But the question seems to express a longing for a world that no longer exists, if it ever did in Vermont.

There is one report of an attempt by a few leading Democrats to urge former Sen. Matt Dunne, at 40 the youngest of the candidates, to run for lieutenant governor instead.  But Dunne said that while a few Democrats told him he’d be “a shoo-in” for lieutenant governor, “no one approached with anything remotely like strong pressure.”

Strong pressure doesn’t seem to work any more. It doesn’t even work when it does work. It is generally accepted in Democratic circles that Gov. Howard Dean pressured Sen. Peter Shumlin to run for lieutenant governor in 2002, leaving the top spot for then-Lt. Gov. Doug Racine. That avoided a primary, but both men lost anyway. Now they are two of the five contenders, along with Dunne, Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz ,and Sen. Susan Bartlett.

Both Davis and Terry said that only two Democrats –Leahy and  Dean—could possibly persuade a candidate to drop out or to seek another office.

But Leahy is running for his seventh term this year. If he had tried to push a candidate out of the race he would have risked offending that candidate and his/her supporters. No incumbent likes to upset part of his own political base.

Besides, Leahy has always kept his distance from the inner workings and internal divisions of the state’s Democratic Party. And so has Dean since he left the governorship in early 2003.

In some states there are alternative power centers that might pressure a candidate out of a race. If a Democrat in California, for instance, found that the Hispanic community was united against him, he might realizes his chances of victory were slim, and withdraw. The same would be true for a contender who offended African-Americans in Illinois, the Jewish community in New York, the United Auto Workers in Michigan, or the Roman Catholic Church in Rhode Island. In all those cases, a few carefully chosen words from a local power broker could convince someone not to run.

But Vermont has no comparable racial, ethnic, or labor constituencies. It doesn’t even have a potent big city Democratic organization because Democrats don’t control the closest thing Vermont has to a big city. And because there is no dominant industry in Vermont, there is no dominant fund-raising community.

Thanks to campaign finance laws, candidates have had to develop broad donor bases both in and out of the state. This diminishes the clout of any one contributor. Mr. Moneybags may give the candidate only $1,000. Even if he can convince a few of his friends to cough up a similar amount, he doesn’t have enough power to push anyone around.

The identifiable constituencies with some influence on Vermont Democrats – public employee and teachers unions, environmental organizations—are not political hard-ball players. The teachers union (the Vermont National Education Association) is likely to endorse one of the contenders, perhaps this week, spokesman Darren Allen said, but it made no effort to urge any candidate to drop out.

(Montpelier scuttlebutt, for what it is worth, holds that Racine or Dunne is the most likely endorsee).

Along with worrying about what Terry called a “bloodletting” that could tarnish the image of the eventual primary winner, it is the financial implications of the five-person field that Democrats worry about most.

“The winner will be financially exhausted August 24 (Primary Day),” Terry said, while Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, the unopposed Republican,  “will have more than a million in the bank.” Like other Democrats, Terry wondered whether his party’s nominee would still be able to raise money from a possibly exhausted Democratic donor base.

But Davis said he thought the Democratic winner wouldn’t have to spend much on the campaign because it made little sense to buy broadcast television time during a summer campaign that will likely end with a low-turnout primary.

“I think it might not be a good investment,” he said. “I would be surprised if a candidate spent more than $50,000 (buying television time).”

Stressing direct mail, phone banks and personal campaigning, Davis said,  a Democrat might win the primary after spending only about $350,000, perhaps keeping competitive with Dubie for the fall campaign, which should cost each candidate somewhat more than another million dollars.

Another possible bright (or at least less dark) spot for the Democrats is that five-person races don’t often remain real five-person races. Within the next few weeks, two or three of the candidates, based on poll results and fund-raising reports, are likely to pull away from the others. The also-rans will then find it harder to raise money or be taken seriously (though perhaps also to resist the temptation to go on the attack.)

“By early July, we’ll know,” Davis said.

Leaving one more question: Just what will we know?

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.

The News Guy is taking today (and took last evening) off.

Come back Friday for serious tax talk

But check in Sunday middle-late afternoon. There might (no promises) be a special End-Of-The-Legislative-Session entry (assuming, of course, that the session does in fact end).

We begin this morning with some inside baseball.

Barring unexpected obstacles, and perhaps delayed due to a brief hiatus on the part of the fellow in charge (see note at end), something new is likely to appear on these pages within a week or so: Advertising.

Present plans are for the ads to appear underneath the “Log in” selections but above “Archives” in the column over there on the right.

These ads will be text. Just words, no logos, picture or other graphics, at least not for now.

The purpose of these ads, like the purpose of all advertisements in all news operations, is to provide said operation with revenue.

In this case, the revenue to be provided is likely to end up somewhere between paltry and minimal. Indeed, the mere appearance of the ad provides not a penny. The pennies (and we are talking pennies) start to flow only if a reader clicks on an ad.

(No, don’t click just to create revenue for the News Guy. That’s not cricket. Click only if you are interested in the good or service being advertised).

For the foreseeable future, then, the financing of this web site will continue to depend largely on: (1) the personal resources of its proprietor-publsisher-writer-editor-researcher-floorsweeper; (2) donations from readers.

Of late, the News Guy has been gratified by the noticeable increase in the number of people who have registered so they can get ‘Twitter’ updates about the posts and so they can comment should they wish.

Alas, this increase has not been matched by a concomitant increase in the number of donors. All who have not donated, are hereby invited to do so. Just hit “Donate” (under “Pages,” top right) and follow directions.

The News Guy accurately quoted the fellow who said the $112,000 that would be saved by hiring union workers for the new Lake Champlain bridge amounted to less than one percent of the roughly $1.7 million that could be saved by instituting a Project Labor Agreement (See “Non-Union Blues,” April 28)

But as a couple of readers pointed out, $112,000 is more like 6.25 percent of $1.7 million.

That’s still a small percentage of the total projected savings, but the News Guy should have thought to check the numbers. (And did, briefly. That post was written the evening of the big snow, in constant fear of losing Internet connection if not electricity, so it was written and published hastily. But that’s not really much of an excuse).

In another recent post (Political Health, April 24) the News Guy promised to explain soon why a single-payer health care system, whatever it advantages as a nationwide system, might be disastrous if adopted in one state. Herewith, the explanation.

In a single-payer system, health care is paid for with tax money. That’s actual tax money, from the taxes we call taxes, not the ‘taxes’ we call health insurance premiums.

Here’s an undeniable fact about taxes: it’s hard to raise them. People don’t like tax increases. Neither do politicians, who try to find some alternative. Any alternative.

There is no reason to think that health care costs will not continue to rise. Single-payer advocates argue that universal service itself will restrain costs. They’re probably right. But no one has presented persuadable evidence that simply covering everyone in and of itself will be enough to keep health care from getting more expensive.

So every once in a while, the Legislature and the governor will have to raise taxes to pay for the higher cost of health care. Or try to find an alternative.

One alternative is all but sure to be reducing pay to providers. That’s jargon for paying the doctors less. We know that this is likely because it is  what Congress has done for years; as health care costs rise, Congress regularly reduces provider pay for Medicare and Medicaid services.

Doctors don’t like it, but what can they do? They can’t go anywhere. Where would they go? To Canada? But Canada has a single-payer system. To Mexico? Not likely. In fact, almost nowhere in the world do doctors earn nearly as much as they do in the United States. It’s one reason U.S. health care costs so much more per person than it does in the rest of the world.

A few doctors refuse to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients. But not many. That’s an awful lot of patients to give up.

But if Vermont starts cutting physician fees, it’s no trick for physicians to go elsewhere. Many of them wouldn’t even have to move, residentially speaking. They could stay right in their present house and just move their practice to New Hampshire, New York, or Massachusetts.

In other words, if Vermont all by itself adopts a single-payer system, Vermont all by itself could find itself short of doctors in a few years.

Because it is the big guy on the block, the Burlington Free Press has often been the butt of criticism at this web site. So it’s only fair to point out that the paper has committed some first class journalism in recent weeks. Much of it has been the work of Candace Page, who seems to have returned from her recent leave of absence with renewed energy.

But she’s not the only one.  The duo covering the Legislature, Nancy Remsen and Terri Hallenbeck, are doing a good job. Time constraints (two reporters are really not enough for legislative coverage, especially as the session nears its end) prevent them from probing as deeply beneath the surface as some (probably including the two of them) might like. But they get the important stories and they get them right.

Let’s not, however, be too kind to the Freep. One thing its editors should seriously consider is doing away with those “My Turn” columns that regularly run on or across from the editorial page. Sure, it’s a cheap way to fill space (the writers are not paid), but the columns are full of misinformation.

Why wouldn’t they be? There is no requirement that the writers know what they’re talking about. Most are identified only by their town of residence: “Joe Schmoe lives in Colchester.” Living in Colchester is not a credential.

Sunday’s paper provided a perfect example. There one C. Joseph Soper (whose “credential” is that he lives in Burlington) pronounces himself “bemused” over opposition to the possible arrival of the new (and apparently quite noisy) F-35 fighter planes for use by the Air National Guard.

Only  Soper knows what bemuses him, and he may be right that the pluses of welcoming the new plane to South Burlington outweigh the minuses. But when he proclaims that “jobs disappear almost daily” in Vermont, he appears not to know that during this Recession they have disappeared more slowly here than in most states. All he had to do was check the unemployment statistics.

Pointing out that other sites are being considered for the F-35, Soper said, “ I strongly suspect the other installations involved have not adopted anywhere near the response we seem to be reflecting. In fact, theirs is most probably one of great excitement over the prospect of being chosen.”

Well, he may strongly suspect it, but he’s wrong. Some ten minutes of surfing the Internet could have told him that comparable opposition to the F-35 has sprung up in, among other places, Tucson, Key West, and Mountain Home, Utah.

This is not Soper’s fault, at least not primarily. He’s not in the news business, so he doesn’t know that a writer’s strong suspicion is insufficient. The rule is: Check it out. If your mother says she loves you, check that out, too.

But the editors of the Free Press are in the news business. They ought to edit those columns for accuracy or get rid of them. They may be good public relations. They are bad journalism.

NOTE: There will be no News Guy posting Wednesday, and perhaps not on Friday either, due to a death in the “family.” That’s in quotes because the person who died was not a relative, but a dear friend of many years.