The plan here is for this site to deal with at least two more substantive matters – each probably requiring two posts – before riding off into the sunset.

The hope was for part one of the first of these to appear today. Alas, the fates (in which the News Guy does not literally believe) have conspired against that. Check back Friday.

Meanwhile, to give you…well, not your money’s worth, because in most cases that would mean giving you nothing, but let’s say something to chew on, herewith some reflections on a national flappette which acquired a Vermont twist thanks to Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Who, as many no doubt already know, became enraged when MSNBC suspended commentator Keith Olbermann after learning that he had contributed to three Democratic congressional candidates.

The suspension, Sanders said in a statement released by his office, could “have a chilling impact on every commentator for MSNBC.”

So it could. Perhaps so it should.

No, not that it should chill commentators from speaking their minds. But maybe it should chill journalists from making political contributions.

Yes, the news world is changing, Keith Olbermann never claimed to be a neutral observer, and one could say he was putting his money where his mouth is. Furthermore, like every American, Olbermann has the constitutional right to make political donations.

But there is no constitutional right to be a political journalist, and there is a distinction between expressing one’s opinions (mouth) and personally participating in a campaign (money).

In 1980, the political world knew that columnist George Will favored Ronald Reagan. What no one knew was that he had helped Reagan prepare for his debate with President Jimmy Carter (using Carter’s debate briefing-book, stolen from the White House). When that news came out in 1983, Will was generally and properly condemned.

The distinction here is that even when a journalist is an avowed partisan, he ought to remain independent. That means not directly participating in anyone’s campaign, either by debate-coaching or money-giving. The honest reporter will criticize the candidate she is going to vote for as readily as the one she will oppose. That’s harder to do when she’s crossed the line from being an observer – even a committed observer – to being a participant.

Besides, in this confusion, somebody should raise a voice in behalf of the old notion – possibly outmoded but also possibly essential in a democratic society – of the journalism of the disinterested observer, the reporter who feels attached to no political party and no ideological faction. Keith Olbermann is not one, and never pretended to be. And he’s more marketable on cable TV for not being one.

But maybe the country still needs reporters who follow the motto of “no cheering in the press box,” a phrase not invented but popularized (it was the title of one of his books) by the late Jerome Holtzman, the  Chicago Tribune’s great baseball writer.

“We watch the game,” Jerome liked to say, speaking around both sides of his ever-present cigar. “We supposedly understand the game better than the average guy. We wear a tag around our neck that gets us on the field for batting practice and into the clubhouse after the game. But we don’t root for either team.”

Still not a bad attitude for a journalist.

Sanders was right when he said that  “talk radio is dominated by right-wing extremists (and) the Republican Party has its own cable network (Fox).”

Where, as he noted, not only the commentators but the company itself (the News Corporation) openly support the Republican Party.

But is the solution here really to bring MSNBC – and by extension the rest of the journalistic world – down to Fox’s level? The problem with Fox News Channel is not that it covers the news from a conservative perspective, which could be useful. It is that with rare exceptions it does not cover the news at all. It does something else altogether – basically anger enhancement, keeping a niche market riled up, often by feeding it misinformation, so that it will come back for more the next day.

The suspicion here is that the world will be no better off – perhaps worse off – if MSNBC merely becomes the left’s mirror image of the same marketing scheme.

Assuming, of course, that it has not already done so.

Cicero at court

With a week to go, one question dominates the Vermont campaign for governor: Can it get any pettier?

Don’t bet against.

Conventional political wisdom holds that in the final two weeks of a campaign, the candidate should “go positive,” start telling voters why they should vote for him, leave off telling them why they should not vote for the other guy.

If that’s going to happen here, it has not happened yet. As late as Saturday evening’s final debate on WCAX-TV (Channel 3), Brian Dubie and Peter Shumlin, each claiming to be waging a “positive campaign on the issues,” spent more time squabbling over trivia.

An interesting question here is whether the two candidates are equally guilty, and it’s interesting not because there is any real doubt about the answer, but because there is some problem with the very notion of “unequally guilty.” Neither side being innocent, are there gradations of guilt? Or does even one transgression justify (if not require) a “plague on both their houses” judgment?

In the non-political realm, when assessing journalists or scholars, the outlook here is the second one, derived from the old Roman legal principle of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. The witness who deliberately falsifies anything surrenders credibility for everything.

But in elections, at some point the voter has to choose between two contenders, both guilty. In that case, comparative guilt may be necessary. To the extent (and it should only be some extent) that the voter’s decision is based on how the candidates campaign, it makes sense for the voter to judge which candidate hypes and distorts more than the other, even while deploring such behavior in both.

In this case, it’s an easy call. Peter Shumlin has spun his own record on tax legislation to emphasize the times he helped cut taxes, which he did, while ignoring the occasions he helped raise them, which he also did.

And arguably should have. A really forthright candidate would stand his ground and point out that sometimes taxes have to go up. That may be too much to ask of any politician these days.

By and large, though, Dubie is both quantitatively and qualitatively the guiltier. More of the what he and his campaign commercials have said has been out-and-out false. It’s also been falser, not to mention more personal and more petty.

The Shumlin campaign commercial that aroused the most condemnation was accurate, if perhaps childish. That was the “Pinocchio” spot in which Dubie’s nose grew after each of three misstatements.

Misstatements they surely were. At least one may have been an error rather than a falsehood, and in the Pinocchio story his nose does not grew when he makes mistakes, only when he lies. So the ad went farther than scrupulous intellectual honesty would allow. But it was not baseless.

Neither was another Shumlin allegation criticized earlier here, and repeated by Shumlin in Saturday’s debate, that Dubie favored a $100 million property tax increase. Actually, Dubie favored a 2009 plan by Gov. Jim Douglas that, had it been enacted, would almost surely have resulted in some increase in property taxes, possibly even $100 million.

But from the way Shumlin and his campaign put it, one would think that Dubie had just come out and suggested that kind of property tax hike. He did not.

The irony here is that there’s a harsher attack Democrats could make on this Douglas-Dubie proposal. Not that it would raise property taxes, but that it was not serious governing, and perhaps was never intended to be.

The problem being addressed was that the cost of education was rising, too fast in the view of the Republicans. Serious governing would have started in at least mid-2008 by getting together with the various constituencies – teachers, school boards, superintendents, town officials – and trying to come up with a cost control plan.

Instead, in January, after most school budgets had been finalized, Douglas proposed shifting some costs (mostly the state contribution to the teachers retirement program) from the General Fund, largely financed by sales and income taxes, to the Education Fund, which gets most of its money from property taxes. The Governor and his allies, including Dubie, didn’t want property taxes to go up. They wanted to raise the threat of property tax increases to pressure schools to make big cuts in their budgets rather than face the wrath of property tax-payers.

That’s not serious governing. It is a cynical political ploy.

(And, as it happened, one that didn’t work. The Legislature didn’t adopt the Douglas plan, the school boards did not change their budget recommendations, the voters did not defeat many school budgets. It all came to naught).

But that critique is hard to express in a 60-second TV ad, and too complicated for a political speech. Easier just to say that Dubie wanted to raise property taxes.

Dubie’s transgressions can be dealt with more briefly. He continues to make statements that are simply false, and that he must know are false unless he is willfully refusing to acknowledge what is obviously true.

First, he continues to insist that Shumlin has proposed freeing non-violent convicts before their terms expire. As noted earlier here, Shumlin’s account of his corrections policy in his official campaign document is a touch vague, and might have led people to infer that he did mean to release prisoners early.

But neither in that document nor elsewhere did Shumlin ever say that this was what he planned to do, and plainly it is not. That earlier account suggested that it was “not dishonesty as much as stubbornness” that kept Dubie from acknowledging the facts.

Maybe that’s not an either/or situation.

Even less defensible is Dubie’s insistence on citing the obviously flawed Seven Days “survey” (closer to a poor effort to conduct a survey) finding Shumlin “ethically challenged.”

This matter was dealt with here adequately on October 11 (Ethical Quandary) and need not be repeated, or elaborated on except to wonder at what point political stubbornness morphs into complete shamelessness.

Political/Media Note 1—Usually, a candidate who gets endorsed by a newspaper can take that endorsement to New York City and get on the subway, assuming said candidate also has a farecard.

But the Burlington Free Press endorsement of Shumlin could help him. Whatever else it may be, the Freep is the voice of Vermont’s – or at least northern Vermont’s – establishment. That has to include the business establishment, and even though Dubie will probably win more business votes, the endorsement at least sends the signal that Shumlin is OK with the movers and shakers.

Political/Media Note 2—Great Job Saturday by Channel 3 co-anchors Darren Perron and Kristin Kelly as they firmly but politely interrupted both Dubie and Shumlin in an effort to get them to answer the questions they’d been asked.

It didn’t work, of course. Both candidates just regurgitated their talking points, and the anchors didn’t try to push it. They didn’t have to. They’d made their point.

A nice refutation of the assumption that TV news anchors are just readers. This was first class journalism by both of them.

Innumeracy: A front page story in Monday’s Free Press noted that the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC) “is pushing to hold on to Vermonter’s loan accounts, arguing that Vermont default rate (4.7 percent) is well below half the national rate (7 percent)…”

Forget the lack of either the word ‘the’ before, or an ‘apostrophe s’ after, ‘Vermont,’ and just concentrate on 4.7 being “well below half” of seven.

Let’s see. “Below half” would be less than twice as much. So multiply the lower number by two. Seven times two is 14. Put down the four and carry the one. Four times two is 8. Add the one and you get nine. Twice 4.7 would seem to be 9.4, which at least to the untutored eye is more than seven, making 4.7 definitely above half of seven.

“Well” above?

That’s a judgment call.

Illiteracy (economic version): In a column in Sunday’s Free Press, Betsy  Bishop, president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, declared, “government does not create jobs.”

A widely held and bipartisan sentiment. Sen. Susan Bartlett posted the same words on her web site during her primary campaign for governor. But it’s economic illiteracy.

Cops, firefighters and teachers are employed, almost all of them by one government or another. While employed, they provide a service, which creates wealth, which produces more jobs.

There is a name for the system described above. It’s called a market economy, sometimes known as capitalism. Among Adam Smith’s great insights in Wealth of Nations (1776) was that it made no difference how wealth was created or who created it. By any means, from any source, it enriched society and created jobs.

Our society, to be sure, has decided that most economic activity – and therefore most wealth-creation and job-creation – should take place in the private sector. For all sorts of reason, that’s a very wise decision. But it does not mean that government does not create both wealth and jobs. In fact, five days a week for most of the year, in almost every town in America, schools (the vast majority of them public, meaning government-run) create human capital, perhaps the single greatest source of wealth, and therefore of jobs.

Numbers, good and bad: Via Huffington Post and an organization called Mint.com, comes this inter-active map showing poverty rates by state and county in 2009, when the poverty reached its highest levels in 51 years. No big surprises. Vermont’s poverty rate (10.4 percent) is lower than the national average (14.3 percent), but not as low as the rates in several other states, including neighboring Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The states with the lowest rates were Wyoming, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Minnesota. Mississippi, Alabama, and the District of Columbia had the highest rates.

Vermonters between the ages of five and 17 had almost the same poverty rate (10.6 percent) as the entire population, but the rate for children under five was a surprisingly high 16.2 percent. Even that was lower than in most other states. In Mississippi, more than 30 percent of children under five were poor.

Unlike most states in the deep South, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and both Dakotas, no county in Vermont had a poverty rate of anywhere close to 30 percent. Still, there were obvious – and perhaps not surprising – differences among the state’s 14 counties. The lowest rate was Grand Isle County’s 8.4 percent; the highest Essex County’s 14.8 percent.

The rates in the rest of the state were as follows: Addison 10.4; Bennington 12.2;  Caledonia 11.8; Chittenden 9.6; Franklin 9,9; Lamoille 10.1; Orange 10.9; Orleans 14.3; Rutland 11.6; Washington 9.7; Windham 9.8; Windsor 9.3.

Numbers and Words: The following is clarification, not criticism. Vermont Public Radio has been trickling out reports from the statewide poll that it commissioned from Mason-Dixon Polling and Research. The results are interesting, and probably accurate, but the latest accounts could be misleading if not understood in context.

For instance, the poll showed that 44 percent of the respondents think the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant should be shut down when its license expires in 2012, while 39 percent want it to get the 20-year renewal it seeks and 17 percent are undecided.

Asked whether they support or oppose a plan to consolidate the state’s 278 school districts into 45 “to save administrative costs, which could result in the closing of some smaller schools,” 45 percent supported the idea, 36 percent opposed it, and 19 percent were undecided. On health care, a 56 percent majority supported either a universal government-run program like Medicare or a “public option” alternative like Catamount Health Care.

As mentioned in Monday’s post, Mason-Dixon is a respected firm, the sample of 625 was big enough, so there is no reason to doubt that these results are accurate.

But there is some reason to doubt that they accurately represent popular opinion on those issues by the people of Vermont.

That’s because, as also noted Monday (just scroll down) the average age of those 625 people is substantially higher than the average age of Vermont’s voting age population. A full 60 percent of the respondents are over 50. Almost 60 percent of voting-age Vermonters are under 50.

The pollsters didn’t goof (although “to save administrative costs,” though accurate, might invite a positive reply on the school question). They were first and foremost trying to figure out who’s likely to win next month’s elections, so they “screened” for likely voters. Older folks vote more. The sample, then, quite likely represents those Vermonters who are going to vote on November 2.

But no matter who wins the elections, the results on those three questions are likely to be used during next year’s legislative session as though they reflect where Vermonters stand on those issues. Perhaps they do not.

OK, there’s a certain amount of conjecture here, because the poll did not break out the voter preferences by age groupings. But there’s something close to a consensus among politicians that younger voters are:

–More likely to oppose Vermont Yankee;

–Less likely to be for school consolidation because they are more likely to have kids in school. Rare is the parent who wants his/her child to have a longer bus ride to school. If nothing else, it means getting up earlier in the morning.

–Perhaps (though this one is murkier) not as keen on government-run health care.

Still in the realm of conjecture, but restrained conjecture, here’s a suggestion that a poll of all registered voters – not just those likely to vote this year – would find a small majority against Yankee’s relicensing, with perhaps 30 percent in favor and almost 20 percent undecided.

Politically, that’s a big difference because the undecideds don’t matter; they’re not going to vote against a legislator either way over the issue. But a lawmaker who might hesitate before displeasing 39 percent of the electorate, while earning the thanks of only five percentage points more, is less likely to pause before pleasing a majority and annoying only a third of the people.

As is often true in life, in polling, when it comes to numbers, nothing is more important than the words.