Like a person, a web site must take a day every now and then to establish its procedures, clarify some confusions, and take note of new information which might confirm (or refute) earlier statements.

This is one of those days.

Last week the News Guy gratefully received a generous donation from an out-of-state political advocacy organization.

And reluctantly returned it.

The alternative was to keep it, but then, when dealing with the subject of this particular group’s interest, insert a parenthetical, “full disclosure” statement.

Nah! That’s no good, and not only because it’s awkward. You either take the money or you don’t.

The News Guy does not. At least not from: elected officials; senior appointed officials (as in, direct appointees of the governor); anyone running for office now (donations from former candidates gladly accepted, even those pondering another run sometimes in the future); political parties; interest groups.

As for individuals who work for political parties and interest groups, let’s use common sense. On the one hand, the News Guy is not about to research every contributor to see where he or she is employed. But then, he doesn’t have to do that with the chairs of Vermont’s three political parties. They should not donate.

If you do not fall into one of those categories, however, and have not sent a donation, you are encouraged to do so. Simply look under “Pages” (in the top right quarter of the page), click “donate,” and contribute as little (or, better yet, as much) as you wish. More revenue does not enrich the News Guy as much as it makes it possible to cover more stories, better.

If and when the site seeks advertisements, ads from any legal entity will be accepted: candidates, causes, defense contractors, tobacco companies, subversive organizations, escaped convicts. Whatever.

Two big differences between donations and advertisements. First, the ads are out there in plain site for all the world to see. Second, the revenue from each one is infinitesimal. In fact, the revenue is zero unless someone clicks on the ad. In that case the revenue is pennies. The News Guy can be bought, because anyone can be bought. But not for pennies.

Similarly, though it doesn’t really do any harm, all Facebook “Friends” (the quotation marks are needed because most of these “friends” remain complete strangers) might save their energies by not inviting the News Guy to be a “fan” or otherwise support (or attend the event of) a political cause, or for that matter a commercial enterprise.

Reporters are not fans, at least not of anything but sports teams, musicians, and actors. Yes, technically, the Facebook page under discussion here is personal, but it is effectively the News Guy web site’s page. As such, there is no point in urging him to become a friend of any business, or a fan of “Let’s Close Vermont Yankee,” VPIRG, the Champlain Housing Trust, “Fight Animal Cruelty.” Or Radio Free Vermont.

Since the December 28 post, “Population Balm” two pieces of information have generally confirmed the point of that post that Vermont’s stable population is a result of who Vermonters are rather than what they, or their state government, does.

One was a new Census Bureau report showing that Vermont was one of several states in which there were fewer young people (under 18) last year than in 2000.

Then there was a report by the Southern Education Fund revealing that a majority of students in public schools in the Southern states were both low-income and minority.

Not, the report said, because of the “white flight” of earlier decades, or because so many whites go to private schools; the South has the smallest percentage of private school students in the country. Instead, black, Hispanic, American Indian and others now comprise more than 50 percent of the Southern public school students partly because of increased Hispanic immigration. But also, according to the report, “Higher rates of birth among the South’s Hispanic and African American populations in recent years explain a significant part of the increase in school enrollment.”

The report does not quite say that whites, and especially affluent, educated, whites, are simply not having as many children as other groups, or as many as they used to. But it suggests that conclusion, which is also found worldwide in other population statistics.

It is one reason Vermont’s under-18 population has declined by 14 percent, faster than any other state’s, though the decline in Maine, Michigan, and North Dakota was also ten percent or higher.

Michigan, which is losing total population, is a special case these days because of the decline of the auto industry. Maine is almost as white as Vermont, but North Dakota is not, and neither is as affluent nor as well-educated.

Whether the drop in the under-18 population is a problem or an opportunity, it is undoubtedly a factor. It’s happening, and therefore should be discussed in connection with whether state policy can, or should, try to: (a) reverse: or (b) encourage and exploit the trend.

And finally today, reluctant though the News Guy is to pick on the poor, pitiful, Burlington Free Press yet again, a blunder in Saturday’s paper can not go unremarked. In a straightforward story with no byline, the Freeps informed us all that the speaker at Burlington’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. remembrance next Sunday would be law Professor Anita Hill, who “earned notoriety during the 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.”

Not exactly wrong. At the time, Hill earned notoriety – that is: infamy, dishonor, ill repute – because at the time most people didn’t believe her allegations of misconduct against Thomas. Later, thanks to new information that backed up her contentions, public opinion turned more in her favor.

But the point here is not to relive the squabbles of 1991. The problem is that like many people these days, the writers and editors at the Free Press seem to think that “notoriety” means “fame.”

Minimally defensible. “Known widely” is the start of the Dictionary definition of “notorious,” but the words immediately following are “and usually unfavorably.”

A great language, English, because it allows nuance and precision. One of the great examples is the distinction among “fame,” “celebrity,” and “notoriety.” Newspapers oughtn’t muck them up.

Not that everything is peachy keen in Vermont, but relatively speaking, they aren’t that bad, either.

From the ever-useful Rural Blog comes word that reporter Bill Bishop of Daily Yonder has performed the valuable service of doing a county-by-county check of the recent growth of poverty in America.

It was disproportionately rural.

Using U.S. Census bureau statistics, Bishop found that while last year’s 13.2 percent nationwide poverty rate was the highest since 1997, it was higher yet – 16.3 percent – in the nation’s rural counties.

“The increase in the number of poor Americans was heavily weighted in rural communities,” Bishop wrote. “Rural counties were home to just over 16% of the nation’s population in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But 33% of the increase in the number of poor Americans from ’03 to ‘08 — more than one million people — was found in rural counties.

As a result, the gap between the poverty rates in urban and rural America widened, doubling between 2003 and 2008.”

During the 1990s, Bishop found, the rural-urban poverty gap actually declined, thanks largely to a growing nationwide economy. The weaker economy of this decade, though, apparently hits rural areas the hardest. There are 50 rural counties where more than 32 percent of the people live under the poverty line.

How many of those counties are in Vermont?

None. In fact, no Vermont county has a poverty rate as high as that 16.3 percent of all rural counties. Essex County in the Northeast Kingdom comes closest with a 14.8 percent poverty rate, closely followed by neighboring Orleans County, at 14.3 percent.

(In case anyone is wondering, Chittenden is Vermont’s only urban country. Franklin and Grand Isle are considered exurban. All the others are designated rural).

On the other hand, no Vermont County was among the least impoverished rural counties, either. And in all of them, the poverty rate was higher than it was in 2003, when the rate in Essex County was 12.3 percent, and 13.1 percent in Orleans.

Here are the poverty rates for the other counties: Addison—9.5 percent up from 8.7 percent in 2003; Bennington–12.2, up from 10; Caledonia–11.8 , up minimally from 11.3; Chittenden—9.6 from 7.6; Franklin—9.9 up from 9.5; Grand Isle—8.4, up from 7.3; Lamoille—10.1 from 8.8; Orange—10.9 from 9.2; Rutland—11.6, up from 10.3; Washington—9.7 up from 8.4; Windham—9.8, just up from 9.7; Windsor—9.3 up from 8.7.

It’s possible that Vermont’s rural counties are lucky in being, in a sense, less rural than the rural counties of many other states. Down South and especially out West, some rural counties take up as much space as four or five of Vermont’s, and are much farther from the nearest town of any size, where most of the good jobs are these days.

What with poverty going up, it’s no surprise that so is reliance on food stamps. Last Sunday’s New York Times reported that one in eight Americans – and one in four children – use food stamps to keep themselves nourished. So widespread is the use of food stamps, the Times reported, that much of the stigma is gone from a program “once scorned as a failed welfare scheme.”

Using both U.S. Agriculture Department and Census Bureau statistics, the Times also provided, on line, a county-by-county breakdown which showed that in Vermont, as in almost every other state, use of food stamps has grown everywhere, especially in some of the more affluent areas.

Chittenden County, for instance, had Vermont’s lowest percentage of food stamp users in June of this year – nine percent. But the growth since June of 2007 was 43 percent, higher than the 33 percent growth in less affluent Essex County, where 17 percent of the residents use food stamps.

The same pattern holds in many other states, at least suggesting that the current recession is plunging into poverty many households and individuals who until recently could be classified as middle-income. Not only are some of those people unemployed, but even more are working fewer hours.

Here are the results for the other Vermont counties, with the percentage on food stamps first, followed by the two-year percentage increase: Addison—9. 61; Bennington—16. 51; Caledonia—16. 41; Franklin—15. 46; Grand Isle—11.52; Lamoille—13. 47; Orange—12. 13; Orleans—20. 42; Rutland—15. 45; Washington—11. 45; Windham—15. 54; Windsor—11. 47

And speaking of statistics, and reluctant though the News Guy is to beat up on the Burlington Free Press yet again, there was a certain amount of innumeracy in its account last week of Fletcher Allen Health Care’s dissent from the recent federal task force recommendation that all women under 50 did not need to get annual mammograms.

“During the last fiscal year,” the paper reported, “the hospital screened about 7,000 women ages 40 to 49…79 women in that age group were diagnosed with cancer.”

But “those diagnoses were not necessarily made through the annual screening process.”

Meaning those figures provide no evidence of the efficacy of the annual mammograms for those women. Neither does the fact that women in their forties “had the second largest tally of breast cancer diagnoses,” after women in their fifties.

They would, wouldn’t they? The disease is less prevalent among both younger and older women.

Reached in Chicago, where she is attending a medical conference, Dr. Sally Herschorn, Fletcher Allen’s attending radiologist, acknowledged that the figures were “not germane” to the factual debate over the recommendations. But Dr. Herschorn said she thought the task force’s study was “flawed,” and that annual screenings by women in their forties could save lives.

She may be right. But the numbers cited by the Freep as evidence for her position, while interesting, were not evidence for anything.

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.)

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.

It isn’t a Vermont campaign, but it’s been hard for Vermonters to avoid the attack ads in the increasingly bizarre special election for Congress across the lake.

Because Burlington television is also Plattsburgh television, we’ve been besieged by the merciless attack ads aimed at all three candidates – the Democrat, the Republican, the Conservative – in the race to replace former Rep. John M. McHugh, the Republican who is now Secretary of the Army.

Except for one apparently positive commercial saying only good things (depending on one’s views) about the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava.

Bought and produced by a new organization called ”Common Sense in America,” the ad calls Scozzafava the only candidate who supports President Obama’s economic policy and gay marriage.

“On Tuesday, progressives have one candidate to vote for with pride: Dede Scozzafava,” the ad proclaims.

Hmmm. Interesting strategy. Get the district’s liberal voters to desert Democrat Bill Owens by painting the Republican as the real “progressive”?

Actually, no. “Common Sense in America” turns out to be the recent creation of a conservative Arkansas businessman who is a board member of the Club for Growth, the anti-tax, anti-regulation outfit squarely behind the Conservative Party candidate, Douglas L. Hoffman.

The ad is actually a dirty trick, designed to divert liberal voters away from Democrat Owens, who was slightly ahead of Hoffman in the polls. It was an honest dirty trick; Scozzafava really does hold the positions the ad claims she holds. And it’s a legal dirty trick, apparently complying with all campaign disclosure laws. It just isn’t what it purported to be.

A subject now moot. Saturday, Scozzafava suspended her campaign, leaving a two-way race between the Democrat and the Conservative. At first, it seemed that Hoffman would have the edge, especially after the entire GOP establishment in Washington got behind him.

But wait. Another weird development. One Republican did not line up behind Hoffman: Scozzafava. The (still) official Republican candidate endorsed Owens, the Democrat.

Even if Owens wins, the conservative pressure that forced Scozzafava out of the race seems like a big victory for the Republican right wing.

A Pyrrhic victory? No less a conservative than former Speaker Newt Gingrich thinks so, telling the New York Times that continuing conservative challenges to locally chosen candidates (Scozzafava was the pick of all 11 Republican county chairs in the district) could “guarantee Obama’s re-election.”

Results in Wednesday’s post.

And speaking of Election Day, here – first in the nation and exclusive to News Guy readers – is the complete, comprehensive, nationwide significance of Tuesday’s elections — that Congressional race and the contests for governor Virginia and New Jersey:

Zero.

As in: nothing, nada, bupkiss, rien de tout, gornisht or the translation in any language you choose.

This comes from someone who has tried (pretended?) to find some nationwide meaning from these odd-year elections in the past. If you’re the political reporter for a newspaper, there’s some inner voice telling you that in order to earn your keep you should write something about every political event. Hence the temptation to find meaning in the event.

The temptation should be resisted. This year, the likely Republican win in Virginia should enlighten those over-optimistic Democrats who deluded themselves last year into thinking that Virginia was now a Democratic state.

It is a swing state, itself a big improvement for Democrats over the situation a decade ago. But it is by no mean leaning Democratic.

New Jersey, on the other hand, is not a swing state, and won’t be even if Republican Chris Christie ousts incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine. A Christie victory would mean only that a tiny plurality (there’s an independent candidate) of New Jersey voters ultimately decided they found Christie marginally less unappealing than Corzine. That will not put the state “in play” in 2012, when it will remain as safely Democratic as…well, Vermont, come to think of it, which also has a Republican governor. If any news report tells you otherwise, dismiss it.

Speaking of strange news reports, consider the story in last Tuesday’s Times Argus, by reporter Peter Hirschfeld, about State Senate leader Peter Shumlin’s plan to help Vermont National Guard soldiers come home for Christmas before they get shipped off to Afghanistan.

Because Shumlin is almost surely going to run in the Democratic primary for governor next year, Hirschfeld said that when Shumlin “convened a well-publicized press event,” to announce his plan, he “faced questions about whether the event was as much about a nascent gubernatorial campaign as it was about the troops.”

Perhaps he did. But the rest of the article indicated that he faced such questions only from Hirschfeld.

Perfectly acceptable in a column. But, at least as it seemed from reading it on line, this was a news story, in which questions about Shumlin’s motivations would generally be considered “news” only if someone else raised them, preferably a prominent person speaking on the record.

A Republican, for instance. But the only Republican quoted, Northeast Kingdom Sen. Vince Illuzzi, said “to suggest it’s about anything other than helping the soldiers would be unfair.”

Judging from most of his work, Hirschfeld is a good, careful reporter, making one wonder whether an editor wanted the (quite reasonable) question asked, and ordered the story written even without getting the desired answer.

And speaking of odd journalism, there was real news in an editorial Saturday in St. Johnsbury’s Caledonian-Record. Taking note of the recent appearance of bedbugs in the St. J elementary school, the editorial proclaims that the infestation “should never have been allowed to fester to this point,” and that the landlord who owns the apartment building from which children carried the bugs to school, “should have been forced to immediately eradicate the problem or pay a hefty fine.”

Everybody knows, said the Cal-Rec that “certain landords (the dropped ‘l’ is in the original) won’t spend a nickel on their properties unless they are forced to by the law. Mandatory and immediate action should have been applied in this case.”

Wow! The Caledonian-Record endorses stricter regulation of private business, more power for government bureaucrats, and – at least by extension – higher public spending to pay for the staff and equipment to keep children safe from bedbugs.

Get me re-write.

white-tailed deer

STRIKE ONE: KVETCH KVETCH KVETCH

When the going gets tough, they say, the tough get going.

Not in Vermont, especially rural Vermont. There, when anything changes, the supposedly tough whimper.

The latest example of this phenomenon occurred last week when roughly 100 members of the Champion Land Leaseholders and Traditional Interests Association met in Ferdinand, in the core of the Northeast Kingdom, to talk to Mark Maghini, who is sort of their landlord.

Well, not really talk to him. At least as reported in Orleans County’s Chronicle, it was more like screech at him.

And why? Because…(steel yourself for the horror about to be expressed) everything is not the same.

Oh, and also because weeping and wailing have become the default position in the subculture of some segments of rural Vermont.

To elucidate, for those unfamiliar with the saga of what are still called the Former Champion Land, Maghini is the manager of the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Silvio Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, the owner of some 26,000 acres that once belonged to the Champion International Paper Company.

A few hundred people lease small plots of this land on which they have built camps, as they did when Champion owned it. As it happens, the terms of their leases are much more advantageous to them now than in the Champion days (largely because they moaned and groaned, and were immediately placated by a cowardly Vermont State Legislature, but let’s let bygone wails be bygone wails).

What ails them now?

First, under the new rules, they won’t be able to use or possess alcoholic beverages while hunting. What would happen, one of them asked, if he was bringing beer to his camp and a deer cross the road. Would getting out of the vehicle to go after the deer by a violation?

Of course not, Maghini said in a telephone interview.

“Get out of the truck. Go after the deer,” he said, as if any explanation were needed. Clearly this was a crowd looking for something about which to complain ever though there was nothing about which to complain.

Refuge visitors won’t be allowed to hunt from the road any more, either. Nor is anybody else, at least not in this state (see Page 17 of the most recent hunting regulations).

But the problem, as one of the meeting-goers put it, was that “we can’t do what we have been doing for a lifetime.”

Oh, please. There are two things these folks should do up. Grow and shut. The world changes. The land they lease is now owned by the Federal Government, which has designated it a Fish and Wildlife Refuge. The primary mission of the Refuges is “to conserve the abundance and diversity of native plants and animals.” But as a matter of law and policy – oh, and by the way, in the interest of the economy of northeastern Vermont – they also try to attract visitors.

Who are less likely to show up if they worry about getting shot.

Okay, federal regulations can always be dumb, and one of these seems to qualify. If motor vehicles are allowed on the roads, why should bicycles be banned?

Maybe they won’t be for long, Maghiri said, under a “comprehensive conservation plan” now in the works.

The Leaseholders are a small sliver of the body politic, but a somewhat larger sliver of the local cultural mythology. These are (at least so they want us to think) the traditional Vermonters of yore—self-reliant, rugged, adaptable.

Perhaps we’ll have to adapt to the reality; they’re a bunch of crybabies.

STRIKE TWO: SMILE, YOU’RE (MABYE) ON TV

More than any generation before us, we command the resources for self-realization…But do we want to be artists, philosophers, pioneers of the natural sciences? No, we want to be celebrities—Hilary Mantel

But does the Burlington Free Press have to lead the way.

The Freep routinely goes bananas any time a Vermonter even approaches celebrity, like appearing on a TV reality show. But Sunday, it outdid itself, devoting 50 square inches – 40 percent of the “news” (that is, not advertising) space on the front page to tell us that a guy who used to go to Middlebury would be playing against the New England Patriots that day.

Not that Steven Hauschka is really a celebrity. Or really a Vermonter. He grew up in Massachusetts. But he did start kicking footballs at Middlebury and he is the place-kicker for the Baltimore Ravens who would play (and lose to) the Pats Sunday afternoon.

Meaning he might be (oh, contain the excitement) on TV.

Not that it wasn’t a story. (Sort of) local kid (sort of) makes good. And it was nicely done. But it belonged on the sports page, not all over Page One.

Oh, and is it turned out, Hauschka kicked no field goals Sunday, or even (so it seemed after a quick look at the game account) attempted one. No TV time after all.

STRIKE THREE: LAW? WE DON’T WORRY ABOUT NO STINKIN’ LAW. WE’RE THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The paper of record came to Vermont last week, right up to the Northeast Kingdom, to write about that moose. You know, the one that’s being fed doughnuts in an impoundment in Irasburg.

Cute story by Katie Zezima of the Boston office. Mentioned the doughnuts. Quoted the old farmer who’d brought the moose to the impoundment and the guy who owns it. Got into the chronic wasting disease danger.

Just one little omission. Never mentioned that the rescue, transportation and confinement of the moose are all, undeniably, against the bleepety-blank law.

Actually, a not-so-little omission. Not, at least, in a serious newspaper, which The New York Times is.

Was?

Thanks to the….let’s just call it the less than impressive performance of the Wild Blue internet provider company and the firms to which it contracts out its customer service – DSI Systems Inc. of Des Moines and Installation Management of Lincoln, Maine, the News Guy still has no Internet connection, and will not until Tuesday at the earliest.

(Memo to all three companies: If you’re not going to show up as scheduled, you could call a guy and tell him you’re not going to show up as scheduled. Delay is excusable. Being inconsiderate is not).

Tuesdays being the News Guys teaching days at the University of Vermont, Wednesday’s post, if there is one, will probably be a brief one. But expect a doozy for Friday.

Before leaving you all today, though, something must be said about that truly bizarre lead story in Saturday’s Burlington Free Press, the one about how more jobs might be created if Vermont, emulating Oregon and New Jersey, banned self-service gas stations. (No time to do the link from here at the Step Back café in downtown metropolitan Barton

).

Not necessarily a bad idea, not only because it would create (as the story reported) more than 5,000 jobs but also because (as the story ignored), gas station owners would have to pay those people, so they’d have to charge more for gas, so people would drive less. (Markets work).

(And maybe for the same reason other goods should be more expensive, such as processed, fatty, sugar, food, either by taxing it or at least by not subsidizing it quite so much).

But bizarre (back to the Freeps story here) because the idea comes from nowhere.

Well, nowhere except the Freeps. The story does not cite any organized (or, for that matter, disorganized) effort to do away with self-service filling stations. There is no anti-self-service-gas station movement in Vermont. No politician’s campaign pushes the issue. No petition drive urges it. No organization calls for it. Yet there it is as the lead story on the front page of the state’s biggest newspaper.

Newspapers, to be sure, should be fonts of new ideas. But these usually come on the editorial pages or in columns. The Page One lead story is news, also known as “what happened yesterday,” or at least what is going on in general these days. Devoting the lead story to this proposal suggests that the idea is something other than the brain-child of somebody at the Free Press. But that’s all it is.

So what happened? The following is just conjecture, and anybody who knows better is invited to submit actual information, but here’s one guess:

Some Freeps bigwig took a vacation in Oregon or went down to New Jersey, found out he/she couldn’t fill up the tank self-service, and began to think….hmmm! Maybe this wouldn’t be bad for Vermont; it would mean jobs.

So the bigwig comes back, sends an email to an editor and/or reporter, who realizes that the bigwig – being a bigwig – can’t be blown off, and gets to work, and as the nonsense flows downhill, a perfectly good reporter, Dan McLean, risks embarrassing himself by having to write this peculiar story to lead the paper.

The News Guy is hot on the trail of several complicated and controversial stories, none yet ready for public consumption.

But fear not. He will not leave you in the lurch, There are always some tidbits, none worth a major take-out on its own, but interesting in small doses.

Consider, for instance, the recent meeting of the Rural Sociology Association in Madison, Wisconsin. Like most gatherings devoted to rural America, this one seemed pitched mostly to the South and the Midwest; lots of talk about the pros and cons of ethanol. But there was also some information that could apply to small towns and rural areas everywhere, even in Vermont.

As reported by Bill Bishop in The Daily Yonder, several of the sociologists reported that their studies found that while rural and small town residents want to make money (who doesn’t?) that wasn’t all they wanted. It wasn’t even what they most wanted.

Terry Besser of Iowa State University studied “thriving small towns” which, she said, were more likely to be in remote areas than close to cities. That seemed to be because the more remote areas required more community involvement.

“You may have less income if you’re more remote, but you will have more connections,” she said.

Rural people who lived near a city were likely to work in that city, meaning they had longer commutes as well as weaker ties to the town they lived in.

Incomes were higher, but she said there was a sense that “people were just living in a place,” rather than really belonging to it.

On the other hand, residents of the tiniest towns and villages seemed less content than those who lived in slightly larger municipalities. In very small towns, she found (according to Bishop) “people burned out working on their communities. Communities of at least 5,000 residents ‘have an advantage over those 1,500 and below,”Besser said.

Similarly, Cheryl Burkhart-Kriesel of the University of Nebraska found that people moved to small towns in that state seeking “a slower way of life,” and closer ties with relatives. Only a third said they moved to take a higher paying job.

No doubt that’s true of many Vermonters. Not that anyone wants to be poor, or even low-income. But apparently a great many people have figured out that – contrary to what one reads in some circles – it isn’t necessary to be all that high income, either.

The lesson being that in pondering “economic development,” its costs, as well as the benefits ought to be in the mix.

Speaking of costs and benefits, here’s an item that the boys in biz school would probably warn against, as it comes under the heading of free advertising for the competition.

But have you noticed that there’s a new, on-line, newspaper in the state? It’s called vermontdailynews.com, and you are invited to Google away for it.

It isn’t really competition, since it: (1) concentrates on Chittenden County rather than statewide matters; and (2) seems to do little (or maybe no) actual reporting on its own. It aggregates nicely, though, and the photography is superb. Word has it that the guy who runs it is a photographer, but for some reason he doesn’t identify himself (or anyone else) in the “About” link.

Don’t be shy, fellas. Tell us who you are.

The health care debate is nationwide, and not specifically a Vermont issue, especially because it’s pretty clear that a substantial majority of Vermonters favor the Obama/Democratic approach to changing the system, if not changing it even more (you will note absence of the word “reform,” a word honest reporters ought not use; “reform” means “to improve by alteration.” Whether the proposed alteration is an improvement is precisely what is at issue).

But along with the other northern tier states, Vermont gets a little attention because it borders Canada, whose health care system is held up as a paragon of virtue by one side and as a sinkhole of horrors by the other. Many a Vermonter knows both: (1) a neighbor who sneaks over to Canada for less expensive prescription drugs; and (2) a wealthy Canadian who has come to the U.S. for elective surgery (paying for it out of pocket) rather than wait months to get the same treatment there.

How pleasing then to find a peer-reviewed, intellectually honest , comparative study of health care in the two countries by American and Canadian physicians and policy experts. It was actually a study of studies, and here’s how we know it’s intellectually honest: it says that for some ailments Canadians seem to get better treatment, but for others it’s the folks South of the border who get better results.

Anyone who resists the temptation to oversimplify and overstate his/her case should be taken seriously.

The study was limited to examining whether there are “differences in health outcomes (mortality or morbidity) in patients suffering from similar medical conditions treated in Canada versus those treated in the United States.”

Neither country “won” in every category. Even these folks, though, have to conclude that by and large the Canadian system serves its people better, not to mention a lot cheaper.

“Despite the limitations of the available studies, some robust conclusions are possible from our systematic review,” the report concluded. “These results are incompatible with the hypothesis that American patients receive consistently better care than Canadians. Americans are not, therefore, getting value for money; the 89% higher per-capita expenditures on health care in the United States does not buy superior outcomes for the sick.

“Canadian health care…produces health benefits similar, or perhaps superior, to those of the US health system, but at a much lower cost.”

But we knew that.

Further thoughts on Glenn A. Wright’s farewell to Vermont, previously scheduled for today, will be postponed until Monday in order to provide a timely explication of the latest transgressions of Vermont’s established news organizations.

These transgressors are the big guys, the Burlington Free Press and WCAX-TV (Channel 3), meaning they have more power to misinform. That’s why it’s more important to call them to account.

Alas, the villain (or at least one of them) in the Free Press case is Sam Hemingway, who is generally a good reporter. In fact, the News Guy is one of many Vermonters who think the Freep goofed when it took Hemingway’s column away some years ago. Hemingway was no Jimmy Breslin or Mike Royko (or, for that matter, the other Hemingway); no one turned to him just to see how a master handled 800 words of English prose. But he was intelligent, prudent, and hard-working. His column gave the paper some personality, which it needed then and needs even more now.

But Hemingway was neither intelligent nor prudent in Wednesday morning’s story about the latest sighting of what might be “Champ,” the supposed lake monster of Lake Champlain, a local version of the celebrated Loch Ness Monster (that’s the Loch above, sans monster).

Oh, he seems to have gotten the facts right enough. This guy with a camera-equipped cell phone saw something weird in the lake near Burlington’s Oakledge Park, filmed it for about two minutes as it struggled in the water, and put the film on YouTube. To his credit, Eric Olsen, the fellow who took the cell phone video, did not rush to the conclusion that he had filmed a lake monster. Perhaps he did rush to a reporter, but that’s OK.

We may also proceed under the assumption that Hemingway quoted Olsen correctly, and accurately described the video, a still picture of which illustrated the story, which the Free Press editors, to their discredit,  put on Page One.

But then came the….ahh, verification process, which Hemingway began by citing one Loren Coleman, identified as “a cryptozoologist based in Portland, Maine,” who concluded that the video “needs to be looked at very seriously.”

Then, in what can only be called a excess of pseudo-responsibility, Hemingway finds yet another cryptozoologist, Scott Mardis of Winooski, who pronounced the video “very impressive.”

Here the careful reader will note that Hemingway did not describe his first cryptozoologist as, for instance, “holder of the Cadwalleder Chair in Cryptozoology at MIT,” nor the second as, “chair of the Cryptozoology Department at the University of Chicago.”

That’s because there is no such chair and no such department. Not at MIT or Chicago or Harvard or the University of Vermont or any accredited institution of higher education.

That’s because crytpozoology is not a science, at least, not as recognized by the scientific world.

Which is hardly proof that the cryptozoologists (‘crypto’ means ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ in Greek) are wrong, or that there is no “Champ.” It does mean that a story that quotes them should let its readers know that these folks do not strictly follow the scientific method, and are often considered outright frauds by those who do.

In The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience, (ABC-CLIO 2002) , Michael Shermer & Pat  Linse say Cryptozoology “ranges from pseudoscientific to useful and interesting, depending on how it is practiced,” but that it is “not strictly a science…papers on the topic are rarely published in scientific journals, no formal education on the subject is available, and no scientists are employed to study (it).”

Simply noting, as Hemingway did, that “cryptozoology is the study of purportedly nonexistent or mythical creatures,” is not sufficient.

Here’s what else should be in every story about a “Champ” sighting: Considering that the first reported sighting dates back to 1883, either this is a very long-lived creature or there are at least two of them. You see, the way it works (you may want to send the children out of the room for a moment), it would take at least one guy Champ and one girl Champ to produce champettes to continue the species.

And since stuff happens – death, you know, or disability – there would really have to be several of them. And if there were, their existence would not be in doubt.

Only toward the end of the story did Hemingway tell us that the one actual scientist he talked to, UVM biology professor Ellen Marsden, said the object in the lake was possibly a drowning moose.

Less fun but more likely.

Now let us turn to Channel 3 on Wednesday evening, which led its six o’clock news by telling us that, “the state’s fiscal crisis is only beginning.”

Wow! We have a fiscal crisis. What fun!

Oh, Phooey. Actually, we don’t have a fiscal crisis, except under the singular definition employed by WCAX. A state has a fiscal crisis if it can’t raise enough money to pay for the functions it has determined to undertake. Thanks to the passage of a state budget Tuesday, Vermont has no such crisis.

It does face a potential shortfall next year. But by definition, a problem that might arise sometime hence is not a crisis. Crises are immediate. They occur at  “a decisive point or situation,” according to the dictionary. That point is not yet here. If it gets here, we can start talking crisis.

One might argue (though it would be a weak argument) that the state’s Unemployment Insurance Fund is close to a potential crisis.  Whether or not anything potential can really be critical, the Fund really is in theoretical danger, at least, of going broke in the not too distant future. But that hardly amounts to a fiscal crisis for the state.

In reporting about the Legislature’s effort to deal with the Unemployment Insurance problem, correspondent Andy Potter, standing outside the House chamber, told us that the Legislature would not cut unemployment benefits, adding, “lots of politics behind that.”

No! Did he mean that citizens were urging lawmakers not to take steps that would cost said citizens money? What do these people think this is? A democracy or something?

And did Potter and his associates at Channel 3 think the folks on the other side of this dispute – the business leaders who do want benefits cut so their assessments don’t go up as much – are not practicing politics, but are home sipping tea trusting legislators to do the right thing?

(And here’s a bizarre development: That crack about “lots of politics” seems to have been expunged from the script on Channel 3’s web site. Should the rest of us be pleased that someone at the station was embarrassed by the remark? Or disturbed that WCAX is retroactively cleaning up its act?).

But Channel 3 was not done. Its next item had to do with taxes. The budget bill passed Tuesday over Gov. Jim Douglas’s veto cuts income tax rates while selectively raising some sales taxes and closing a couple of loopholes. The net result of the tax changes in the budget bill will probably be slightly lower taxes for most people, slightly higher taxes for those who earn more than $200,000 a year (or those who smoke and drink a lot).

WCAX, though, was determined to inform its viewers that even if they don’t earn big bucks, they’ll be paying a bit more in taxes because of the gasoline tax hike that went into effect this week. They showed tape of economist Art  Woolf saying, “well the average taxpayers, they’re going to pay more. And in part that’s due to the gasoline tax hike which hits them all.”

This manages to be accurate and misleading at the same time (with the station, not Woolf, being responsible for the misleading part). It’s misleading because in context, following the report about the partisan split over the budget, Channel 3 seemed to be saying that the gas tax increases were put into effect by that same budget bill, forced into law by those irresponsible Democrats over the objections of Douglas and his fiscally prudent fellow-Republicans.

That isn’t what happened. The gas tax increase was part of a separate bill with much more bipartisan support. One of its architects, in fact, was Republican Richard Westman of Cambridge, the Chairman of the House Transportation Committee. Douglas, who did resist the tax hikes for a while but accepted them weeks ago, signed the measure last week.

And by the way, all the money raised from that tax is to be spent on highway and other transportation improvements, which an honest report would have noted.   WCAX’s analysis of state finance is downright cryptozoological.

The goal of the coverage from there is depth, not breadth. No use duplicating the big stories that other reporters are (quite ably, for the most part) covering. So there might not be a post every day next week. On the other hand, there is the possibility of a heretofore unprecedented Saturday post.

Don’t let the suspense haunt your entire week.

By and large the policy of this site is NOT to debate comments, even the most critical. Au contraire, criticism of the News Guy is welcome. Indeed, he is the only one who may be attacked personally in the comments. Personal attacks on other commenters will not be accepted as comment.

But there was one aspect of this week’s comments which call for explanation, though not for refutation. These were some (not all) of those who objected to parts of Hard Ball on Tuesday and  Vermont is Homeless yesterday.

Tuesday’s post warned against “ignoring the burden placed on middle-income taxpayers who might not have very much more money than the folks getting helped “(meaning beneficiaries of state social programs.).

Both in comments sent to the site and in a few private e-mail messages, several readers took the News Guy to task for, as one put it, “assuming the only revenue option is to raise taxes on middle-income folks.” This commenter and others pointed out that if Vermont had a more progressive tax system, any extra cost for social programs would be borne largely by taxpayers who have a great deal more money than the folks getting helped.

True enough. But there is some confusion here between the advocate’s role and the reporter’s. The reporter has to deal with the world as it is, not as some people (sometimes maybe even the reporter) would prefer it to be. The unspoken clause before the journalist’s analysis of the impact of this or that policy is, “under the circumstances now prevailing.” If you don’t like those circumstances, by all means do your best to change them.

But don’t expect a reporter to help you do it. You want to make the world a better place. A reporter does not. He or she just wants to understand and explain it. That the prevailing foolishness in today’s world comes from the right side of the political spectrum should not delude anyone into thinking that a reporter who exposes that foolishness is any less pleased to point out inconsistencies and exaggerations from the other side of the spectrum.

Similarly, to the commenter who asked, “what’s your solution,” the answer is, “not my job. You do solutions. I do critiques.”

No doubt this is annoying to policy makers and advocates. They arduously work out policies only to have some wise-guy journalist point out the possible pitfalls, inconsistencies, unintended consequences and other flaws. No wonder the advocates now and then come back with, “well, what would you do about it, wise guy?”

Sorry. That’s your responsibility. In a sense, journalism is constantly challenging the policy-proposers of the world: “Come up with a plan in which we can’t find a flaw.”

Not a bad system, when you think about it. Not a fair system, one might argue. The office-holders and advocates have to do all this hard work. The reporter/columnist merely casts his/her gimlet eyes on it and gleefully (and let’s acknowledge a certain amount of glee here) tear it to pieces.

Nobody promised you a rose garden.

A post script to an earlier discussion (Sweet Taxes, April 21) of whether governments ought to tax sodas and other unhealthy foods. The voters seem to think that it should if the revenue is used for health care. A new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation and NPR showed that, nationally, 61 percent of the people approve such taxation.

Finally (and gimlet eyes sharply agleam) let’s take note of the Vermont flapette this week that provided another illustration (not that one is required) of the human, American, and (perhaps particularly) Vermont inclination to get upset over nothing at all.

Or several nothings at all, the first one here being H.176, a bill that would transform the application for a drivers license, learners permit, or non-driving state identification card into a de facto registration for the draft for men between the ages of 18 and 26.

Why bother? Because Vermont seems to be the state in which proportionally fewer such men are registering as required since President Jimmy Carter arguably over-reacted to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. This apparently annoyed Fairfield Democrat Richard Howrigan, the bill’s main sponsor, and the legislation in turn has inspired scores of letters to the editor, anguished commentaries on the Internet, an a segment on Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition program earlier this week.

And why is this a collection of nothings? Because the bill is not going to become law. But more importantly because the draft registration requirement is meaningless. There is no military draft. There will be no military draft. Let’s repeat that. THERE WILL BE NO MILITARY DRAFT. Reviving the draft is as politically feasible as re-instituting slavery or bringing back prohibition. Its chances are non-existent. It has almost no support.

Mind you, this is not to say that there should not be any military draft. It is quite likely, for instance, that had there been a draft, the United States would not have invaded Iraq in 2003. By something close to common consent, that would have been a preferable outcome.

But that’s theory. Draftless, the United States has an extraordinarily capable and adequately large Army, and one which can be adequately expanded without resorting to conscription. It would not be adequately large only if an adequately large country – Russia, say, or China, or maybe Brazil – were actually to attack the U.S.

This will not happen. And if it did, then of course there would be minimal opposition to a draft, even if enough young people did not enlist voluntarily. But all that is not even theory. It’s fantasy.

There are many things in this world to worry about. Getting drafted is not one of them. All of you who were worried about that, do something more productive. Like maybe, have a cocktail.

Oh, what a good idea! See you Monday.