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.

No, we cannot. As Louisiana’s Earl Long once told his segregationist opponent Leander Perez, “Da Feds got da A-bomb.” More formally, dey got da Supreme Law of da Land Clause, which leaves no doubt that when federal law conflicts with “any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary, ” federal law prevails.

You wouldn’t know this from reading the papers or watching the news accounts about the debate. Reporters such as Terri Hallenbeck in this account in the Burlington Free Press simply quoted the candidates.

Don’t take this as criticism of Hallenbeck (a good reporter) or the other journalists. First of all, the Constitutional explanation might have taken more minutes or column inches than they could afford (and certainly more than Steele’s candidacy is worth). More pertinently, though, the reporters were following the current journalistic ethic: We just write down what people say. Not only do we express no opinion, we possess no knowledge, or at least none we will convey.

Thus, if candidate Smith says the world is flat and candidate Jones differs, today’s mainstream reporter will quote Jones’s dissent, but leave it to the reader to decide which candidate is right.

Not a service to the reader. Reporters should not express opinion, or even allow it to influence what they report and how they report it (not as difficult a task as ideologues think, the typical mainstream journalist being indifferent to ideology, and sometimes even to policy). But readers depend on news outlets to inform them about reality, not simply to recite conflicting assertions. The assertions that the world is flat or that Vermont could order its National Guard troops home are false, and should be so described in news accounts.

Even when an assertion is not provably false, it is often quite unlikely. The reader/viewer/listener is entitled to know how unlikely, and why. Democrat Peter Shumlin did get a bit of pushback from the press over his insistence that he could bring a single-payer health care system to Vermont even though federal law now forbids it. But that was mostly after Republican Brian Dubie had challenged Shumlin over the issue.

Then there’s Dubie’s claim that an IBM official told him the company might move its Essex semiconductor production facility out of the state if the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant is not relicensed.

Dubie’s statement was widely reported, as were those from IBM public relations officials to the effect that the company was making no threats to go anywhere and had no plans to do so.

Well, what else are public relations officials to say? Even though Dubie refuses to name his source, it’s not unlikely that an IBM official did tell him that the possibility of leaving Vermont had been discussed. That plant uses a whole lot of electricity. If utility rates are going up, IBM has to consider every option. (Meaning that in his ‘Pinocchio’ ad, Shumlin was unjustified in using Dubie’s statement as evidence of dishonesty).

But a little reality, if you will. With or without Vermont Yankee, the price of power will rise. More without VY than with it? Could be, but probably not by much. Note the restraint over the issue shown earlier this year by the actual electric utilities (Central Vermont Public Service, Green Mountain Power, etc.), the guys who buy power from the producers and sell it to us. Not that they were against extending Yankee’s license another 20 years. But in the meanwhile, they had assured themselves of an adequate – and affordable – supply of power. Vermont’s economic prosperity may benefit from, but it does not appear to depend on, Vermont Yankee. The same can be said for the IBM plant.

Besides, where would it go? Assuming that it chose Vermont to begin with because of proximity to materials and markets and (probably most of all) a reliable, skilled work force, it can’t go anywhere else nearby with lower electricity rates. The closest state where power is cheaper is Pennsylvania. And the savings would have to be huge to offset the cost of abandoning the plant in Essex and building a new one elsewhere. All this information could have been part of the coverage.

There’s one other category of analysis that should be part of news stories about the campaign, but rarely is. It occurs when candidates make claims or put forth arguments that are neither factually incorrect nor even highly unlikely. They’re just pointless.

Dubie regularly quotes one or another businessperson who has told him that if only taxes were lower, the business would spend more money and hire more workers. It’s right in Dubie’s official campaign statement, where a typical quote is from “a small cheese maker in Bennington (who said) ‘If my taxes were lower, I could hire more employees… buy more Vermont milk from Vermont farmers, and I could make more cheese… But with taxes so high, I can’t afford to invest in my business and grow more jobs.’”

Dubie doesn’t identify this person either. But on the campaign trail, he often names the businesspeople who’ve made a similar argument, so there’s no reason to doubt that he’s telling the truth.

So are the businesspeople. If any of their costs were cut –  utilities, wages, insurance, and certainly taxes – they would have more money to spend. Then they might be able to expand, maybe even hire more workers. It’s true. It’s reasonable. It’s totally meaningless.

Because the same applies to everyone. If your taxes were lower, you’d have more money to spend, too. The problem is that taxes can’t be lower just for you any more than they can be lowered just for that cheese-maker. Your neighbors would get the same reduction, as would all the other cheese-makers. But then the state government wouldn’t have enough money, which would be very bad for the state’s economy – you, your neighbors, and all the cheese-makers.

Just take the example to its logical conclusion: eliminate taxes entirely. Then everybody would have more money to spend. But soon there would be no roads to carry the cheese to market. For all sorts of reasons – including maintaining a strong economy – a certain level of public services is required. So, by definition, is a certain level of taxation.

A case can be made that those levels are too high, and that the state would benefit from less spending and lower taxes. But quoting someone saying, “if my taxes were lower, I’d have more money to spend,” does not contribute to that case. It’s both a tautology and a nullity, which should be part of the campaign news coverage.

There’s at least one more area where reporters – including this one – have fallen down on the job in not refuting (or at least questioning) another campaign constant, this one regularly recited by both leading candidates, and indeed by almost everyone else who comments on what’s going on in Vermont. It has almost become part of the culture. It may be wrong.

Tune in Friday.

Four times in the last 17 years, Peter Shumlin’s fellow Democrats in the Senate have elected him as their leader.

Common sense indicates that they must have thought highly of him. They must have found him capable and energetic. It also follows that most of them trusted him. The party leader is the guy who negotiates with other members of his caucus, as well as with the opposition and the administration. No senator would choose a leader he or she found deceitful.

So why does Brian Dubie keep saying that a survey rated Shumlin the “most ethically challenged” member of the legislature, an allegation now included in a pro-Dubie television commercial?

Because it’s true.

Which is not to say that it’s true that Shumlin is more “ethically challenged” than other lawmakers. It’s just true there was such a survey, and that Shumlin got more votes than any of his colleagues to the “most ethically challenged” question.

Twelve votes to be exact. Twelve of the 30 cast, of the 400 questionnaires that Seven Days sent out to legislators, legislative staff, and journalists. On Vermont Public Radio the other day, broadcaster Mitch Wertlieb called the Shumlin designation “a dubious distinction from a small sampling.” Wertlieb was being much too kind. A better description would have been “total garbage.”

This was not a general public sample, sent to 400 randomly selected voters. The distribution was targeted to 400 insiders, by name. The small minority who bothered to answer the questions knew how to manipulate the results. Even with more participation, the conclusions would have been…well, inconclusive. With 28 real responses (two were apparently thrown out for being absurd), the conclusions are meaningless.

From which it does not follow that Dubie and his supporters should be condemned for using the information, or that Seven Days, by and large a positive voice in Vermont’s public discussion, should be condemned for shoddy journalism. In some paradise to come, a political strategist might look at such a survey, conclude that its results are statistically and intellectually indefensible, and ignore it. We do not live in that paradise. No politician of any party – Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Prohibitionist, Free Soil, or Whig – would look at this information as anything but a fat pitch right across the middle of the plate. You don’t let those go by.

As to the editors at Seven Days, they did not commit bad journalism here because these surveys are not journalism at all. They are promotion.

And what, prithee, is wrong with that?

Nothing. All news outlets, including this one, try to promote themselves. (If you don’t notice it about this one, it’s because the proprietor is no good at it, not that he finds it beneath his dignity). Lots of news organizations, especially alternative weeklies such as Seven Days, use contests and surveys as promotion devices. They’re kind of fun. On occasion, they even produce some useful information. This was not one of those occasions.

(Perhaps because we all knew it was promotion, not journalism, all 17 reporters who got the questionnaire ,including this one, did not fill it out and return it.)

In that same paradise mentioned above, editors might look at their meager results and decide not to publish them, or at least not the ones that can be distorted by political operatives. But it’s unreasonable to expect that the folks at Seven Days would have done that. It was their project, and they were probably gung ho about it.

Besides, almost all of them are likely to vote for Shumlin. They might have reasonably feared that holding back the results of that question could have exposed them to the allegation of political bias. All the folks who did fill out the questionnaire, including 18 legislators, knew the question was on the list. Among the 18 were probably several Republicans who’d named Shumlin the “most ethically challenged. So of course, the paper just published it all.

If Seven Days is to be criticized it is less for running the story than for its effort to explain away what it acknowledged was a meager response.  The 7.5 percent of respondents who replied made the rate “ better than direct mail…and not too much worse than the turnout for a Burlington election, which was 23 percent on Town Meeting Day,” the paper wrote.

But the direct mail comparison is not apt (see above for difference between random sample survey and targeted mailing), and according to arithmetic, 23 percent is more than thrice 7.5 percent, which is, indeed, “too much worse.”

None of which deals with the essential question: Is Shumlin “ethically challenged”?

Of course he is. So are we all, almost every day. “Ethically challenged” isn’t even the right term. It’s pop-psych jargon. The English translation would be “unethical.” The real question then becomes whether Shumlin is unethical, or, more precisely, whether he is more unethical (or unethical more often) than the average person, other members of the Legislature, other politicians in general, Brian Dubie in particular.

And the answer of course is that no one has the slightest idea. The Seven Days survey, even had enough respondents answered to make the results statistically respectable, does not constitute evidence.

What would constitute evidence would be something like a credible account that Shumlin had broken his word to another lawmaker, or promised the same committee chairmanship to more than one senator, or voted for legislation he really found abhorrent to please a big contributor. Were there such credible accounts, the Dubie campaign, thus far showing no sign of subtlety or restraint, would be shouting the news to the mountaintops. The lack of such shouting indicates that the evidence is not there.

Come to think of it, though, it would be surprising if there were no grumblings about Shumlin’s ethics, even if the grumbling has remained private. Shumlin has been the Senate leader, which in a way puts him at a disadvantage vis a vis Dubie, whose only real leadership position in public office was as chairman of the Essex Junction School Board years ago. A lieutenant governor is not a leader; he doesn’t have to displease anybody.

Leaders do. They have to make decisions their followers don’t like, and some of those followers then conclude that the leader has acted unethically. The athlete taken off the starting squad, the actor who doesn’t get the part, the applicant who doesn’t get the job is tempted to accuse the coach, the director, the boss of favoritism or some other unethical behavior.

Legislative leaders are constantly negotiating, with their own members, the opposition, the administration. Often, these negotiations conclude with compromise agreements. On both the political left and right – but more these days on the left – some true believers consider compromise unethical. It wouldn’t be surprising if a few of those 12 votes were from Democratic lawmakers who are to Shumlin’s left, and who resent the compromises he made with Gov.  Jim Douglas’s administration earlier this year.

In addition, negotiators sometimes hear what they want to hear rather than what has been said. When the leader says, “I’ll try to get your pet bill to the floor,” the member might hear, “I promise I’ll get your pet bill to the floor.” When it doesn’t get to the floor, the member thinks the leader lied.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that now and then Shumlin did promise to get a bill to the floor, and then not do it, either because he couldn’t or because he didn’t care. But “entirely possible” is not evidence, either, and with no evidence, there is only one word to describe accusing any individual of being unethical, That word is: unethical.

Then let’s start today’s exercise calmly. The two (apparent) violations of state law about to be detailed do not portend the approach of a police state in Vermont. Jack-booted thugs are not combing the Green Mountains, nor are undercover agents listening to our innermost thoughts through transmitters placed in our tooth fillings.

Furthermore, the two incidents are in many ways not comparable. In one, nobody got hurt. In the other, somebody did.

Yet neither are they entirely unrelated. The thread that runs through them jeopardizes a free society.

Let’s first deal with the lesser offense. Earlier this year, the Legislature ordered the Education Department to prepare detailed budget-cutting recommendations to each of the state’s 283 school districts, and to have them finished by August 1.

That was Sunday. On Monday, a reporter for the Vermont Press Bureau (Rutland Herald and Barre/Montpelier Times-Argus) asked to see the report detailing the recommendations. Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca refused.

In refusing, he almost surely violated 1 V.S.A. § 318, which states, “upon request the custodian of a public record shall promptly produce the record for inspection.”

Unless one of the 39 exceptions in 1 V.S.A. § 317 applies, and then “the custodian” (Vilaseca in this case) must stipulate which exception he is citing in his refusal.

He did not.

Vilaseca did not dispute that the report was a “public record.” In an interview Tuesday, after the Rutland and Montpelier papers had run the story, he argued that the report “hadn’t been finalized” and was “still in working form.” Furthermore, he said,  the law only “requires me to release (the report) promptly,” a standard he said he would meet by releasing it Wednesday at a press conference.

But according to the Legislative mandate, the report was finished, and the dictionary defines “prompt” as “without delay.” A two-day wait is a rather good example of a delay.

From an administrative and policy perspective, what Vilaseca did made good sense. He wanted to send the report out to the schools to make sure there were no errors in it, as there were, he acknowledged, in a report on standardized test scores his department sent out last year which mistakenly described two schools as among the lowest-scoring in the state.

In other words, he didn’t want to embarrass himself or his Department.

Under those circumstances, what’s wrong with keeping the information secret for another two days?

Only that it was against the law, which in this case has two disadvantages. One is that a law-breaking Education Commissioner does not set a good example for the kids. The other is…well, hold that thought while we describe – briefly, because it’s been in the newspapers – the other incident.

Over Memorial Day weekend, police in Hartford were alerted about a possible burglary at a home. They entered the house (the door was apparently unlocked), and found in a third-floor bathroom one Wayne Burwell, a 34-year-old Dartmouth graduate, athletic trainer, and, perhaps not incidentally, an African-American.

Burwell was naked. He was sitting on the toilet. He was apparently unresponsive, perhaps due to a blood sugar problem that has caused him to lose consciousness on occasion.

Not exactly the picture of a dangerous desperado. But the police unleashed enough pepper spray to make both Burwell and some of the officers require treatment later. Then they handcuffed him, covered him with a blanket, and either dragged or led him outside “to wash his eyes,” in the words of Town Manager Hunter Rieseberg, who acknowledged that “some pepper spray had been discharged.”

While Burwell was still inside, one of his neighbors, Bob McKaig, a 71-year-old retired police officer from New Jersey, had come over to the house to warn the police that Burwell was ill. When Burwell was brought out, apparently under arrest, McKaig tried to tell them that Burwell had not been robbing the house. He owned it.

At which point, McKaig said, a “female officer” threatened to have him arrested for interfering. Burwell was taken to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital where, among other treatment, he needed stitches in his hands where the handcuffs had cut him.

At this point, a touch of uncertainty must be acknowledged. Only the police and Burwell (to the extent he was conscious) really know what happened in Burwell’s house. Rieseberg said when all the facts come out, “there will be some red faces, and they won’t be ours.” Perhaps something happened inside the house that gave the police reasons to be wary of Burwell.

But rarely does a burglar sneak into a house, make his way to an upstairs bathroom, take off his clothes and sit on the toilet in a semi-conscious state. Concluding that the police were  incompetent, or, as the Vermont ACLU director Allen Gilbert suspects, guilty of “racial profiling,” may be premature. Strongly suspecting it is not.

So what’s the connection between the Burwell case and the Ed Department report?

Under the same public records law, Anne Galloway, who runs the VT Digger web site, asked Hartford police for the arrest report. Police Chief Glenn W. Cutting and then Town Manager Rieseberg refused, as they had refused a similar request from the Valley News newspaper. The town argued that it has asked the State Police to investigate the incident,  triggering an exception to the public records law.

Yesterday, with the help of the ACLU, Galloway sued. The ACLU notes that the law specifies that “’records reflecting the initial arrest of a person’ are public and not exempt.”

(Full disclosure: As regular readers may know, the News Guy occasionally writes for VT Digger [see the link to it above] and knows, likes and admires Galloway as a first-class journalist).

The town’s response is that Burwell, handcuffed and pepper-sprayed though he may have been, was never arrested.

“No one was taken into custody. No one was transported to jail,” Rieseberg said. Nancy Sheahan, the Burlington lawyer who will represent the town, noted that “it is possible to detain someone without arresting him. In this particular case, there was not an arrest.”

Obviously, the courts will decide whether it was an arrest. At least some Vermont case law indicates that the Town may find it hard to prevail. Research undertaken out of the goodness of his heart by a prominent Vermont defense attorney found a 1990 Caledonia County case in which the court ruled that “the public interest clearly favors the right of access to public documents and public records (and) the exceptions listed in { 317(b) should be construed strictly against the custodians of the records and any doubts should be resolved in favor of disclosure.”

The lawyer also found a 1992 Supreme Court decision reversing a Chittenden County court decision denying a plaintiff “a list of names and addresses of taxpayers subject to a business gross receipts tax adopted by an ordinance of the City of Burlington.”

Needless to say, every case differs, and this one might have a different outcome. But the legal details really aren’t that important, because, while as acknowledged above, we can not know with 100 percent certainty what happened in Burwell’s house that day, we can know with about 98 percent certainty.

The cops messed up. And they want to keep the details secret because they fear that the details will provide powerful evidence that they messed up. That’s the main – if not quite the only – reason that officials want to keep records secret: to hide their misdeeds, or at least their foolishness. If the arrest report would make the Hartford police look good, reporters would have been invited to read it in comfort with coffee and muffins provided by the town.

And here’s why this is important: If police anywhere in Vermont  can handcuff and pepper-spray Wayne Burwell in his own house with impunity, then police somewhere in Vermont can do the same to you and to me. And the more they can hide the records of what they did, the more are they likely to do the same to you or to me.

Just as – though Armando Vilaseca’s offense was benign by comparison – if a high-ranking state official can ignore the public records law for 48 hours to make sure a few minor errors don’t embarrass him, another such official on another occasion may be emboldened to ignore it for 48 days or 48 weeks in an effort to cover up real malfeasance.

That’s why there’s a public records law to begin with, and why it ought to be enforced.

On the assumption that attention spans and (especially) appetites for solemn matters will be low this semi-holiday morning, the discussion of a rather solemn subject will be delayed until Wednesday, leaving today open for: a couple of updates; a political note or two; the posing of a question.

Update One: The one reporter who was planning to go to the Democratic Party fund-raiser a week ago Sunday ended up not going after all. Neither, as earlier acknowledged, did the News Guy, despite having made a stink about the Dems (subsequently reversed) decision to close the event.

But the point holds. When a public figure speaks at an event open to everyone (willing to pay) at a public accommodation, reporters ought to be given reasonable access because the public figure might say something the public should know.

Update Two: Newport Mayor Paul Monette, apparently aware that his city might become the laughing stock of the whole country (think what Jon Stewart might have done with this) used his veto power to squelch a city council decision banning the use of any French words on signs welcoming visitors to town. (See A Vermont House of Commons, June 28).

Bienvenue, nos amis.

Political Note One: The June 25 post, What the Polls Mean (and What They Don’t) noted that a clear picture of how the Democratic primary for governor shaped up wouldn’t be available until later this month, when WCAX-TV (Channel 3) was scheduled to make public results from a survey by the Research 2000 firm, which has been polling for the station for years.

Don’t hold your breath.

For reasons far too complicated (and legally treacherous) to explore here in detail, Research 2000 may not be polling in Vermont soon, or perhaps ever. After questions were raised about how the firm conducted its surveys, one of its major customers, the liberal web site Daily Kos, sued Research 2000, accusing it of “fraudulently manufacturing phony results.”

In response, Research 2000 president Del Ali (who has been cooperative and candid with the News Guy in the past) called the allegations in the suit “pure lies.” However the legal case gets untangled, the scheduled Vermont polling seems to be on hold. Channel 3 News Director Anson Tebbetts said Friday he was “still looking into it,” and had not been able to reach Ali by phone.

“We’ve used this guy for a very long time,” said Tebbetts. “It’s hard to read what’s really going on.”

Political Note Two—Despite the disinclination to pick on a campaign which is going nowhere anyway, some of the material emanating from Dan Freilich is too tempting to ignore.

As most voters probably do not know, Freilich is challenging the renomination U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy in the Democratic primary. On Freilich’s web site the other day, he proclaimed that one of his “three basic but rarely adhered to political principles” would be “country ahead of party (no ‘automatic caucasing’.)”

“Caucusing?” OK, The News Guy will plead guilty to pedantry here, but this was not an oral slip of the tongue. It was written, and, as one of merely three “basic principles,” should have been checked over.

But that’s not all. Freilich advocates a single-payer, government-run universal health insurance system, a perfectly reasonable position which many Vermonters (maybe even most) share. Interviewed on Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition the other day, he said that President Obama and Democrats in Congress, including Leahy, should have held out for such a system rather than passing the health care law which just (partly) took effect.

Even if they did not immediately have the votes for a single payer system, Freilich said (not in these exact words; the News Guy does not take notes while driving, and no transcript is available)  Obama and the Democrats could have held off and arranged a “discussion” with the American people which might have led to adoption of a single-payer system.

They could have? With a well-disciplined opposition party determined to block passage of anything? With a media culture shaped to no small extent by a faction which has slipped the bonds of rationality, if not sanity?

Not hardly. Folks who put themselves forward, however futilely, for major office, ought to behave like grown ups.

Now the question: Can the government of Vermont find its behind with both hands?

The question is inspired, if not required, by recent revelations that high-ranking officials have, quite simply, fouled up. For years, however some Vermonters may have disagreed with Gov. Jim Douglas’s policies, few argued that he didn’t run a tight ship. Of late, that ship has sprung a few leaks.

First, the news that the sex offender registry does not include the names of some people who should be on it, and apparently does include the names of some who should not be on it.

Second, state officials failed to meet a federal deadline for arranging health insurance for low-income people with medical problems.

Third is the continuing failure of the State Hospital for the mentally ill to meet federal standards, a failure that has cost the state millions in federal aid and will cost another $9.7 million this year, according to former State Sen. Jim Leddy.

Ok, there are extenuating circumstances. The Federal Government is not always the world’s most flexible outfit. The sex offender registry is a relatively new operation. Finding an acceptable alternative to the State Hospital situation ain’t easy.

Still, these are the problems state governments are supposed to solve, especially when not solving them costs money.

At the dependably anti-Douglas web site Green Mountain Daily, Julie Waters writes that these mistakes are the result of a government led by “people who don’t believe in government.”

A plausible contention, neither confirmable nor refutable. But Jim Douglas is no Tea-partier, nor did he appoint any to high office. Just as likely is that, as the Douglas Administration heads into its last months, its department heads are tired, perhaps bored, and no doubt looking for their next jobs. It can be distracting.

That’s a possible explanation, not an excuse.

Then of course there’s the simple politics of the matter. The constituencies being ill-served, the poor who are either physically or mentally ill, don’t have much clout.

Especially the mentally ill, who, as Leddy said in the Burlington Free Press column he wrote about the State Hospital the other day, remain stigmatized.

Sometimes — stigmatized, powerless and frustrated — mentally ill people take their own lives. As it happens, in Vermont, perhaps the healthiest state in the union, the suicide rate is higher than the national average.

The somber subject to be dealt with for the rest of the week.

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 auditor’s race is no longer boring.

OK, that wording used to describe the primary for governor is a tad grandiose, having more famously been applied to the entire cosmos, next to which the Vermont Democratic Party is an infinitesimal speck.

Still, the phrase is descriptive. The endorsements of Sen. Doug Racine by both the state’s AFL-CIO and the teachers union (Vermont NEA) do not make Racine the front-runner. No one can be considered the front-runner until someone releases an independent, credible poll (and, no, the one being taken by the campaign of Sen. Peter Shumlin, one of Racine’s four opponents, does not qualify).

But the endorsements do give the campaign some shape (form) and heft (voidlessness?). If nothing else, they provide a framework for thinking about the contest. Racine is at the very least having a good week and the other four are scrambling. It isn’t that the boost he got can’t be overcome. But the other candidates have to take steps to overcome it.

By no means do the endorsements mean that all 10,000 or so Vermont members of AFL-CIO affiliated unions or the 11,500 teachers who belong to the NEA are going to vote for Racine. If there was ever a time when rank and file union members automatically voted as their leaders recommended, that time is long gone.

On the other hand, there’s no reason why a union member – whether a teacher or a construction worker – shouldn’t pay some attention to the suggestion of an organization that helps improve his or her life. Especially when there’s not much difference among the candidates, five Democrats swimming straight in their party’s main stream.

Shumlin, who says he’s a “fiscal conservative,” and Sen. Susan Bartlett, who in her formal campaign kick-off Monday called herself a “centrist Democrat,” are trying to paint themselves as slightly less liberal on taxes and spending than the other three. They may be right, but “slightly” is the key word here. For many Democratic voters, any of the five contenders would be acceptable. So why not go with your union’s choice?

But the bigger boost for Racine might be that both the AFL-CIO and the NEA provide built-in GOTV operations. That stands for “Get Out the Vote,” and in what promises to be a low-turnout primary, the only more valuable asset than an existing organization that knows how to operate phone banks, identify supporters, and arrange car-pools to take voters to the polls is two of them. That’s what Racine now has.

The others can build their own, and no doubt are planning to do so. But it will cost a little time and money that he can spend elsewhere.

The candidate most hurt by the Racine endorsements was former Sen. Matt Dunne. He knew it, issuing a statement Monday congratulating Racine and pointing out that he it was his “understand(ing)  that the endorsement decision came down to Doug and me.”

It did. The endorsement would have been even a bigger boost for Dunne, who is less well-known, so losing it is a big blow. Dunne also hastily scheduled a press conference yesterday to announce the support of  seven House members and two Senators, including the fiscally centrist Hinda Miller of Burlington.

The AFL-CIO did not limit its endorsements to the governor’s race. It made choices in some of the other contests, too, and one of them could prove very interesting indeed. The labor organization’s preferred candidate for State Auditor is Burlington policy analyst Doug Hoffer who plans to run in the Democratic primary, and who also has Progressive Party support.

The reason this is interesting is that Hoffer could actually get elected. And if he does, the Auditor’s office might become a very lively spot.

Full disclosure: Hoffer, who knows how to find economic data and who analyses it astutely (if from his own point of view) has been an occasional source for this web site, which he obviously reads because he now and then comments on the posts. On the other hand, he and the News Guy have never met, and what follows is analysis, not an endorsement.

It’s not really a prediction, either. But here’s why he could win. So far, the only other Democrat running is former Auditor (and present state senator) Ed Flanagan. In the interests of both brevity and kindness, this account will skip the details abut Flanagan’s political problems (available on line for the curious). Suffice to say that thanks to some recent bizarre personal behavior Flanagan is all but unelectable.

Meaning Hoffer could win the Democratic Primary and also be on the Progressive line for the November election against incumbent Republican Tom Salmon.

Not quite unelectable, but decided beatable, also thanks to some of his own bizarre behavior, including a drunk driving episode and writing obscene emails to a reporter. Plus, he’s a party-switcher, elected and re-elected as a Democrat before becoming a Republican late last year. Party-switchers have a tough time getting re-elected.

Aside from one unsuccessful bid for town council in Massachusetts years ago, Hoffer said, he has never run for office. He could be a terrible candidate. Furthermore, another Democrat might jump into the race before next week’s filing deadline. Democratic Party Chair Judy Bevans said “a number of candidates have expressed interest” in running.

If Hoffer does win, he is likely to be, based on his work as an economics numbers-cruncher, both aggressive and independent. He’s an unabashed economic liberal who approves of raising taxes on the wealthy rather than cutting social services. But he’s also a dedicated data freak who does not go where the statistics do not lead. Should he get elected, the Sate Auditor’s office might become not just interesting, but also a word rarely associated with auditors of any stripe: fun.

MEDIA NOTE: The News Guy is by and large a fan of (and has written for) Seven Days, Burlington’s sprightly alternative newspaper. So it was discouraging to see, in its on-line version, a sophomoric swipe at the Roman Catholic Church and Bishop Salvatore Matano. Apparently some ex-Catholics who write for a blog called The Plaid Crew and who seem to harbor ill will toward the Church, saw a perfectly ordinary (actually, a rather touching) picture of the Bishop ordaining a new priest on the cover of the Vermont Diocese’s magazine, Vermont Catholic, and gave it the smuttiest possible interpretation.

For whatever reason, Seven Days writer Lauren Ober found it “sort of the most amazing photo I’ve ever seen…this week” (sort of the most?) and for whatever reason, the editors agreed to post the item on the paper’s Blurt blog.

The temptation to describe this as locker-room humor offends those of us who have spent some time in locker rooms and remember that the jokes there usually contained a modicum of wit.

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.