If you’re reading this early, come back later.

It is midnight, as late as some…uhhh, shall we just say, ‘veteran’ observers are willing to stay awake.

Maybe as late as they are able to stay awake.

According to the unofficial tally from WCAX-TV (which had far and away the best election night coverage in the state), Peter Shumlin is now ahead of Brian Dubie by 1,003 votes with almost a quarter of the precincts yet to report.

Shumlin said he was going to win. Could be, but the prudent observer will wait for some more precincts to report.

At this point, then, there is nothing to say. And while it is not a policy universally practiced in the journalism dodge, the preference here has always been that if there is nothing to say…don’t say anything.

So for you early birds, check back later. Maybe 10 AM.

And for all of you, there will be an extra posting tomorrow, Thursday.

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.

Woe is us.

That is not Vermont’s official state motto (“Freedom and Unity” is) but it sometimes seems that way. It’s impossible to prove this statistically, but it does seem that official, established, Vermont-government officials, academics, editorial writers, and possibly even bartenders-spend more than half their time and energy moaning and groaning about how awful everything is here.

On Saturday, for instance, WCAX-TV (Channel 3),  the state’s most influential television news station, ran a story reporting that “for the first time in decades” fewer than 2,000 new businesses started up in Vermont last year.

The story was legitimate, maybe even important, and it was accurately reported by Keagan Harsha. But it lacked context, and in so lacking fit right into the “things must be awful in Vermont” mindset.

Things are awful in American, which is in a deep recession. Fewer people are starting new businesses all over the country. That’s the context that was lacking.

The point here is not to trash WCAX or Harsha. It’s to question the widespread sentiment that any discouraging news about Vermont, especially its economy, means the state must be doing something wrong. No doubt it is; who isn’t? But an objective look at economic statistics around the country indicates that Vermont is somewhat better off than the other states.

In fairness to Harsha and his bosses, the business start-up numbers come from the Vermont Secretary of State’s office. There was no way any reporter was going to call the other 49 secretaries of state, even assuming that they all keep similar figures. And the latest federal numbers from the Commerce Department are two years old.

Still, it’s possible to find some evidence showing that the economic news in the rest of the country is as depressed (and depressing) as it is here. Federal figures show, for instance, that  ”New Privately Owned Housing Units Authorized” fell last year in Vermont, but at about the same rate as elsewhere. It has been widely reported that Vermont has one of the country’s lowest rates of home foreclosures, arguably the root cause of the recession.  Vermont’s unemployment rate, though rising, remains below the national average.

As to people going into and out of business, a survey by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor run jointly by Babson College and Baruch College showed that the percentage of Americans engaged in new businesses fell from 12.4 percent in 2005 to 9.6 percent in 2007.

That’s a pretty big percentage decrease, and most of it came before the economy went into recession in the summer of 2007.

That figure is not exactly comparable to business start-ups, and at any rate, it’s a percentage drop, not an actual number as reported by WCAX.

Which raises an interesting question: Just what was the percentage drop in Vermont start-ups last year? WCAX doesn’t tell us. It tells us only that there were fewer than 2,000, perhaps the smallest number since 1980. But that could be a tiny percentage increase, or a large one. Without knowing how many new firms opened their doors in 2007, it’s impossible to figure out the percentage of decline, arguably the more meaningful statistic.

The same holds true for business failures. At least 800 Vermont businesses “closed their doors” in 2008, Harsha reported, with not a word about whether this was more than in 2007, or an unusually high number, not to mention any comparison with other states. And look at the comparison: Even in tough times, more than twice as many start-ups as failures. Not, it seems a portent of economic decay.

(The start-up and failure figures are presumably available at the Secretary of State’s office. But efforts to find them on-line over the weekend did not succeed, either because they are not available on-line or because the guy searching for them is a techno-doofus).

Again, the purpose of today’s exercise is not to hold up Channel 3 or its reporter, who seems quite capable, to special ridicule or criticism. The problem is that the station’s approach  was typical of the “woe is us” attitude. The story accentuated the negative, apparently based on the assumption that its audience revels in bad news. The news, to be sure, is bad. But evidence that it is any worse between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain than, say,  between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, or the Rockies and the Pacific, is somewhere between scarce and non-existent.

The danger here is that when a reporter or a scholar comes up with news indicating that Vermont does have a worse problem than most of the rest of the country, or that the state really is pursuing unwise policies-economic or otherwise-it will get absorbed by the noise. As the old story says, sometimes there really is a wolf, but who will know when if the watchmen keep crying wolf when there are only raccoons at play?-Jon Margolis