A dispatch from London in today's New York Times waddles in to follow up on Barbara Amiel's column in Monday's Daily Telegraph. Never mind that readers of the New York Times had to wait until Saturday to learn about the news that the Telegraph brought in on Monday. (And even so the New York Times won't deign today to convey directly the "vulgar term" that is at the crux of the news story.) What's really amusing is the Times's reference to Lord Black of Crossharbour, which says, "His publications, which also include The Jerusalem Post, take a very conservative line." The New York Times, which takes a very liberal line, doesn't enlighten its readers about exactly when the line is crossed between a conservative line and a "very" conservative line. In future coverage of Lord Black and his ventures -- including those in New York that involve the editor of Smartertimes.com -- watch for the Times to use "very conservative" and "conservative" as dismissive shorthand instead of actually describing the substance of the newspapers' coverage or the papers' editorial positions on issues.

News Articles: Two original, non-Times-related news articles follow:

'Dumb, Stupid, Idiotic and Moronic' Tax Increase Is Now Law
By BENJAMIN SMITH
Smartertimes.com Staff
NEW YORK -- Remember this summer's $300 tax-cut check from Washington? Get ready to give much of it up to the cash-strapped New York City government.

Just two months after Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called raising taxes in the face of an economic downturn and the terrorist attacks "a dumb, stupid, idiotic, and moronic thing to do," he agreed in budget talks this week with the New York City Council to raise taxes. In particular, the budget deal between the mayor and the council revives the personal income tax surcharge. The council had heavily reduced the surcharge in 2001.

Proponents of the tax increase, which will take effect New Year's Day, say it will yield additional revenues that will help plug a budget gap estimated between $3 billion and $4 billion. But the tax increase will hit New Yorkers in the pocketbook, and it could cost the city thousands more jobs in the midst of a recession that has already sent unemployment soaring as companies lay off workers and move remaining jobs to lower-cost sites. The return of the 14% surcharge on a base city income tax rate of 2.55% to 3.20% reverses a Giuliani administration policy that had steadily reduced the share of personal income that city residents pay in taxes.

"These are very tough times for the city, and to raise the income tax is sort of like pouring gasoline on the fire," an economist at the Cato Institute in Washington, Stephen Moore, said.

Still, the tax hike was welcomed by those concerned that budget cuts will run too deep. The City Council, using a static analysis that assumes the tax increase will have no negative effects on job creation or the city's population level, estimates that the tax increase will ease the annual deficit by $362 million next fiscal year. The city's Independent Budget Office puts the figure at $347 million, and some economists expect the economic downturn and the impact of the tax itself to reduce further even those revenues.

The return of the surcharge "was a terrific, unexpected development," said the associate director of the budget-watching City Project, Glenn Pasanen. "The city needs the revenues, and there was no strong rationale for cutting that tax."

The City Council was able to reintroduce the personal income tax surcharge without actually voting on it. That's because the levy is authorized by the New York State government in Albany, but the city has the option of reducing or removing it. In 2001, the City Council cut the rate for the first time since the surcharge's introduction in 1991. A pair of local laws reduced it by more than half for couples making less than $90,000, and by a smaller amount for those in higher tax brackets.

Income taxes are often controversial among economists, but city income taxes have drawn heavier criticism than most because they are so easy to escape by moving to the suburbs. New York City's personal income tax is between 2.68% and 3.32% in 2001, including the reduced surcharge. Suburbs like Westchester and Long Island have the same state income tax as New York City -- a maximum of 6.85% -- but no additional city tax, while New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania have lower state income-tax rates, according to the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based group that argues Americans are taxed too much. High property tax rates in some suburbs complicate the overall comparison of the tax burden between New York City and the suburbs, but the property taxes, unlike the income taxes, apply only to property owners.

"When the United States government raises the federal income tax, it hurts growth but it's kind of hard for people to escape it," the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, Daniel Mitchell, said. "When a city does it, it's like putting a gun to its head."

New York is one of a handful of cities around the country that rely on an income tax to raise revenues. Other cities levying an income tax include Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia.

With New York's renewed surcharge in place, a couple making $90,000 will pay $235 more in city tax on their 2002 income than on their 2001 income, according to research by a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a New York-based think tank. But the damage could extend beyond household budgets: 11,000 jobs will be lost as a result of the raised surcharge, the Manhattan Institute researcher, E.J. McMahon, warned.

The Giuliani administration had until now embraced the argument for income tax reductions. The mayor and the City Council dropped one Dinkins-era surcharge in 1998, part of a series of tax cuts that saved city taxpayers more than $2 billion between 1994 and 2001, by the mayor's calculations. The reduction in 2001 of the personal income tax surcharge was one of the last such cuts, and was "symbolic of a change in the city's philosophy of government," Mr. Giuliani told the City Council in July. "The fact that New York City imposes the surcharge, a tax on taxes, recalls the city's out of control tax-and-spend days," he said then.

The tax cuts of the 1990s helped put New York City's job growth above the national average during an economic boom for the first time since the 1950s, Mr. McMahon and others have argued. The income tax will come out of money that small-business owners could have used for investment, and it will drive businesses and residents out of the city, damaging service industries, he said. That economic damage would reduce the council's projected $362 million in annual revenues from the income tax surcharge by $30 million, and the bad economy could drive that figure down further.

The next mayor and new city council still have a chance to extend the existing reductions on the surcharge or formulate new ones. The press office of Mayor-Elect Bloomberg's transition team did not return a call seeking comment on the question. A spokesman for Mayor Giuliani did not return a call seeking comment, and the chairman of the City Council Finance Committee, Herbert Berman, also did not return a call seeking comment on the tax increase.

This week's tax hike passed largely beneath the public radar. The New York Times's subheadline on a metro-section article about the budget deal stated simply that "two planned tax cuts will not take effect." But in fact, one of those two -- the personal income tax surcharge -- had already come into effect in 2001.

"This is a tax increase," a research associate at the Citizens Budget Commission, Douglas Offerman, said. "You can't have a temporary cut in a temporary tax."

At Least One Franzen Feud Set to Rest
By BENJAMIN SMITH
Smartertimes.com Staff
NEW YORK -- Oprah should be so lucky. Novelist Jonathan Franzen set to rest his spat with the small former Soviet republic of Lithuania -- just before reopening his feud with television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey in a New Yorker magazine article.

Mr. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel "The Corrections" angered Lithuanians with its portrayal of their country as anarchic and impoverished, as Smartertimes.com reported on November 16. The Lithuanian ambassador to the United States wrote Mr. Franzen's publisher to complain, and a correspondent for Lithuania's biggest daily newspaper subsequently visited the writer in his Harlem studio.

Now, Mr. Franzen says he's sorry to have given offense, and he promises to visit the country. "I do understand your worry that American readers will get a false impression of your country," Mr. Franzen wrote Ambassador Vygaudas Usackas in a December 12 letter, which the Lithuanian embassy provided to Smartertimes.com. "Let me take this opportunity to assure you that I personally am fully aware that the 'Lithuania' in the novel is a product of my imagination."

The novelist told the Lithuanians that he painted a grim portrait of their country -- "chronic coal and electricity shortages, freezing drizzles, drive-by shootings, and heavy dietary reliance on horsemeat," the novel said -- to make a political point: "I have a great deal of sympathy for the former Soviet states" that were "betrayed by the excesses of American globalism," he told a reporter from Lithuanian daily Lietuvos Rytas, according to a transcript of the interview that he attached to his letter. "I exaggerated" Lithuania's "political disarray and economic woes in the late 1990s in order to tell a more vivid and compelling story for American readers."

A spokesman for the Lithuanian embassy, Rolandas Kacinskas, declined to comment on his country's alleged betrayal. But Lithuania, which has boasted a stable currency since 1994, has been a rare zone of free markets and functioning democracy in the lands of the former Soviet Union.

Mr. Franzen's conflict with the Lithuanians was a less-noticed sequel to his public feud with Ms. Winfrey, who accepted "The Corrections" for her book club and then dumped it after Mr. Franzen displayed ambivalence about being associated with the show. The novelist later apologized for his faux pas -- but in the issue of the New Yorker dated December 24 and 31, he describes feeling that the presence of an Oprah camera crew on a trip to his native St. Louis was "fundamentally bogus."

A spokesman for the Oprah Winfrey Show did not return a call seeking comment on the New Yorker article.

At least the Lithuanians have accepted his apology. "It was kind of him to get back to us," Lithuanian embassy spokesman Rolandas Kacinskas said. Now, they're hoping Mr. Franzen will keep his promise to accept their invitation to visit Lithuania.

The novelist wrote that he "will be in northern Europe next October, and would love to take you up on your invitation then. In the meantime, please know that I have the deepest respect for your country."

"We hope that he really will take away a different impression of Lithuania and it will be reflected next time in his book," Mr. Kacinskas said.

An article in the sports section of today's New York Times reports that the Boston Red Sox have accepted a bid to be bought by a group that includes the New York Times company.

This is a repulsive deal on a number of levels. For one thing, New York's dominant newspaper now owns an interest in a baseball team that has had a bitter historic rivalry with New York's own baseball teams, the Yankees and the Mets. That may put a sour taste in the mouth of many Yankees and Mets fans, who wonder why anyone would want to own a Red Sox hat, let alone the entire team. No mention of that reaction in today's Times.

For another thing, it's repulsive from the point of view of Boston. The city has lost its own dominant newspaper, the Globe, to the control of New York. Now New York owns the Red Sox? The Times article today makes no mention of the reaction in Boston, which has a history of resisting colonial rule dating back at least to the Tea Party.

Indirectly: A dispatch from Gaza City in the international section of today's New York Times reports on an interview with a leader of the terrorist group Hamas. "Asked if by 'occupation' he was referring to the Gaza Strip and West Bank, which Israel conquered in the 1967 war, or all of Israel, Dr. Rantisi smiled slightly and declined to answer directly," the Times reports. Well, he may have declined to answer "directly," but a comment elsewhere in the Times article, in which the Hamas leader refers to "a struggle that continues now for 53 years," is a pretty direct answer.

Efforts: A dispatch from Cairo in the international section of today's New York Times reports, "Egypt and Jordan, the only two Arab League countries that have signed peace treaties with Israel, have backed Mr. Arafat's efforts to calm the violence that has all but smothered the peace process." Efforts to calm the violence? Mr. Arafat has been orchestrating and encouraging the violence that has all but smothered the "peace process." Even a New York Times editorial on December 14 referred to Mr. Arafat's "renewed use of terrorism to pressure Israel."

Fewer Security Guards: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports on an increase in the city's unemployment rate for the month of November. "Fewer people were needed to work as security guards," the Times article reports. If it is true that the rising unemployment is even a partial result of a decrease in the demand for security guards, there ought to be some statistics or discussion to back that up in the news article. In the absence of such information, a reduced demand for security guards seems improbable following the attacks of September 11. If companies are already firing the extra security guards they hired in a panic after September 11, that's a news story in itself.

Remember the front-page article in Tuesday's New York Times that claimed "Housing prices, which soared in the expansion of the 1990's, have not gone down"? Well, today's New York Times front page carries a story that begins, "Rents on thousands of apartments in Manhattan have tumbled in the last few months as the economy has worsened and fallout from the terrorist attack has spread beyond Lower Manhattan."

The Tuesday article claimed that the still-high housing prices had contributed to a surge in homelessness. Today's article tries to finesse that question. Today's article first claims that "the trend of reductions carries over to rent-regulated apartments on a smaller scale." Then it says, "Low-income, subsidized housing is not affected." And then it says, "While rents have fallen, the city's homeless population is still increasing, as the worsening economy strikes particularly hard at those at the bottom end of the economic ladder. Also, the lower end of the rental market, where most of the poor live, is highly regulated and thus not affected by the new cuts in rents."

Try to untangle this jumble of conflicting information. A reader is tempted to throw up his hands in despair.

First, there are the contradicting claims about what is happening to housing prices. One article claims prices "have not gone down," another claims the prices "have tumbled."

Then there are the contradicting claims about who is being struck "particularly hard" by the worsening economy. Today's article claims "those at the bottom end of the economic ladder" are being struck particularly hard. But a front-page New York Times article on Sunday claimed, "Unemployment has risen for nearly every group, climbing most sharply for college graduates and others who usually escape the brunt of a downturn."

Then there are the contradicting claims about how housing prices affect homelessness. Tuesday's article listed the steadily high housing prices as among those factors "responsible for the surge" in homelessness. Yet today's article seems to suggest that the poor are insulated from the effects of price in the housing market because their housing is "highly regulated."

Some of these contradictions may be explained by the rent control and "stabilization" regimes in place in New York and in a few other bastions of Marxism but not in other parts of the country. The Tuesday article was about homelessness nationwide, while today's article focuses on New York. Still, the overall picture is confusing.

Watch the Label: A "news analysis" in the national section of today's New York Times mentions several interest groups and advocacy groups. Consumers Union is mentioned with no explanation. Families USA is described as "a consumer advocacy group." The Kaiser Family Foundation is described as a "health research group." And the Heritage Foundation is described as "the conservative Heritage Foundation." In typical Times fashion, the conservative group gets labeled as such, while the liberal groups get labeled as "consumer" or "research" groups or get no label at all. There are plenty of conservatives -- some of them even consume things -- who think that the Heritage Foundation's policies would be better for consumers than the policies of the so-called consumer advocacy groups. The board of Families USA, for instance, includes not just "consumers" but a doctor, a former president of a union that represents health care workers, an aide to a Democratic congressman, a Democratic state senator, and Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff.

Death By Socialized Medicine: A dispatch from London in the international section of today's New York Times reports, "About 1,200 people died in public hospitals last year because of mistakes in prescribing and administering medicine, according to a report published today by a government watchdog group." The Times doesn't compare the deaths caused by Britain's socialized medical system to the incidence of such deaths in America, which has a health care system with more competition and less government control. That would be an illuminating comparison, but one unlikely to sway the true believers at the New York Times. Here's how one retiring Times columnist on Sunday described his view of Britain's National Health Service: "You know, the health service doesn't work. I'm still for it. But it doesn't work."

The lead editorial in today's New York Times defends a law that requires some groups engaged in political speech to disclose their donors. If the law is changed, the Times frets, "clever fund-raisers could drive truckloads of anonymous cash through."

The Times only in passing refers to what that cash might be used for. The best indication is a reference to "the presidential campaign," when "a sham group calling itself Republicans for Clean Air ran advertisements in New York attacking Senator John McCain during the primary season."

The Times editorial frets that a change to the law "opens a potential huge loophole freeing political groups from even the most simple reporting requirements."

Hmmm. This "loophole" was once known as the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. The Amendment doesn't distinguish between "anonymous" speech and non-anonymous speech. It doesn't say that disclosure of the identity of the speaker may be required.

In fact there was a U.S. Supreme Court case on this very point, the 1995 case of McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission. In that case, Justice Stevens, writing an opinion for the court, said, "Great works of literature have frequently been produced by authors writing under assumed names. Despite readers' curiosity and the public's interest in identifying the creator of a work of art, an author generally is free to decide whether or not to disclose her true identity. The decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to preserve as much of one's privacy as possible. Whatever the motivation may be, at least in the field of literary endeavor, the interest in having anonymous works enter the marketplace of ideas unquestionably outweighs any public interest in requiring disclosure as a condition of entry. Accordingly, an author's decision to remain anonymous, like other decisions concerning omissions or additions to the content of a publication, is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment."

A footnote pointed out that "American names such as Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) and O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) come readily to mind. Benjamin Franklin employed numerous different pseudonyms. . . . Distinguished French authors such as Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet) and George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin), and British authors such as George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Charles Lamb (sometimes wrote as 'Elia'), and Charles Dickens (sometimes wrote as 'Boz') , also published under assumed names."

The Supreme Court decision in McIntyre noted that this tradition extends to political speech in America, as well: "That tradition is most famously embodied in the Federalist Papers, authored by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, but signed 'Publius.' Publius's opponents, the Anti Federalists, also tended to publish under pseudonyms: prominent among them were 'Cato,' believed to be New York Governor George Clinton; 'Centinel,' probably Samuel Bryan or his father, Pennsylvania judge and legislator George Bryan; 'The Federal Farmer,' who may have been Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia member of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence; and 'Brutus,' who may have been Robert Yates, a New York Supreme Court justice who walked out on the Constitutional Convention. . . . A forerunner of all of these writers was the pre-Revolutionary War English pamphleteer 'Junius,' whose true identity remains a mystery."

Had the Times editorialists' view about the threat of "anonymous cash" prevailed at the dawn of the Republic, the debate over ratification of the Constitution might have been less vigorous, and either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights might never have passed. 'Cato,' Hamilton, Madison and Jay might all have been muffled.

The final irony, of course, is that today's screed against the evils of anonymous participation in political debate is penned by an unnamed editorialist, in an unsigned Times editorial.

Teddy Tumbles: A dispatch from Washington in the national page of the New York Times carries the following quote from Senator Kennedy about an education bill: "If your child is doing well, with this legislation, they will do better. If your child is failing, with this legislation they will get the help they need. Help is on its way." Maybe the education bill will teach children that a "child" is a singular noun that would deserve the pronoun "he" or "she." If the Senator wants to use "they" to avoid a gender-specific pronoun, then his soundbite should have started, "If your children are doing well. . ." and "If your children are failing. . ."

News Article: Original, non-Times related news article follows: Want to Know How Your Council Member Voted? Good Luck.

By BENJAMIN SMITH
Smartertimes.com Staff
NEW YORK -- In Atlanta and Albuquerque, and even in Washington, D.C., which isn't exactly known as a model of municipal management, you can check your city council member's voting and attendance record from your home computer. Here in New York, if you're persistent, you can make your way through three police checkpoints to Room 5 in the basement of City Hall and wait half an hour while the deputy director of legislative documents Vincent J. Bonavita finds the information on his own desktop monitor.

Mr. Bonavita, 31, and his colleagues in the Legislative Documents office have access to something ordinary citizens don't: Legistar. It's a commercially available computer program that allows users to search for everything from voting records to bill texts. And it's available in the offices of the City Council's central staff, to the staff of Speaker Peter Vallone, and to some -- but not all -- members of the council.

The lack of easy public electronic access to some public information in the City Council stands in sharp contrast to the Web site of the executive arm of New York government, nyc.gov, which won a "Best of the Web" award this year from the California-based Center for Digital Government for providing instant access to documents like inspection records for restaurants and buildings. Critics say that the City Council's reticence has helped protect a do-nothing body from scrutiny. Now, a group of newly elected council members are pushing to make the Legistar records easily available to the public.

"This is not rocket science," Councilman A. Gifford Miller said of putting more information online. "In fact, it's already been done. We just have to give the public and council members access to it," he said at a debate earlier this month.

The problem with the current system is not that voting information isn't, strictly speaking, available: complete council proceedings are bound in thick volumes every six months. To answer the question of who voted for what, or even if members showed up to vote, citizens can go to a library where the books are kept and read through the proceedings roll call by roll call.

The system "is just not user friendly," says Lenore Chester, a former associate director of the non-profit Citizens Union Foundation who started a project to track council votes a decade ago. "If you're a member of the public, forget it."

But the council leadership says there is no need to make its internal system available to the public.

"There is no government need to be able to run a voting record by member," City Council spokesman Jordan Barowitz told Smartertimes.com.

So Legistar is off limits to citizens who don't happen to work in City Hall. The council Web site does offer the complete texts of bills under consideration and of laws that have been passed, but voting and attendance records are not included.

That doesn't have to be. Albuquerque, for example, also uses Legistar, according to a press release from the company that produces the program, Daystar Computer Systems. And the Albuquerque city Web site offers access not just to bills, but also to votes. Atlanta has a similar system in place. And the Web site of Washington, D.C. -- where the mismanagement got so bad that the federal government appointed a control board to oversee --the city's finances in 1995 -- allows visitors to select and scroll through the voting record of any of its 13 council members, vote by vote.

New York's city council is admittedly larger than most. But its 51 members are nothing compared to the United States House of Representatives, whose Web site allows citizens to view how each of the 435 representatives voted on a given bill.

"If members want" to open New York's system up "they can," the council's Mr. Borowitz said. "There hasn't been an overwhelming desire."

That desire appears to have arrived this year with the turnover that term limits will bring to the council. A group of newly elected members calling themselves the "Fresh Democracy Council" have penned a statement of principles that includes a demand to give the public "full access to Legistar." They are also calling for meeting agendas -- which are sometimes set immediately before a meeting under the current regime -- to be set in advance and distributed on the Web.

It isn't just ordinary citizens who are being left out. Mr. Miller, who is a leading contender to replace Mr. Vallone as speaker, doesn't have access to Legistar either, he told the audience at a speaker candidates' debate earlier this month.

Staff for other council members say that they can get into Legistar. The council's Mr. Barowitz said that the delay in bringing Legistar to members like Mr. Miller and their staffs had to do with finding time for training sessions on the program.

The leading candidates for Council Speaker have endorsed plans to put more information on the council Web site. That move could call attention to another feature of the little-watched legislative body: the fact that virtually all the votes are either unanimous or along strict party lines.

An article in the international section of today's New York Times, about Posh Spice, reports, "As for Posh, she is skeletal thin with breasts that have recently become larger and better shaped enough to prompt press inquiries. She said it was the uplift bras." If readers want this sort of information -- with a photo to match -- they can go read Maxim magazine or the New York Post or even the New York Times Sunday magazine or Sunday Styles section. But in the A-section of the New York Times? While there's a war on and a recession? Carr Van Anda would be rolling in his grave. Beyond that, there's a question of opinion entering into the news columns. Does the Times foreign desk now have an opinion on what shape of breast is "better" than another?

Housing Prices: A front-page article in today's New York Times runs under the headline, "New Wave of Homeless Floods Cities' Shelters."

The Times article reports that "Housing prices, which soared in the expansion of the 1990's, have not gone down." That's not exactly accurate. The New York Times itself reported on Sunday that "the median price of previously owned homes fell to $145,000 in October from $152,000 in June." And the decline in interest rates means that mortgage payments on a home purchased today are less than they would have been when interest rates were higher, during "the expansion of the 1990's." The Department of Housing and Urban Development maintains a "Housing Affordability Index" that takes into account home prices, mortgage rates and median family income. The composite affordability index is the ratio of median family income to qualifying income. Values over 100 indicate that the typical (median) family has more than sufficient income to purchase the median-priced home. The composite index for September 2001, the most recent available on the HUD Web site, was 142.4. That shows that buying a house was more affordable in September 2001 than it was at any time since 1973, with the exception of January and February of 2001. The index is available at http://www.huduser.org/periodicals/ushmc/fall2001/histdat11.htm

The Times article cites two relatively recent factors as among those "responsible for the surge" in homelessness. One is that "Benefits for welfare recipients are expiring under government-imposed deadlines." And the other is that "charitable donations to programs that help the disadvantaged are down considerably," in part because of the effect of "the outpouring of donations for people affected by Sept. 11." So Sept. 11 is one relevant date. The welfare reform that imposed the 5-year limit only passed in 1996, and in New York State, the first group of welfare recipients reached the federal benefit limit only this month.

Then the Times article tells us that "More than half the cities surveyed by the mayors' group reported that in the last year people had remained homeless longer, an average of six months." Well, if the benefits cutoff was only scheduled for December, and September 11 happened in September, and if they are contributing factors in the "new wave" of homelessness, how come these homeless people have been homeless for six months -- since before either the benefits cutoff or effects of Sept. 11 on charitable contributions took effect?

A news article in the national section of today's New York Times reports that "estimates of the total number" of the nation's Muslims "range from 4 million to 6 million." And a letter to the editor of today's New York Times claims there are "as many as seven million" Muslims living in America.

Yet as recently as October 28, 2001, a news article in the New York Times said America's Muslim population is "estimated variously at two million to six million." And the October 25, 2001, New York Times carried a news article about a CUNY sociologist who studied the American Muslim population and estimated its total size at "1.8 million adults and children."

In other words, to judge from the Times news report, in less than two months the low estimate of the American Muslim population has increased to "4 million" from 1.8 million. And to judge by the letter to the editor published in today's Times, the high estimate of the American Muslim population has gone to 7 million from 6 million over a similar period. Maybe all the publicity has led to a wave of new converts. Or maybe there's some exaggeration going on, and the Times isn't treating the estimates with much skepticism. It's hard to imagine that a letter claiming there are 500 million American Christians or 50 million American Jews would make it into the Times.

News Article: An original, non-Times-related news article follows: Meet Angel Rodriguez, A Frontrunner in Council Speaker's Race; He Calls Rudy 'One of the Worst Mayors in the History of the City'

By BENJAMIN SMITH
Smartertimes.com Staff
NEW YORK -- If you had asked people to name the Puerto Rican who was going to end up in a powerful elected position in City Hall next year, Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer would have been at the top of a lot of lists -- until the election dashed those hopes.

Now it looks like that distinction may go to Angel Rodriguez, a stolid accountant who appears to have as much in common with Mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg as he does with the liberal Democrat Mr. Ferrer. The city councilman is a frontrunner to become the second most powerful elected official in City Hall, speaker of the New York City Council, a role that would make the little-known south Brooklyn politician a crucial player in making the toughest budget in decades.

But Mr. Rodriguez's short four years as a councilman raise more questions than they answer about where, exactly, he stands. On one hand he's a small businessman, a landlord, and a longtime fiscal hawk who warned of an impending crunch well before September 11. But Mr. Rodriguez, 44, also casts himself as a loyal Democrat who says he will fight to maintain or raise city spending on public schools, health care, and services for the aging, and will lobby Albany to reinstate the commuter tax. His mixed politics have left him open to an attack from some labor groups and has helped create an unexpectedly tight race for speaker.

"The liberals think IÕm conservative and the conservatives think I'm liberal," Mr. Rodriguez told Smartertimes.com. "On social things I'm very much to the left" of the Council majority, he said, but "on budgetary issues I tend to be more to the right, and on economic development I'm to the right."

In an interview, the compact, mustachioed Mr. Rodriguez declined to outline cuts he'd make to the strapped city budget. He also refused to suggest any legislation he favored. The only specific program he did advocate echoed proposals by the mayor-elect: Mr. Rodriguez said he'd work to encourage -- either through land-use rulings or financial support -- the development of high-tech, high-skill jobs in industries including biotechnology.

Mr. Rodriguez's record is about as hard to pin down as his future plans. The City Council, which now operates along strict party lines and under the tight control of the speaker, offers legislators little chance to develop meaningful voting records.

In one of the few divided votes during Mr. Rodriguez's tenure, he supported a law that limited landlords' liability for lead paint in apartments. The bill was supported by landlords and by Council Speaker Peter Vallone. Mr. Rodriguez is himself a landlord, listing between $10,000 and $40,000 in rental income from two buildings on the report he filed last year with the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board.

Mr. Rodriguez has also been a voice for a balanced budget: he was warning of the city's fiscal gap well before September 11. In an article written this May for the website Gotham Gazette, he labeled the "annual imbalance" in the budget "the most important issue facing the City." He continued: "if our economy turns, these budget deficits will become enormous and extremely difficult to manage and may force cuts to important programs and/or tax increases." When asked about Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, his first criticism is financial: the mayor was "one of the worst mayors in the history of the city" -- not for aggressive policing or divisive politics, but for increasing the city's debt during an economic boom.

Another issue that offers a clue to Mr. Rodriguez's politics centers on plans to sell a city-owned warehouse in Red Hook to a developer for a Fairway supermarket, shops and offices. Mr. Rodriguez vowed to fight the plan because it didn't include any affordable housing -- something, he said, needed to prevent the project from being "isolated" from Red Hook. The project could face a vote in the city council this year, and the developer, Greg O'Connell of Kings Harbor View Associates, said he will accommodate the councilman's demands to include housing.

"If the housing component is what is necessary to make the project work, then we will do it," Mr. O'Connell said.

Mr. Rodriguez's short, enigmatic record hasn't kept the labor-backed Working Families Party and unions including the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE!) and the Communications Workers of America from launching an unusually open campaign to derail Mr. Rodriguez's candidacy.

"Mr. Rodriguez has a less than stellar record of support for unions," the CWA political director for New York, Bob Master, said. "There is no reason to settle for someone with an uncertain record."

The labor groups who oppose Mr. Rodriguez say he's a supporter of issuing vouchers that would allow public school parents to send their children to private schools and of privatizing elements of public education. They base this claim on remarks they say he made in closed committee hearings and other meetings. But Mr. Rodriguez says he's "categorically" opposed to vouchers and to privatizing the management of public schools, at least until the schools are improved; and he ran this year with the endorsement of the anti-voucher United Federation of Teachers.

Much of Mr. Rodriguez's labor trouble stems not from specific issues but from his general distance from the movement. He won his first race against a candidate backed by major city unions, and has done little to build bridges since then. "The guy's reputation is that he doesn't return phone calls" from labor, a political consultant familiar with the stance of the unions who oppose Mr. Rodriguez said. "He launched a speaker candidacy without even talking to labor."

Mr. Rodriguez responds that he has a good relationship with the municipal unions and other more centrist labor groups. But the concerted, public attack in a contest usually conducted behind closed doors has left an opening for his leading rival for the speaker's post, Upper East Side Democrat A. Gifford Miller.

The race will depend largely on the decisions of Democratic leaders in Queens and the Bronx, who will steer the votes of the members they helped elect. Five other council members have also declared their intentions to become speaker. The race will be decided at the council's first meeting January 9 by a majority of the body's 51 votes.

While Mr. Rodriguez is under attack by the Princeton-educated Mr. Miller on the issues of labor and public education, he says his support for both is in his blood. He was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1957 to a mother who was a long-time member of one of the unions that would become UNITE!. He spent elementary school through college in public education, eventually receiving a degree in accounting from CUNY's College of Staten Island.

Mr. Rodriguez founded Small Business Accounting, which prepares tax returns and advises businesses on managing their finances. He is still a partner there, and drew an income between $20,000 and $60,000 from the company last year, according to documents filed with the conflicts of interest board.

With the support of the Democratic Party leaders in the city's biggest borough, Brooklyn, Mr. Rodriguez remains the man to beat in the city council race. He says he has the backing of at least 18 council members; 26 votes are required to win. But he has been put on his heels in recent weeks by Mr. Miller, and has not responded with particular adeptness.

At a candidates' debate this month, he began on the defensive: "Before I begin my opening statement, I want to dispel some rumors that have been floating around in the city for a while. The first rumor is that I am unsupportive of unions and union issues. This is totally untrue," he said.

After the meeting, his communications director, Lynn Schulman, pulled another candidate, Bill Perkins, aside. "Can you teach Angel to be a little smoother?" she asked.

A sentence in the last paragraph of the "Lives" column in today's New York Times magazine reads, "After the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the F.A.A. tightened security as it did after the bombing of T.W.A. Flight 800."

As one astute Smartertimes.com reader e-mailed this morning, "'The bombing of T.W.A. Flight 800'? If the Times has evidence T.W.A. Flight 800 was bombed, one would think they would put in on the front page of the news section, not the last page of the magazine."

Enough Already: Today's New York Times magazine prints a letter to the editor that is almost identical to one that appeared in the newspaper on December 11. The December 11 letter asserted that national service "benefits the volunteer as well." Today's letter says, "service benefits the volunteer as well." The December 11 letter said that "Both military and non-military opportunities. . . provide young Americans with new skills (including other languages), the chance to make a genuine contribution, and the opportunity to pay one's dues for the duty-free gift of citizenship in this country." Today's letter says "Both military and non-military opportunities in this country and abroad provide young Americans with new skills (including other languages), the chance to make a genuine contribution and the opportunity to pay our dues for the currently duty-free gift of citizenship in this country." Both the December 11 letter and today's go on to refer to the letter-writer's service in the Peace Corps in Senegal in 1967-1969, which the writer says "shaped my life." The letters are signed by the same person -- "M. Burch Tracy Ford," who is identified as the head of school at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn. Given all the letters the New York Times must receive, it's hard to see why the newspaper would choose to run essentially the same one, from the same person, twice in one week.

Behind the News: Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times refers to "the Saudi sheik" in the newly released tape of Osama Bin Laden. Thomas Friedman's column refers to "the unidentified Saudi sheik sitting next to him." Neither Ms. Dowd nor Mr. Friedman apparently were aware of the news dispatch from Riyadh in today's New York Times, which reports that the man in question was not a cleric but a warrior. That news dispatch runs under the headline "Dinner Guest of bin Laden Identified as Saudi Fighter; Had Mistakenly Been Called Religious Scholar."

Some People: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports that the Giuliani administration is spending $2.5 million to pay for 50,000 tickets to Broadway shows. The Times article says, "Although some people have criticized the move, Ms. Nicholas and Mr. Bernstein both defended it on economic grounds, with Ms. Nicholas saying that for retailers, 'January was going to be very bleak, so this is a way of generating some spending.'" The critics get stuck in a subordinate clause. The critics are not named. The critics' arguments are not described. The proponents of the idea, on the other hand, are named and get plenty of space for their detailed defense of the proposal. It's a strangely one-sided dispatch, given that the idea of taking tax dollars from struggling entrepreneurs and wage-earners and using them to subsidize the rich investors in Broadway shows is such a flaky one.

Specialist: The New York Times Book Review today reviews a book by "the noted Asia specialist Ian Buruma." In fact Mr. Buruma has written a lot about Europe, too, so it's not quite accurate to pigeonhole him as an Asia specialist.

The Arts & Ideas section of today's New York Times carries an article about income inequality in America. The article begins, "For 30 years the gap between the richest Americans and everyone else has been growing so much that the level of inequality is higher than in any other industrialized nation."

The article goes on to quote from a book that claims, "Forty-seven percent of the total real income gain between 1983 and 1998 accrued to the top 1 percent of income recipients, 42 percent went to the next 19 percent, and 12 percent accrued to the bottom 80 percent."

Both statements assume a lack of income mobility. But that is at odds with reality. It doesn't make much sense to speak of the gap between "the richest Americans" and "everyone else" over a 30 year period without noting that a lot of people who 30 years ago were "the richest Americans" are now just "everyone else," and that a lot of people who 30 years ago were "everyone else" are now "the richest Americans." If you look at the people on the Forbes list of the richest Americans, many of those at the very top today -- Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison -- were in the "everyone else" category 30 years ago.

Similarly, the study that showed that "Forty-seven percent of the total real income gain between 1983 and 1998 accrued to the top 1 percent of income recipients" is almost certainly not based on a longitudinal study of what happened to the people who were the top 1 percent of income recipients in 1983, but on a snapshot comparison of the top 1 percent in 1983 against the top one percent in 1998. Those are different groups of people; whatever income gain is accruing is then being accrued in an important sense not by individuals but by categories. Which is an important distinction. The Times article talks about the effect of income inequality on "people's sense of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their lot in life." You'd expect a poor person to be a lot less dissatisfied if he knew that in 20 years he could be a rich person -- or even if he knew that in 40 years his children or grandchildren could be rich -- than if he knew that he and his whole family would be mired in poverty for eternity.

Today's Times article does a decent job of talking to some conservative economists who make the argument that "The problem is not inequality but poverty." That's true as far as it goes. But discussing income inequality without discussing income mobility distorts the issue.

Nicholas Kristof writes in his op-ed page column in today's New York Times, "To prevent future Osama bin Ladens from arising, we need to see economic development to lift living standards and create viable countries. A growing body of evidence suggests that civil wars and terrorism arise in part from economic roots. An important study last year by the World Bank, for example, suggested that among the best ways to prevent civil war (which, as in Afghanistan and Somalia, often spawns terrorism) is to promote economic growth and in particular manufacturing, so as to diversify economies away from dependence on commodities. There is a landmark step we could take to fight terrorism: Announce our willingness to work toward a free-trade area encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States. . . . Granted, fighting terrorism with trade and economic development is not as satisfying as dropping bombs on Taliban tanks, but in the long run it is more important."

Ah, the "economic roots" of terrorism. Mr. Kristof and his editors at the Times might have done well to read the business section of their own newspaper yesterday. There appeared a column under the headline, "To avoid terrorism, end poverty and ignorance, right? Guess again. Debunking conventional wisdom about the roots of hate crime."

That column pointed out, "The fragmentary evidence on terrorists, however, suggests that the common stereotype that they come from the ranks of the most uneducated and economically deprived is a myth. From 1996 to 1999, Nasra Hassan, a United Nations relief worker, interviewed nearly 250 people involved in suicide attacks, including failed bombers, families of deceased bombers and trainers. Her conclusion, as reported in The New Yorker: 'None of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or depressed.' Professor Ariel Merari, director of the Political Violence Research Center at Tel Aviv University, concurred: 'All information that I have also indicates that there is no connection between socioeconomic indicators and involvement in militant/terrorist activity in general and in suicide attacks in particular, at least as much as the Palestinian case is concerned.'"

The business page column also noted that Spain and Ireland, "which have struggled with terrorism for years," are not poor.

Mr. Kristof claims that civil war often spawns terrorism. The business-section columnist acknowledges the findings about economic development decreasing the chances of civil war, but he says that economic development may well affect civil wars and terrorism differently. The business-section columnist quotes an expert who suggests: "You get terrorism when the state is strong and competent enough to prevent the initial attacks of would-be rebel leaders from escalating into a big civil war (e.g., Northern Ireland, the Basque region in Spain, the Red Brigade in Italy). Income, we argue, is a measure of such capabilities."

So why is the Times op-ed page offering up this morning the same "conventional wisdom" that was debunked pretty convincingly the day before in the Times business section? Smartertimes.com understands that different columnists are there to offer differing opinions, but the Kristof column doesn't address or rebut with even a modicum of thoroughness the arguments that were made the day before by the business section columnist. It's as if the New York Times op-ed page crowd doesn't read the rest of its own newspaper.

No One: An article in today's New York Times reports on the Bush administration's decision to withdraw from the ABM treaty. The Times says, "'A year ago, it was widely reported that our intelligence community had concluded that pulling out of ABM would prompt the Chinese to increase their nuclear arsenal tenfold, beyond the modernization they are doing anyway,' said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who said he learned of Mr. Bush's decision by reading a newspaper. 'And when they build up, so will the Indians, and when the Indians do, so will the Pakistanis. And for what? A system no one is convinced will work.'"

Hmm. If all these foreign countries are so unconvinced that the system will work, why then would they spend lots of money to build up their arsenals in an effort to overcome it?

Lost in New York: An article in today's New York Times reports on how the September 11 attack affected a law firm in New York. "On Sept. 11, Mr. Fitzgerald had been on his way to work to wrap up the project when United Airlines Flight 175 hit some 20 floors above his office; a tire from the plane struck his cab. Shaken, he walked nine miles to his home on East 90th Street," the Times reports. It isn't nine miles from the World Trade Center to anywhere on East 90th Street, as anyone with a basic sense of New York City geography would know. Even if you take a long-distance route, the FDR Drive, it's only about 8 miles.

Note: Smartertimes.com is operating this morning off the New York Times on the Web.

News Article: Original, non-Times-related news article: For $1.5 Million Plus, Loft W/ Construx Vu

By BENJAMIN SMITH
Smartertimes.com Staff
NEW YORK -- Residents of a pricey new Manhattan condominium building are complaining that their developer didn't tell them they'd be moving into a construction site.

The scene at "The Greenwich," a converted department store on Sixth Avenue between 13th and 14th streets, turned contentious in late November after residents learned that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to dig and build on the avenue outside their building for more than three years. Now buyers of the lofts, which start at $1.5 million, wonder why developer Mosbacher Properties didn't tell them about the disruption before they bought their apartments.

The Greenwich had been billed as one of New York's hot new properties, and scored a coup earlier this year when it landed as residents both the widow and daughter of restaurateur Warner LeRoy, who created Tavern on the Green and the Russian Tea Room. But now residents face a declining real estate market, a shortage of shops to fill the 6th Avenue storefronts, and the prospect of noisy construction and dirty windows.

"Everyone is upset," says artist Joan Barist, who lives in the Greenwich.

Developer Mosbacher Properties "absolutely didn't tell us" about the planned construction, said the assistant to Jennifer LeRoy, Warner's daughter and his successor as CEO of LeRoy Adventures. "Management -- or lack thereof -- is a running problem" in the Greenwich, the assistant, Jennifer Falk, said.

The person in charge of selling the condos defends her record, and the building's. "People are making a bigger deal of this than they need to," Greenwich sales director Michele Conte of Brown Harris Stevens said of the construction. "Have they never gone through this before? This is New York."

The Greenwich only this week sent out a letter to current and prospective residents detailing the plans, and also this week entered the details in the building's official prospectus, Ms. Conte said. But she said that residents were informed about noisy construction within the building.

"Nobody was misled here," she said.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has scheduled 39 months of digging and construction on both sides of 6th Avenue at 13th Street to expand a system of emergency fans on the F subway line, MTA spokeswoman Deirdre Parker said. The fans would be used to clear smoke out of the subway system in a fire. The city will award a contract for the $25 million project next month, Ms. Parker said.

The MTA informed Mosbacher Properties about the planned work about two years ago, the MTA's assistant director of governmental and community relations, Steve Strauss, told Smartertimes.com. He said he contacted the company to tell them that the construction would cut in on their basement storage space. The condos began selling in 1999, and residents began moving in in 2000, Ms. Conte said.

Other neighborhood groups were apparently aware the construction was coming. The city presented their plans to Community Board Two more than a year ago, board member David Reck said. And the Greenwich's block association has been aware of the construction for over a year, association vice president David Olin told Smartertimes.com.

Four Greenwich residents reached by Smartertimes.com said they first learned of the planned construction after they had purchased their apartment and moved in, when New York City Transit announced a November 30 public meeting on the subject.

The chairman of the condominium's board, Alan Lipner, said residents hadn't yet decided what to do. " I really can't say anything because I haven't determined what the facts are," he said.

Mosbacher Properties gets its name from the family that includes Republican fundraiser Robert Mosbacher Sr., a secretary of commerce in the first Bush administration and a friend of the Bush family. Robert Mosbacher Sr. is chairman of Mosbacher Energy Company. Asked about the ownership of Mosbacher Properties, a spokeswoman for the Houston-based Mosbacher Energy Company said, "You'd better ask Mosbacher Properties." Clinton Smullyan, chairman of Mosbacher Properties, is "a cousin" of the former commerce secretary, Ms. Conte said. Mr. Smullyan did not return three calls seeking comment.

A dispatch from Washington in the national section of today's New York Times reports on the maneuvering among House Republicans for positions in the congressional leadership. The Times reports, "Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois, said he was considering running for either majority leader or whip. 'We need new faces, new blood and new ideas,' Mr. LaHood said."

The Times lets this statement, which is laugh-out-loud funny, pass without noting that Mr. LaHood has been drawing a federal paycheck for his work in the House of Representatives since 1983. He was a longtime aide to Rep. Robert Michel, who served for a time as the House Republican leader. Mr. LaHood served for four years as Mr. Michel's chief of staff. When Mr. Michel retired in January 1995, Mr. Lahood took over his seat in Congress. If Mr. LaHood really believes "we need new faces, new blood and new ideas," he ought to take himself out of the running.

Coordinated Action: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports, "The president of Yale University said yesterday that he would like to abandon the frenzied process of early-decision admissions, and that he had approached the presidents of other selective colleges to discuss the possibility of coordinated action." The article goes on to report that the Yale president's comments "came as Yale and other selective colleges were mailing out hundreds of acceptances this week to early decision applicants who filed applications by Nov. 1 and are committed to enroll if accepted."

Funny how the Times seems to embrace "coordinated action" when it is engaged in by college presidents seeking advantage in the market for incoming freshmen, but not by auction-house executives seeking advantage in the art market.

And funny, too, how the article makes no mention of the early action program at Harvard and MIT, which gives applicants an early answer without requiring a commitment from them to enroll if accepted. Brown, Princeton and Yale used to have early action programs but have since moved to binding early decision programs. If Mr. Levin thinks the binding early decision program is such a bad idea, why then did he abandon the early action program? The Times article doesn't help with any answers.

Unreasonable: Check out this paragraph from today's New York Times review of Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News." The Times reviewer writes that Mr. Goldberg's argument is "diminished by willfully unreasonable analogies: 'Why should the children of Jesse Jackson or Colin Powell or Diana Ross get some kind of racial preference when they apply to college or go out for a job, but no 'affirmative action' is given to the child of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant coal miner from West Virginia?' An example that loaded is as unfair as the weighted news stories he denounces." Leave aside the fact that Smartertimes.com doesn't quite see how Mr. Goldberg's example fits the definition of an analogy. Mr. Goldberg's question doesn't strike Smartertimes.com as "willfully unreasonable" or "loaded" or "unfair" at all. It's a question that comes up often in the public policy debate over racial preferences in hiring, one asked by neo-liberals like the Washington Monthly's Charlie Peters as well as by the federal judges that must rule on the legality of such programs. It's a question that defenders of racial preferences have ready answers to. The treatment of the coal miner's child might be considered "unreasonable" or "unfair," but it is just hard to see how the Times reviewer would consider Mr. Goldberg's raising the question to be unfair.

In his column on the op-ed page of today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes a memo from President Bush to Saudi Arabia's minister of Islamic affairs. "What encourages us is that you seem to understand that and are taking steps to curtail incitement in your mosques and media," Mr. Friedman writes.

Funny how these Times columnists get all worked up over Attorney General Ashcroft's supposed violations of civil liberties in America, but at the same time they are advocating "taking steps" to curtail the freedoms of press, speech and religion in other countries. Mr. Friedman's suggestion might make sense in the short-term context of Saudi Arabia's state-controlled press and broadcast outlets, but not in the context of the march of freedom.

Even in the short-term context, there isn't much to suggest that America should be encouraged that the Saudis "understand" or are "taking steps" to curtail incitement. Consider this December 7, 2001, report by Matthew Kalman in Canada's National Post: "A major Arabic TV channel has produced a 30-part dramatization of the notorious anti-Semitic 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' to be broadcast throughout the Arab world as a special program for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. 'Horseman Without a Horse' is a multi-million-dollar production starring leading Egyptian actor Muhammad Subhi in 14 different roles with a large international cast from Egypt, Syria and France. The program was made by Arab Radio and Television (ART) a popular satellite channel based in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. Roz Al-Youssuf, an Egyptian weekly, said in an admiring preview that the series successfully debunks Jewish claims that the Protocols -- the supposed minutes of the Jewish clique that controls the world -- were a forgery invented by anti-Semitic propagandists in Tsarist Russia. 'For the first time, the series' writer courageously tackles the 24 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, revealing them and clarifying that they are the central line that still, to this very day, dominates Israel's policy, political aspirations and racism,' the paper reported."

Hard to see how Mr. Friedman, speaking in the voice of President Bush, can say that he is "encouraged" by such developments in Jedda.

News Article: Original, non-Times-related news article: Where Do All the Knives Go?

By BENJAMIN SMITH
Smartertimes.com Staff
NEW YORK -- Air travel is down, but tens of thousands of travelers still fly out of New York area airports every day. And despite warnings, many still bring with them forbidden sharp objects -- nail scissors, pocket knives, razor blades -- only to have them confiscated by baggage screeners. Common sense would indicate that somewhere in the New York metropolitan area is a pile of knives big enough to outfit several divisions of the Swiss Army. So where do all the knives go?

First, into a tangle of jurisdictions. Those baggage screeners -- many of whom will soon become Federal employees -- work under guidelines set by the Federal Aviation Administration. But the security checkpoints are run by individual airlines, which can hire private companies to inspect baggage.

The most recent FAA regulations prohibit knives of any length, along with box cutters, ice picks, and scissors. That's been bad for some businesses. Swiss Army Brands took a particular hit from losing its place at duty-free airport shops, and a spokesman for Buck Knives, Tom Ables, said "all the knife people we talk to say it's been soft" since September 11. Some retailers, though, say they've had a boost from customers coming in to replace confiscated knives: Paragon Sports in Manhattan has sold dozens that way, knife counter saleswoman Veronica Chamlee said.

FAA rules bar sharp objects on planes, but they don't say where to put them once they've been confiscated. So airlines can do "whatever they want" with the harvest of Swiss Army Knives and other, potentially valuable, objects, an FAA spokeswoman, Alison Duquette, said.

A United Airlines spokesperson refused to discuss the airline's policy on security grounds, but other airlines contacted by Smartertimes referred calls to their private security companies. One of the biggest of those is Argenbright Security, which has staff at 45 airports and which says it has confiscated more than 20,000 pounds of banned items since September 11.

Contraband is "disposed of by local law enforcement," Argenbright spokeswoman Sara Jackson said. Confiscated objects, she said, are "always destroyed."

And in much of the country, that appears to be how it works. At some Florida airports, sheriffs departments around the state store contraband temporarily in their evidence rooms, then incinerate it, according to press reports. In San Antonio, Texas, last month, airport police reported that they were storing 10 boxes and three garbage bags full of confiscated objects.

Not so in New York. The relevant law enforcement authority in the case of John F. Kennedy International, La Guardia, and Newark International airports is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department. And "Port Authority does not have anything to do" with "the disposition of anything that's seized at checkpoints," Port Authority spokesman Pasquale DiFulco said.

Although spokespersons for government agencies, airlines, and security services said they remain uncertain about the knives' final destination, a number of airport employees on the ground had a simple answer.

"Security takes it and throws it away," a Continental Airlines baggage service worker at JFK, Julia Barcia, said. A baggage service worker at La Guardia, who gave his name only as Jim, said the knives are "tossed into the trash." And a security worker at JFK, Justin, said "we separate it and put it in the proper garbage cans."

And then? Well, the Port Authority didn't respond to an inquiry about who handles their trash. And three Queens pawnbrokers told Smartertimes they haven't noticed a sudden influx of knives onto the local market. So those knives may still be out there, somewhere.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman attempts this morning to blame Argentina's financial crisis on a failed test of "the libertarian credo: that the great expansion in government's role between the two world wars was unwarranted." In particular, Mr. Krugman blames Argentina's troubles on a currency board that essentially fixed the value of the Argentine peso to the dollar. In fact, Mr. Krugman could benefit from reading the news coverage of the New York Times. In particular he might have a look at a dispatch from Argentina in the November 18, 2001 New York Times, which reported, "Provincial governments across Argentina are choking from their combined $23 billion debt, the product of a deepening 41-month-old recession and of their large inefficient bureaucracies, known better for corruption and political patronage than for service." The Times news article goes on to say that, "economists say that most of the provincial financial problems stem from unwieldy bureaucracies, built by old-fashioned political bosses. Eighty-five percent of the San Juan government's $783 million annual budget, for instance, goes to wages rather than services. The bureaucracy of 30,000 workers, combined with their family members, make up a big political bloc that resists wage cuts or trimming of inefficient agencies. 'San Juan residents work and produce to allow the state to subsist, even though it does not serve the purpose for which it was created,' Federico Manrique, an economics writer at the San Juan daily newspaper Diario de Cuyo, complained in a column this week. 'What is the purpose of having more police per capita than New York if there isn't enough fuel to keep them on patrol or enough money to buy them uniforms?'" Mr. Krugman somehow interprets the Argentina situation as puncturing the idea "that government activism is unnecessary, and that radical laissez-faire works." In fact, as the November 18 Times news article shows, it is "government activism" that has helped get Argentina into its current mess, and a dose of laissez-faire that might help cure it.

Moreover, Mr. Krugman in the midst of today's column issues a correction that is incredibly lacking in generosity of spirit. Here's what Mr. Krugman wrote on November 7, 2001: "As little as three years ago Argentina's 'currency board' monetary system was the subject of extravagant praise in publications like Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, and economists at the Cato Institute established lucrative consulting practices advising other countries to mimic Argentina's approach." Here's what Mr. Krugman writes today: "Contrary to what some may have inferred from a previous column, no staff members at the Cato Institute are in the currency-regime consulting business." Well, it looks to Smartertimes.com like the question here is not what "some may have inferred" but what Mr. Krugman actually wrote. Are these nonexistent consulting practices also not "lucrative"? Or is Mr. Krugman going to leave the point about the lucrative nature of these nonexistent practices uncorrected, as well? Some might have inferred that he was talking about specific cases or individuals. Is the problem that there isn't anyone running a lucrative consulting practice advising countries on this, or is the problem just that the people who are doing it are not on the staff of the Cato Institute. Do they have some kind of non-staff affiliation with the Cato Institute? Are they affiliated with some other institute? Times readers are left with all these unanswered questions. Given that the Times has refused to run a letter to the editor from the Cato Institute setting the matter straight, one might think that the newspaper owes Times readers and Cato economists something a little less grudging than this glancing business about what "some might have inferred."

An editorial in today's New York Times about campaign finance "reform" asserts, "The Shays-Meehan bill would ban campaign donations of unregulated soft money from corporations, unions and rich individuals."

Never mind that these donations are already regulated; there are regulations that require disclosure. And never mind that Shays-Meehan, in some versions, would go far beyond limiting these already-disclosed campaign donations to also impose limits on independent expenditures. How about that reference to "rich individuals"? The fact about the limits on political speech that the Times is backing is that there is no income test or assets test. They would apply just as equally to a rich person who wants to donate $25,000 to the Democratic Party as to a non-rich person who wants to donate $25,000 to the Republican Party. The only "individuals," rich or otherwise, that the law would not apply to would be those who own newspapers, which, under the law, would be able to print candidate endorsements in editorials and would be able to print an unlimited number of unregulated news articles bashing or boosting political candidates. So maybe it would be more accurate, in the Times editorial, to say that "the Shays-Meehan bill would limit the political speech rights of corporations, unions and the non-Sulzberger rich."

Medicaid Bailout: A news article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports, "New York is helping to lead states in a nationwide effort effort to persuade the federal government to provide billions of dollars in additional aid to help the states cover the cost of Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor." To judge by the Times report, there is not a single person who thinks that such a bailout is a bad idea. It's a one-sided story.

In fact, there are serious doubts about whether federal dollars should be used to prop up New York's health care system. The Times article acknowledges that New York "has long had among the most expensive Medicaid programs of any state." But it attributes this fact, to the extent that it explains it at all, to the fact that the program in New York "recently broadened its eligibility requirements to allow even more people to qualify."

But the high cost of Medicaid in New York isn't merely on a total basis -- it is on a per-patient basis. Steven Malanga reported in the Summer 2001 issue of City Journal that "a recent study by the Data Advantage consulting group found that New York's hospitals collectively ring up the second-highest average bills of any state in the nation -- $6,204 per hospitalization, or 30 percent above the national mean, even after adjusting for the severity of cases New York hospitals treat. Meanwhile, the state spent $7.4 billion in 1999 on hospitalized Medicaid patients, or $4,180 per patient, compared with $9.2 billion, or just $2,377 per patient, in Texas and California combined." Mr. Malanga also reported that "The average cost of training a resident in New York State is now about four times as high as at major medical centers in California or Massachusetts."

That context is missing from this morning's Times article. Also missing is a comment from anyone who might question why the taxpayers of California, Massachusetts and Texas should prop up New York's expensive hospitals. One reason might be that New York's teaching hospitals train many of the doctors who go on to practice in other states. But that's a reason to shift doctor-training costs to the doctors themselves, many of whom go on to make quite a nice living, rather than a reason to ask non-New York taxpayers to help the New York taxpayers in subsidizing the doctors-in-training.

Not in the Times: No mention in today's New York Times of the reports from Israel that one of the suicide bombs that went off earlier this month in Jerusalem was laced with a chemical weapon -- rat poison. If this ends up being confirmed, it is big news.

An article in today's New York Times reports on time limits and welfare reform. "States can relax deadlines quite freely because the welfare law permits caseload exemptions of up to 20 percent due to various hardships," the Times reports. "Because of the strong economy of the 1990's and the abundance of jobs then, far fewer than 20 percent of recipients have stayed on welfare for five years and therefore are not approaching a deadline." (The end of that last sentence is hard to understand, but what it seems to be trying to convey is that far fewer than 20 percent of welfare recipients are now approaching a deadline.)

The Times article continues, "That means that unless unemployment rises sharply, states say they can grant exemptions at the current pace and not reach the 20 percent for two or three years. By then, proponents of the welfare law say, the economy should be generating jobs again and leaving few people exposed to deadlines."

The Times news article is asserting that welfare caseload is related to unemployment levels and the strength or weakness or the economy. In fact, evidence for that relation is weak, if it exists at all. A chart, in PDF format, http://www.house.gov/budget/hearings/haskinscharts.pdf , shows the number of families in the U.S. receiving welfare from 1959 to 2000. During the economic boom of the 1980s, the welfare rolls remained steady. And if you look at the situation on a state-by-state basis, as Robert Rector and Sarah Youssef did in a 1999 Heritage Foundation study ( http://www.heritage.org/library/cda/cda99-04.html ), the results are even more clear. Mr. Rector and Ms. Youssef write, "We find that differences in state welfare policies -- specifically stringent sanctions and immediate work requirements -- are highly associated with rapid rates of caseload decline. By contrast, the relative vigor of state economies, as measured by unemployment rates, has no statistically significant effect on caseload decline. Indeed, states with higher caseload reductions, on average, had slightly higher unemployment rates."

Most Influential: An op-ed in today's New York Times claims, "the fact remains that Pat Robertson has been the most influential figure in American politics in the past decade." That's a preposterous claim. There are probably dozens of more powerful figures -- from Ronald Reagan, whose legacy still dominates much of American politics, to Bill Clinton, who actually won two elections and who, for all his flaws, played an important role in moving the Democratic Party toward the center on issues such as welfare reform and trade. The op-ed piece claims, "George W. Bush is president today because the religious right vetoed the nomination of John McCain." But there are plenty of reasons other than the religious right that Mr. Bush prevailed over Mr. McCain. The business wing of the Republican Party pumped more money into the Bush campaign than it did into Mr. McCain's, for instance. The tax-cutters in the Republican Party liked Mr. Bush's bigger tax cut better than they liked Mr. McCain's smaller tax cut. And the libertarians in the Republican Party didn't like Mr. McCain's restrictions on free speech touted as campaign finance "reform." The op-ed goes on to claim that Mr. Bush's "bioethics commission is headed by the religious right's favorite intellectual, Leon Kass." Mr. Kass writes for The New Republic, hardly a bastion of the Pat Robertson religious right. And he's hardly the religious right's "favorite" intellectual -- Richard John Neuhaus and William F. Buckley both probably rank higher on the list, as do George Will, William Bennett and Robert Bork.

Wrenching Choices: An article in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times writes of Yasser Arafat, "Nor is it possible to belittle the wrenching choices he has made in recognizing Israel, signing the Oslo agreements, giving up the Palestinian national charter and accepting a fifth of mandated Palestine as his future state." It sure is possible to belittle those choices. To demonstrate that it is possible, Smartertimes.com will now do it. While the Times claims Mr. Arafat has recognized Israel, in fact Mr. Arafat speaks openly about a staged plan that will eventually lead to Israel's destruction. His own maps and even the PLO's logo don't include Israel but do depict a Palestinian state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. The Times claims that Mr. Arafat has given up the Palestinian national charter but in fact the charter, which calls for Israel's destruction, appears to this day on numerous PLO Web sites. The PLO held a for-show vote in which it was supposedly decided to amend the charter, but the newly amended charter has never been published or distributed or adopted by the PLO. Finally, most wrenching of all is the Times's claim that Mr. Arafat has made a wrenching choice in "accepting a fifth of mandated Palestine as his future state." Mr. Arafat has accepted no such thing. When Mr. Arafat was offered a state with such borders by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak at Camp David, he rejected it. Even if he had accepted it, there is no evidence that it would have been anything more than an interim stage in a long-term plan to destroy and conquer Israel. Moreover, the British in the Balfour Declaration and the U.N. in its partition never contemplated giving the Palestinian Arabs all of the mandatory lands. When did the Times ever praise the Jews for accepting "less than a third of mandated Palestine" as their state? Remember, the Arab state now called Jordan was part of mandatory Palestine, as well.

See, it was possible.

Note: Smartertimes.com is traveling this morning and operating from the New York Times on the Web.

A front-page article in today's New York Times runs under the headline, "In Spat over Russia in NATO, Rumsfeld Loses Out to Powell."

To get a flavor for just how the Times news department is, like the newspaper's editorialists, siding with Secretary Powell in the Rumsfeld-Powell debate, check out the way the news article frames the dispute. "The debate over how to do it pits conservatives in the Pentagon -- and among some allies -- against the more pragmatic style of Secretary Powell. The conservatives advocate an unconstrained role for the United States, while Mr. Powell favors a collective approach of working with allies. He sees great virtue in Russia's inclusion in the alliance to help combat extremism, terrorism and the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Secretary Rumsfeld's reported concerns reflected a view that any effusive descriptions of 'NATO at 20' create an image that Russia is gaining the privileges of full NATO membership, perhaps even veto authority over alliance decisions."

This summary is totally distorted. Instead of describing the Pentagon as "conservatives" and the State Department as "pragmatic," the newspaper could just as easily have described the Pentagon as "pragmatic" or "realistic" or even "idealist" and the State Department as "accommodationist" or "dovish." The Defense Department has nothing against working with allies when the allies are countries such as Israel, Turkey, Great Britain or India, which share American values of freedom and democracy. What the State Department favors is treating as "allies" countries that aren't really our allies -- countries like Russia, which is headed by a former KGB colonel who has made it a priority to assert state control over Russia's independent television news broadcasters. This debate isn't about collectivism versus unilateralism. It's about who gets to be members of the collective, and about how much Russia gets appeased. As proof, consider that the Defense Department types mostly favored enlarging NATO to include Eastern European countries such as Poland and also the Baltics, while some of the State Department types resisted it for fear of offending Russia. No one was complaining back then that the State Department opposed a collective approach.

The Times article quotes Mr. Powell asserting, "I own the communique." This is reminiscent of Al Haig's "I am in control here," and, if anything, it is a sign of Mr. Powell's diminished influence in the administration. If Mr. Powell were really as in charge and as victorious over Mr. Rumsfeld as this Times article makes him out to be, Mr. Powell would not have to say so.

Poor Choice: An article in the Arts and Ideas section of today's New York Times reports, "Perhaps not since Steinberg's drawing had New Yorkers poured over a magazine cover so long." The word the Times wanted there is "pored." That is the verb that means, as one online dictionary put it, "to gaze intently; to read studiously or attentively -- usually used with over; to reflect or meditate steadily." The image of New Yorkers pouring over a magazine cover, like raindrops from the sky, is actually funny.

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Florida this morning and is operating off the Times National Edition.