A dispatch from Jerusalem in today's New York Times reports on Avraham Burg's effort to become leader of Israel's Labor Party. "As party leader, Mr. Burg could be expected to distance himself from the government's hard-line policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, certainly far more that Mr. Ben-Eliezer, who has helped shape those policies," the Times reports.

What is "hard line" about the current policies of the Israeli government? If anything, the government has shown remarkable restraint in the face of attacks on Israeli civilians. It has not launched large-scale retaliatory attacks against Palestinian civilians. It has not fully retaken the West Bank and Gaza. It has not launched any retaliatory strikes against Iran. It has accepted the Mitchell Commission's call for a "settlement" freeze and a return to the negotiating table after the cessation of Arab attacks.

The Times goes on to describe Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Mr. Burg's rival for the Labor Party leadership, as "a security hard-liner." Is anyone in Israel a security soft-liner? Would the Times ever describe them as such? (Answer: No. The opposite of the hard-liners are the "peace camp," at least to judge by today's account.) It seems like anything short of standing idly by and surrendering while Israeli civilians are slaughtered in terrorist attacks will get an Israeli leader branded a "hard-liner" by the New York Times.

Baffling: To get a sense of where the New York Times is coming from in its Israel coverage, check out the dispatch from Cairo in today's Times. "Arab governments do not see any prospect of a wider war growing out of the violence in Israel," the Times announces in the first paragraph of this article, which runs under a headline that reads in part, "Arabs Expect No Wider War." The article goes on for 32 paragraphs about how the Arabs don't expect a wider war -- without a single mention of the June 9 article in Al-Hayat by Saudi Arabia's ambassador in London. That article called for a repetition of the 1973 surprise attack on Israel by the Arabs on Yom Kippur and said, according to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute, "I warn you that entirely ruling out the option of war from the agenda, is the surest guarantee for the continuation of Israel's superiority."

And while many of the Arabs the Times interviews say they don't expect a wider war -- and the Times apparently believes them -- the Arabs sure are spending a lot of money on weapons. Egypt, for instance, is arming itself with North Korean missile technology. Given that most of these Arab countries are so poor, it is interesting that they are spending so much on offensive weaponry if they expect "no wider war." The Times doesn't note that, either.

The Times does assert, however, that "Even Syria, an implacable foe of Israel, long avoided any open confrontation during the decades that Hafez al-Assad ran the country." The Times does note Syria's proxy war with Israel in Southern Lebanon. Still, it's just strange for the Times to assert that Hafez al-Assad -- who sent 1,400 Syrian tanks rolling into the Golan Heights on Yom Kippur of 1973 -- avoided open confrontation. He avoided it after he lost the war in 1973, and he ruled a long time after that, but to describe that post-1973 period without noting the 1973 attack is just sophistry. The

Times also asserts that "Both Egyptian and Jordanian officials and analysts said they also found it baffling that Israel, just as it was beginning to win some acceptance in the Middle East with trade offices and the like, should toss it all aside and try to pummel the Palestinians into submission." This is really laughable. The Times lets it slide right by, as if the recent violence was really just a unilateral attempt by Israel "to pummel the Palestinians into submission," and not an uprising of violence orchestrated by the Palestinian Arabs against which Israel has been forced to take defensive measures.

The whole concept of a story headlined "Arabs Expect No Wider War" is pretty absurd to begin with. If the Arabs were about to attack, you think they'd announce it to the visiting correspondent of the New York Times? They didn't in 1973.

Late Again: The New York Times business section reports today on interviews it had with the incoming and outgoing executives of General Electric. The Wall Street Journal yesterday ran news stories about its interviews with the same executives. The Times coverage today adds very little; if you read the Journal yesterday, it's safe to skip today's coverage in the Times.

The lead, front-page article in today's New York Times reports that "Democrats have long opposed a cut in the capital gains tax, saying it would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and they could almost certainly block the proposal through their control of the Senate."

That's inaccurate.

In 1997, the long-term capital gains tax rate for individuals was reduced to 20% from 28% under a bill signed by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Senator Joseph Lieberman and Senator Robert Torricelli, both Democrats, are cosponsors of S. 818, the Capital Gains Relief and Simplification Act of 2001, which, while it doesn't lower the rate, is effectively a capital gains tax cut because it shrinks the base, decreasing the time necessary to qualify for the long-term capital gains tax rate to six months from a year. In the House, Democratic congressman Peter Deutsch is a cosponsor of the Capital Gains Tax Reduction Act of 2001, which would reduce the long-term capital gains rate for individuals to 15% from 20%. Businessweek reported last year that when it asked Rep. Charles Rangel, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, if he would support cuts in capital-gains taxes, he replied, "I have no problem reducing the tax burden for people who take risks."

Demerit Badge: The "The Boss" column in the business section of today's New York Times includes a sentence that says, "Jack was also my Cub Scout leader, and I could never get the lifesaving merit badge." Cub Scouts don't have merit badges; Boy Scouts do.

An article in the Arts section of today's New York Times reports on an exhibit about life on the Bowery. "The museum term for this type of edgy exhibition is difficult history, a category that encompasses the historical society's earlier photographic exhibition about Southern lynchings," the Times reports.

This use of "edgy" sure looks like a violation of the New York Times's own style manual, which says of "edgy": "Use the adjective to mean tense or nervous, but avoid the faddish meaning of 'far out' or 'on the edge'; that sense gained cliche status almost overnight."

Weekend Update: Readers returning after a long holiday weekend may want to catch up with the Smartertimes from Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

The New York Times today publishes an editorial calling on Congress to "require Internet companies, mail-order houses and the like to collect taxes at states' base sales tax rates. Using these 50 rates (and others for American territories and the District of Columbia) cuts out the complexity of city and county surcharges and hardly seems excessive."

The editorial says, "This action would eliminate a disturbing imbalance. As the wealthier and better educated shop more on the Internet, the people who use brick-and- mortar stores -- disproportionately the poor, the less educated, minority consumers and rural populations -- bear bigger shares of states' tax burdens."

The Times describes this "disturbing imbalance" as "regressive" and a "digital divide."

Well, those reading this editorial on the New York Times web site are just one click away from something called the New York Times Company Store, which offers New York Times books, videos, photographs, a T-shirt, a desk diary, and various other products. The site asks New York and Vermont residents to add the sales tax, but for residents of the other 48 states, the purchase is tax-free. If it's as simple as the Times editorialists claim to collect sales tax using 50 different rates, why doesn't the Times Company itself do it in its own e-commerce operations?

And speaking of a "disturbing imbalance," it turns out that reading the New York Times on its Web site is free. Those who get the paper edition -- no doubt those non-Internet users the Times claims are "disproportionately the poor, the less educated, minority consumers and rural populations" -- have to pay for it. If the Times is so disturbed by the regressive "digital divide," why is it subsidizing computer users by providing them the paper 's contents free of charge?

The Times's editorial argument in favor of taxes on the Internet is so weak that apparently it can't sway even the newspaper's own corporate executives.

An article by Robert Reich on the op-ed page of Sunday's New York Times refers to "the recession in 1991 and 1992." It refers again to "when the last recession blew through in 1991 and 1992." And it refers a third time to "the recession of 1991-92."

There was no recession in 1992. Using the standard definition of a recession of two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth, the recession lasted from 1990 to 1991. Seasonally adjusted quarterly real GDP growth in 1992 was positive: 3.5% in the first quarter, 4.9% in the second quarter, 3% in the third quarter, and 5.7% in the fourth quarter.

If there's any more doubt about the matter, Mr. Reich could go check the Web site of the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, which carries a press release dated December 22, 1992, headlined, "NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee Determines that Recession Ended in March 1991." The press release said, "The eight-month period between July 1990 and March 1991 is a recession in the NBER's chronology. The committee thus determined that the recession ended in March 1991 and that an expansion began at that time."

The Times error might seem like an innocuous one, but it is politically charged. If the Times claims the recession continued through 1992, then the recovery must have begun in 1993 -- when a Democrat took over as president.

The Reich article published Sunday also claims that "In the second quarter of this year, consumers increased their spending at an annualized rate of 2.1 percent." In fact, as one especially astute Smartertimes.com reader points out, on Wednesday that number was revised upward, to 2.5 percent.

Can't Spell: A front-page article in Sunday's New York Times refers to a Gore adviser named "Michael Whooley." In fact the correct spelling of his name is "Whouley."

A front-page dispatch in today's New York Times reports from Durban, South Africa, on a United Nations anti-racism conference that has turned into an Israel-bashing fiasco.

One glaring problem with this story is that the Times manages to go on for about 1200 words on the question of Israel's supposed racism without a single quote from an Israeli.

Another problem is the missing context. The Times reports that Yasser Arafat condemned Israel as racist "after the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he had brokered an agreement to eliminate language in conference documents that the Bush administration considered offensive."

The Times also reports that "Hoping to break the diplomatic impasse, several black American members of Congress met privately with Mr. Arafat. The meeting was arranged by Mr. Jackson, who persuaded Mr. Shaath to write his conciliatory statement this morning. But while the Palestinians were meeting with Representatives John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, and Sheila Jackson-Lee, Democrat of Texas, Mr. Arafat learned of clashes between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Hebron. In an interview late tonight, Mr. Arafat repeatedly refused to say he endorsed the language of compromise used by Mr. Shaath."

To read this, you'd think that Rep. Conyers and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee were representing Israeli interests at the meeting, or even representing the overwhelmingly pro-Israel sentiments in the U.S. Congress. In fact, Rep. Conyers is one of Israel's bitterest enemies in the Congress. When the House voted recently 411-4 to urge the U.N. to provide Israel with videotape showing the aftermath of a Hezbollah kidnapping, Mr. Conyers was one of the four who voted against it. When the House voted 408-3 recently that the proposed condemnation of Zionism as racism will "undermine the goals and objectives" of the Durban conference, Mr. Conyers was one of the three congressmen voting against the resolution. When the House voted 392-22 in 1998 on the Iran Missile Proliferation Sanctions Act, a bill strongly supported by the pro-Israel lobby, Mr. Conyers was one of the 22 votes opposed. Mr. Conyers also recently wrote a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to investigate the use of American weapons by Israel against the Palestinian Arabs.

Ms. Jackson-Lee's record is less clear-cut but still troubling. She has been a leader of the effort to weaken the sanctions against Iraq, and she was instrumental in arranging a handshake between then-President Bill Clinton and the Nation of Islam's southwest regional minister, the Rev. Robert Muhammad. According to a report in the Final Call newspaper, Rev. Muhammad at that meeting suggested that Mr. Clinton include the Rev. Louis Farrakhan on his race relations commission. Rev. Farrakhan, of course, has trafficked in foul anti-Semitic propaganda and has been embraced in anti-Israel capitals from Teheran to Tripoli.

In any event, for the Times to report that Mr. Conyers and Ms. Jackson-Lee interceded on behalf of Israel without noting or even alluding to any of this background is just strange.

Then there is the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Leaving aside the "Hymietown" episode, for which Rev. Jackson has apologized, there is still the fact that Mr. Jackson has a record of backing anti-Israel language in fights over the Democratic Party platform. Even as the Times portrays him as Israel's defender at Durban, Rev. Jackson is still propagating myths and ideas harmful to Israel, as when he asserts in the Times that he sought to meet with Mr. Arafat to "make the case that at a global conference on racism xenophobia and racial discrimination that his legitimate concern of the killings and the occupation could not be resolved." What is "legitimate" about Mr. Arafat's concern about "the occupation"? At this point, the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs -- more than 90 percent -- live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. The "occupation" is in effect over. Had Mr. Arafat accepted the exceedingly generous terms offered by Prime Minister Barak at Camp David, the "occupation" would be more than in effect over; it would be totally over.

Rev. Jackson proceeds to call for America to act "as an honest broker to break the cycle of violence." Israel's friends in America reject the moral equivalence and neutrality inherent in honest-brokerism and think that America should support Israel, which shares our values of freedom and democracy and which is not the aggressor in this conflict.

The whole report is really a Times masterpiece -- Rev. Jackson, Mr. Conyers and Ms. Jackson-Lee are portrayed as the pro-Israel crowd trying to prevail on Yasser Arafat to moderate his views. Smartertimes.com doesn't know what happened in that Durban meeting, but it wouldn't be surprising if a talk with these three led directly to Mr. Arafat's rejection of the supposed compromise. The views and statements of the three would certainly give the Palestinian Arabs a distorted view of the position of the Congress and the American public, which has been solidly supportive of Israel.

Lost on Labor: A New York Times report on labor this morning says, "The report, issued by the International Labor Organization, found that Americans added nearly a full week to their work year during the 1990's, climbing to 1,979 hours on average last year, up 36 hours from 1990." The article helpfully explains, "That means Americans who are employed are putting in nearly 49 1/2 weeks a year on the job." Well, it's nice to see the Times showing off its long-division skills, but the statistic "means" nothing of the sort. It "means" that only if you assume a 40-hour work week, which is a fiction for many full-time American workers.

The New York Times reports at the top of its front page today: "In 90's Economy, Middle Class Stayed Put, Analysis Suggests." A headline inside the paper says "Boom May Not Have Lifted Middle Class." The gist of the article is that the median family income in New York, adjusted for inflation, declined $2,876 over the decade from 1990 to 2000. The article includes a slew of caveats and explanations, but it misses one obvious point. The 1990 census put the New York State population at 17,990,455. The 2000 census counted the state's population at 18,976,457. That's a 5.5% increase. When you measure the median income of a population that includes at least a million new people, the answer you get doesn't tell you whether anybody "stayed put." To figure out whether the "middle class" is staying put or being lifted you need a longitudinal study that tracks individuals over time, not a comparison of medians in different populations measured ten years apart. You'd also want to know how many hours people are working -- if their income is the same but they are choosing to work fewer hours, they may have been "lifted" and are simply choosing to enjoy more leisure time. The article also doesn't take into account the effects of the tax system. Between the increase to the upper income tax rates and the increase to the earned income tax credit, the combined effect of the changes to the tax structure between 1990 and 2000 probably would take some of the edge off of the claims by the Times's consulting sociologist that the median income declined and that "the biggest gains occurred among the most affluent."

Drunk on ADA: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports on a dispute between the mayor and the police union over the provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act. "Legal experts said the federal law cited by Mr. Lynch did protect people from dismissals based simply on their alcoholism and has prodded employers to make some accommodations for them. The experts added, though, that the law has not protected employees with alcohol problems from being fired for otherwise prohibited conduct, such as absenteeism, even if that conduct had arisen from their drinking." Rather than relying on the unnamed "experts," the Times could have checked the actual law. It says employers: "may prohibit the illegal use of drugs and the use of alcohol at the workplace by all employees," "may require that employees shall not be under the influence of alcohol or be engaging in the illegal use of drugs at the workplace" and "may hold an employee who engages in the illegal use of drugs or who is an alcoholic to the same qualification standards for employment or job performance and behavior that such entity holds other employees, even if any unsatisfactory performance or behavior is related to the drug use or alcoholism of such employee." Seems to Smartertimes.com that the ADA doesn't stop the mayor from establishing not driving drunk while off duty as a qualification standard for employment or job performance, even for employees who are alcoholics.

Late Again: The New York Times waddles in today with a story in the national section about lost federal tax payments at a Pittsburgh processing center. The Washington Post had this story yesterday.

The lead, front-page article in today's New York Times reports on $150 million in "cuts" to the city's public schools. "Some longtime observers of city politics and the school system said the contemplated cuts were remarkable in light of the city's overall robust financial situation," the Times reports.

Oh, so now that money is to be cut from the schools, the city has a "robust" financial situation, according to the Times. This is likely to bring a smile to the lips of anyone who remembers how, whenever Mayor Giuliani talks about a tax cut, the Times yelps about how dire the city's financial situation is.

Indeed, in yesterday's lead, front-page news article about the mayoral debate, the Times reports that Alan Hevesi, in attacking Mark Green, "suggested his opponent [Green--ed.] did not have the budgetary experience to deal with the fiscal problems that may await the next mayor."

Amazing how in the space of 24 hours the city, as described by articles in the same spot on the Times front page, can go from "fiscal problems" to an "overall robust financial situation."

Missing Candidates: Today's New York Times carries the paper's endorsements for the Democratic City Council primaries in Brooklyn.

In the 33rd District, which includes Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg, the Times reports that David Yassky, a former aide to Charles Schumer, "has an uphill battle against the Democratic organization's candidate, Steven Cohn." The Times endorses Mr. Yassky. But what's really odd is that the newspaper makes it sound like a two-man race. In fact, there are at least two other Democrats running in the 33rd district: David Reiss and Ken Diamondstone. Neither one is exactly a fringe candidate. Mr. Diamondstone has the endorsement of Rep. Major Owens and of a political club called Lambda Independent Democrats, according to the Gotham Gazette. Mr. Reiss claims the endorsement of Betsy Gotbaum. If the Times doesn't want to endorse them, fine, but it seems rather extreme to pretend they don't exist.

The newspaper pulls the same stunt in its endorsement in the 39th District. The Times endorses Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager, Bill de Blasio, while also mentioning Jack Carroll and Steven Banks. "Any of the three would make a fine council member," the Times says. To read the endorsement, you'd have no idea that there are three other candidates in the race: Craig Hammerman, Anthony Pugliese and Paul Bader. An article in the metro section of today's Times refers to the 39th district campaign as a "6-Way Race." That news article notes that Mr. Bader has the support of the Senate Democratic leader, Martin Connor, that Mr. Pugliese has the endorsement of District Council 37, the city's largest municipal labor union, and that Mr. Hammerman has been the district manager of Community Board 6 for 11 years. Again, if the Times doesn't want to endorse them, fine, but it seems weird for the endorsement editorial to deal with these other candidates by pretending that they do not exist.

Fire: Bizarre front-page placement in today's New York Times for an article about a fire in California that the Times says "caused no injuries or deaths." When a New York City firefighter died while fighting a blaze in Staten Island this week, the news made the bottom of the first page of the Times metro section. Why is a non-fatal fire in California more newsworthy to the Times than a fatal fire in Staten Island? The California fire caused $3.5 million in damage to property, "including timber," the Times reports. Well, if, as yesterday's Smartertimes.com noted, the Times believes the silly claim that California has already lost 90 percent of its forests, maybe the loss of additional trees there explains the Times decision to give the article front-page placement. At least no chainsaws were involved in the damage to this timber.

Late Again: The New York Times waddles in today with the news about Communist China that "Until this month, the site for The New York Times on the Web was blocked. The blocking was lifted after an interview with President Jiang Zemin by top editors at the Times in which President Jiang was specifically questioned about the blocking of the site." Smartertimes.com reported the end of the blocking in its Friday, August 24, 2001, edition.

A front-page article in today's New York Time reports on trees in California. "In California, we lost about 95 percent of our wetlands and 90 percent of our forests and we've lost them one puddle and one tree at a time," the article quotes the executive director of the California Oak Foundation as saying.

According to the most recent numbers available from the U.S Forest Service, from the mid-1990s, California has 37.3 million forested acres. Of that, more than 20 million was under protection as U.S. Forest Service or other federal land. The total land area of California, meanwhile, is 99.8 million acres. So even if you assume that all 99.8 million acres were originally forest, and even if you assume that the number of forested acres has declined somewhat since the mid-1990s, it's hard to see how the claim that California has "lost" 90 percent of its forests can be taken seriously. Sure, one can distinguish between "old-growth" forest and new forest that has grown in after logging or farming or fires. But the Times doesn't make that distinction. As a result, the newspaper's readers are left with the false impression that California -- a state that has vast and beautiful state parks, national forests and national parks -- has been paved over or reduced to a field full of stumps.

Chainsaw Massacre, II: Yesterday's editions of Smartertimes.com criticized a Times editorial that called for President George W. Bush to wear more protective gear while using a chainsaw. The Times editorial claimed that "the number of chain saw users who require hospitalization annually exceeds 44,000, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission."

Smartertimes.com pointed out yesterday that "the number of Times readers who require hospitalization annually also probably exceeds 44,000, which tells you virtually nothing about how dangerous the Times is or what protective gear ought to be worn while reading it. If what the newspaper is trying to communicate is that there were 44,000 chainsaw accidents last year that required hospitalization, it should say so."

Thinking the matter over a bit yesterday afternoon, Smartertimes.com thought that that 44,000 number seemed a bit high, if what the Times really meant to count was chainsaw accidents. Indeed, the Web site for Elvex, one maker of protective safety gear for chainsaw users, reports that "According to the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission there were over 28,500 chain saw injuries in 1999." Well, 28,500 is a far cry from 44,000.

So Smartertimes.com did some further research and placed a phone call to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. A helpful official, Sharon B. Winston, a technical information specialist in the office of technical services at the National Injury Information Clearinghouse of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, faxed over to Smartertimes.com headquarters the "national estimate" of injuries that involved chain saws in 2000, the most recent year for which an estimate is available. The total: 26,711.

Again, 26, 711 is a far cry from 44,000.

But there's more. The "national estimate" devised by the Consumer Product Safety Commission is derived from a sample of about 100 hospital emergency rooms nationwide known as the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. Any emergency room record that mentions a chainsaw is counted in devising the injury estimate, so, Ms. Winston said, a person hurt by a falling tree after cutting the tree down with a chain saw would likely count as someone injured by a chainsaw. The 26,711 estimate is projected from an actual count of 546 hospital emergency room visits in 2000 that stemmed from injuries that involved chainsaws.

Now it gets even better. The Consumer Product Safety Commission actually breaks out the emergency room statistics by what happens to the patients, into three categories: "treated and released," "transferred," and "hospitalized." Of the chainsaw-related emergency-room visitors, 94.8 percent were treated and released, 1.6 percent were transferred, and 2.6 percent were hospitalized, according to the Year 2000 statistics Ms. Winston faxed over.

Now, it is no fun to go to the emergency room with a chainsaw-related injury, even if you just have to get stitches and go home. Whether an emergency room visit without an overnight stay counts as "hospitalization" is a semantic question. But remember, the Times used the word "hospitalization " to describe 44,000 annual injuries that it implied, however vaguely, were related to chainsaw use. And it cited as its authority the Consumer Product Safety Commission -- which, by its own statistics and definition, says that only 2.6 percent of the emergency room visits related to chain saws led to a patient being "hospitalized." 2.6 percent of the 26,711 national estimate is 694. And 694 is a far cry from 44,000.

But remember, that national estimate is an estimate based on a smaller sample of actual injuries counted in emergency rooms. Taking 2.6 percent of that actual sample of 546, the actual number of persons the Consumer Product Safety Commission knows for certain were hospitalized last year because of chainsaw injuries was about 14. And 14 is a far cry from 44,000.

Sure, there may be sampling error in these statistics. And Smartertimes.com is sorry for going on at such length and in such detail about a relatively obscure point. But the Times presents itself as the world's most authoritative newspaper, and the newspaper is constantly attacking the Bush administration for similarly obscure numerical points involving the math used in the federal budget. If the newspaper wants to be taken seriously in such debate as there is over chainsaw safety, asserting that 44,000 people annually are hospitalized from chainsaw-related injuries when the real number is closer to 26,711, to 694 or to 14 is a poor way to establish credibility.

One wonders why the newspaper would make a mistake like this. Smartertimes.com usually hesitates to speculate, but today at least one explanation leaps to mind. Perhaps it is for the sake of internal consistency. If indeed California has lost "90 percent" of its forests, as today's front-page news article claims, there must, after all, be a great many chainsaws in use -- and therefore a great many chainsaw injuries.

The "Reckonings" columnist on the op-ed page of today's New York Times gets himself all worked into a lather about George W. Bush's "dishonesty" and "deceptions."

"The important point for now involves honor and credibility," the columnist sermonizes. Mr. Bush "lied," the columnist says. "The administration is still lying."

Well, look who's talking. The letters to the editor section of today's New York Times carries a letter from the director of the Congressional Budget Office responding to the August 21 Reckonings column. That August 21 column claimed: "Managing millions of small individual accounts would be very expensive. That last point is important. A forthcoming study by the Congressional Budget Office suggests that as much as 30 percent of the value of private accounts would end up consumed by administrative costs. This compares with costs that are less than 1 percent of benefits in today's Social Security system."

Smartertimes.com pegged that claim as highly questionable back on August 21. But now the director of the Congressional Budget Office writes to set the record straight: "The figure is from a 1999 draft study . . . . Not surprisingly, some design choices could imply high administrative costs. Other design choices could dramatically lower cumulative administrative costs to as little as 1 percent of an average account's value at retirement. The number Mr. Krugman cites is at one end of a range and is not the C.B.O.'s estimate of the likely administrative costs of private accounts."

Now, if one wanted to be nasty, one could say this reflects on the "honor and credibility" of the Reckonings columnist, and one could assert that the columnist had engaged in "dishonesty" and "deceptions." But Smartertimes.com believes in changing the tone in Washington.

Chainsaw Massacre: In an editorial that really has to be read to be believed, today's New York Times urges President Bush to wear a "protective helmet and Kevlar logging chaps" as well as a "wraparound mesh face-mask" and "more aggressive hearing protection" while using a chainsaw on his ranch. The Times points out that "the number of chain saw users who require hospitalization annually exceeds 44,000, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission." The newspaper cites the Forest Service Health and Safety Handbook for these recommendations, and asserts, "This is how the real pros dress, the ones that work with chain saws all the time."

But a part-time weekend chainsaw operator clearing light brush doesn't need to dress like a professional logger felling huge trees, any more than a weekend home chef needs to wear steel-toe cook's shoes and a fireproof kitchen uniform. The people who work full-time on airport runways wear aggressive hearing protection, but when a passenger walks off a plane onto the tarmac, his ears go unprotected.

A recent front-page New York Times article reported that wearing bicycle helmets may encourage more dangerous behavior and promote accidents by engendering a false sense of security in the bike-rider. The chainsaw safety gear may have the same effect.

A "wraparound mesh face-mask" could also impair the vision of the chainsaw operator.

None of this is to suggest that chainsaws aren't dangerous, but there are lots of dangerous things running around New York City, too, and most New Yorkers haven't yet resorted to walking around in Kevlar logging chaps.

The real laugher is the Times claim that "the number of chain saw users who require hospitalization annually exceeds 44,000, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission." Well, the number of Times readers who require hospitalization annually also probably exceeds 44,000, which tells you virtually nothing about how dangerous the Times is or what protective gear ought to be worn while reading it. If what the newspaper is trying to communicate is that there were 44,000 chainsaw accidents last year that required hospitalization, it should say so. The way the sentence is currently phrased, it reads as if it were written by someone who was typing while wearing a protective helmet, aggressive hearing protection and a wraparound mesh face mask.

Sharpton: The New York Times today gives ridiculously prominent front-page placement to the endorsement of mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer by the Rev. Al Sharpton. Mayoral endorsements in this race by David Dinkins, Ed Koch, Floyd Flake and Daniel Patrick Moynihan didn't make it onto the front page -- and, unlike Rev. Sharpton, those politicians have all won elections. The endorsement was already widely expected.

Median Income: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times, about a city council race in Queens, reports that the median income of the council district is "43%." Huh?

"Disparities Seen in Mental Care for Minorities," blares a front-page New York Times headline today. Readers who see the headline, or the lead sentence referring to "large and troubling disparities," might understandably imagine hordes of ferociously bigoted psychiatrists and psychologists standing between blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and American Indians and adequate mental health treatment.

Not exactly. The article reports, "While the rates of mental illness in Asian-Americans do not differ significantly from those found in other groups, mental health professionals may hold the stereotype that they are 'mentally healthier,' a bias that contributes to inadequate treatment and prevention."

Smartertimes.com is prepared to believe that this "bias" is indeed false and pernicious. But how, then, to square it with the statement later in the Times article claiming that the U.S. surgeon general and "other experts" said that "little was known about the prevalence of mental disorders in many smaller racial and ethnic groups, including Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, American Indians and Alaska Natives."

If indeed "little" is known about "the prevalence of mental disorders" in Asian-Americans, how can the Times state so confidently that "the rates of mental illness in Asian-Americans do not differ significantly from those found in other groups"? And how can the Times be so certain that the belief that Asian-Americans are "mentally healthier" is a stereotype that is false?

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Florida today and is operating off the national edition of the New York Times.

The lead editorial in today's New York Times is about Harlem. The editorial begins with a reference to a Pathmark supermarket. "When it opened in 1999, it was Harlem's first major supermarket in more than half a century -- an astonishing fact given that upper Manhattan has 500,000 people and is roughly the size of Atlanta."

In fact, one reason this "fact" is so astonishing is that it's not true.

Now, you can get into definitional questions about what is a "major" supermarket and what is just a regular, super supermarket, but if the Times editorial rests on that distinction, it rests on thin ground indeed.

The truth is, as Smartertimes.com pointed out on July 1, 2000, when the Times made this same error, anyone who lives in Harlem knows that there were supermarkets there before 1999. The then-ombudsman of The Washington Post, E.R. Shipp, devoted part of her column in May of 1999 to debunking a similar claim that had appeared earlier that month in The Washington Post. She wrote: "The article said, inaccurately, that Harlem had recently acquired its first supermarket. This came as a surprise to Harlemites past and present -- of which I am one. I regularly shop at the Fairway in my section of Harlem; others prefer such supermarkets as Associated and C-Town."

Indeed, the Fairway has been at 133rd St. and the Hudson River waterfront since 1996; directories showed an Associated Food Supermarket on East 116th St. and C Town Supermarkets on St. Nicholas Ave. and on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. If The Washington Post, an out-of-town paper, was able to grasp this point on the second try, you'd think that the Times -- which, after all, is based in New York -- would do better.

'Dark Side': The Week in Review section of today's New York Times carries an article that runs under the headline "The Dark Side of the Global Economy." The article claims, "The globalization of crime is a logical outcome of the fall of Communism. Capitalism and Communism, ideologies that served as intellectual straitjackets for Americans and Soviets, allowed them to feel justified in using unsavory proxies to fight their cold war. When those alliances dissolved, those proxies sought other outlets to maintain -- or improve -- their positions. The transformation of apparatchiks into gangsters or money-launderers in the former Soviet republics and the Balkans is just the most familiar example."

Note the careful moral equivalence there between capitalism and communism, and the Times's description of capitalism as an "intellectual straitjacket." Note also the implication that before the fall of Communism, no apparatchiks were gangsters or money launderers.

There's more. The article goes on to assert that "In the Soviet Union, the authorities themselves often scrambled for new sources of income and power as the Communist Party's grip loosened, blurring the lines between officials and those who operated beyond the law."

As if the "officials" under Communism operated within the law, or as if the "law" in the Soviet Union was distinguishable in any meaningful way from what the "officials" wanted.

The article goes on to claim that in Russia after the fall of Communism, "the old intelligentsia was impoverished and became susceptible to bribes." The concept of bribing the intelligentsia sounds like something out of Woody Allen's short story "The Whore of Mensa": "Pssst. For a hundred bucks, would you mention me in the acknowledgements of your next obscure philosophical treatise?" But if what the Times really means is not the intelligentsia but the government officials, then, again, the notion that they only became susceptible to bribes after the fall of Communism is just unadulterated Pravda-style propaganda.

Nearsightedness: An article by the Times architecture critic in the Arts and Leisure section of today's New York Times refers to "the sleek megastructural sweep of Renzo Piano's Kansai airport in Japan." There's no disclosure that Mr. Piano, the architect the Times critic is praising, is the same one who has been hired by the Times Company to design the newspaper's new headquarters tower near Times Square. Mr. Piano was selected by a committee that included the Times architecture critic. There's no need for such a disclosure, really, and for all the Smartertimes.com architecture critic knows, the Kansai airport really does have sleek megastructural sweep. The only reason it's worth mentioning is that the Times business section recently went after the editor of Variety, Peter Bart, for failing to disclose his business relationship with a lawyer he wrote about. Why should the Times judge Mr. Bart by a more strict standard than the one the Times itself observes?

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Florida today and is operating off the national edition of the New York Times.

An op-ed piece in today's New York Times says, "Indeed, after more than 100 years of saying no to each other in every way possible, it seems as if Israel and the Palestinians are not capable today of wanting 'anything' at all."

One hundred years ago, "Israel" and "the Palestinians" didn't exist. Israel was established in 1948; 100 years ago, it was an area controlled by Turkey. "The Palestinians" 100 years ago would have included Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews. If by "Israel" and "the Palestinians" the writer means Palestinian and then Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, he's still wrong when he says they've been "saying no to each other in every way possible" for more than 100 years. The Palestinian Arabs may have been saying no, but the Israelis have been saying yes. They said yes to the 1947 U.N. partition plan; they said yes to the 1978 Camp David peace agreement; they said yes to the 1993 Oslo Accords. The Israelis keep saying yes and the Arabs, with their continued violence against Israel, keep saying no.

Pretty: A dispatch from New Paltz in the metro section of today's New York Times concludes with a quote that describes it as "one of the prettiest landscapes on earth." Well, at least the Times publisher and its executive editor can't be accused of not making a contribution to increasing the property values in the town where, according to the 1999 book "The Trust," they both have weekend homes.

New In Letters: The "Letters About Smartertimes" section was updated yesterday afternoon with reader comments on topics including brightwork and the Butcher of Beijing. The "Letters about the Times" section was also updated yesterday afternoon with reader comments on topics including Red Square, lawsuits in Mississippi, and electricity regulation in Brazil.

A dispatch from Oakland in the national section of today's New York Times refers to "the famously antimilitary Bay Area." While the University of California's Berkeley campus and some neighborhoods of San Francisco were centers of opposition to the Vietnam War, it's just an absurd overgeneralization to call the entire Bay Area "famously antimilitary." For one thing, the military has historically been a huge employer in the Bay Area. The Presidio Army Base, the Alameda Naval Air Station, the Navy's Oakland Fleet and Industrial Supply Center, the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- many of these have since been converted to non-military uses, but they employed tens of thousands of people in their day. Many of those people remain in the Bay Area. The Times description of the Bay Area as "famously antimilitary" says more about the Times than it does about the Bay Area.

Wrong Number: When the New York Times claimed in a front-page article on July 20, 2001, that "Johns Hopkins receives more federal research money than any other university, $310 million last year," Smartertimes.com pegged the number and the claim as bogus. The New York Times never ran a correction of the July 20, 2001, article, but the newspaper is now modifying the claim in its new coverage. Today, a news article in the national section of the Times says Johns Hopkins "receives more federal money for medical research than any other university." Plainly, there's a distinction between "federal research money" in general, which includes things like contracts from the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, and "federal money for medical research." Today's New York Times article on the Johns Hopkins story waddles in a day after an article in the metro section of the Washington Post reported essentially the same facts.

'A Very Good Paper,' III: Smartertimes.com has received a report from inside Communist China that the government there has stopped blocking access to the Web site of the New York Times. Other major papers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post are still blocked. New York Times representatives had raised the blocking issue during their interview earlier this month with Jiang Zemin. A front-page article in today's New York Times on the AIDS epidemic in China, meanwhile, makes no mention of Mr. Jiang. The article particularly doesn't mention Mr. Jiang's claim that he had "no knowledge" of provincial authorities preventing Dr. Gao Yaojie from traveling to Washington to accept an international award in public health. Today's Times reports the denied travel, but not Mr. Jiang's response to a question about it. To find out about that you have to read Smartertimes.com or go visit an obscure page on the New York Times Web site.

As part of its continuing crusade for higher taxes, the New York Times reports on today's front page on the situation in Tennessee. "Two weeks ago, after yielding to large crowds at the Capitol here protesting a proposed income tax, legislators could balance the budget only by spending all the state's remaining $560 million share of the national settlement with the tobacco industry; most other states are using their settlement windfalls for health purposes and preventing tobacco use."

Well, that claim that "most other states are using their settlement windfalls for health purposes and preventing tobacco use," while it supports the Times campaign for higher taxes, is on precarious ground when it comes to the facts. Here's the New York Times's own headline from August 11, 2001: "Tiny Part of Settlement Money Is Spent on Tobacco Control." That August 11, 2001, article went on to report that "politics and a slowing economy have trumped promises to fight smoking, leading many states to use the money for other needs, like public schools, elderly care and balancing the budget." The August 11, 2001, article reported that "A new report by the National Conference of State Legislatures found that the 46 states that joined in the settlement, plus the four that reached separate deals with the tobacco companies -- Florida, Minnesota, Mississippi and Texas -- have used 5 percent of the money so far for smoking prevention and cessation programs. In June, a similar undertaking by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that states were using 'about 7 percent' of the settlement money for new or expanded tobacco programs."

Repeating the Error: A photo cutline in the Arts section of today's New York Times says, "A suicide bombing outside a Tel Aviv disco left 18 people dead on June 1." Here's a correction that ran in the New York Times on August 1, 2001: "Because of an editing error, a picture caption last Thursday with an article about the elusiveness of peace in the Middle East misstated the number of people killed by a suicide bomber at a Tel Aviv discotheque and misstated the date. The bombing occurred on June 1, not 2, and killed 21, not 18." The Times is to be congratulated for getting the date of the bombing right this time around, but the newspaper still seems to be having a little trouble getting an accurate count of the number of deaths. One reason, of course, is probably that the death toll rose after the initial reports of the bombing. Still, you'd think that after having already run one correction on this point this month, the Times would at least attempt to refrain from repeating the error.