This morning's New York Times reports in a front-page, above-the fold article on a 19-year-old who is working as a corrections officer at a state prison in Kansas. The headline says, "Desperate for Prison Guards, Some States Even Rob Cradles." The prominent placement and the breathless headline ("Even") make it seem like the Times thinks this is somehow exceptional or a big deal. The article reports that "Some corrections officers and experts question whether teenagers have the maturity to be guards."

You have to read pretty far into the article before a prison warden notes that 18-year olds can serve in the military. They can also vote. Keep an eye out for an upcoming front-page New York Times article under a headline like "U.S. Army Even Robs Cradles."

Capital Gains: A news article in this morning's New York Times reports that Republicans in Congress are considering an attempt to cut the capital-gains tax. Rather than interviewing someone opposed to such a cut, the Times just tells its readers in its own voice why such a cut would be a bad idea: "The great bulk of stocks and bonds are held by wealthy investors. A capital-gains tax cut would mostly benefit the well-to-do and would offer relatively little directly to typical taxpayers. Democrats generally oppose reducing the capital-gains rate."

This is so wrongheaded it's hard to know where to begin, but, for one thing, there are plenty of "typical," not "wealthy" Americans who in 2001 own stocks and bonds through mutual funds, individual retirement accounts and 401K plans. Criticizing a capital-gains-tax cut on these grounds is about as silly as saying, "The great bulk of stocks and bonds are held by wealthy investors. The stock tables printed each day in the New York Times mostly benefit the well-to-do and offer relatively little benefit to typical readers." The Times claims that Democrats "generally oppose reducing the capital-gains rate," but it fails to note that Senator Torricelli has favored a capital-gains-tax reduction, and it fails to note that the last capital-gains-tax cut, which had a positive effect on government revenues, was signed into law by President Clinton.

Correction: Yesterday's Smartertimes.com item praising the New York Times dispatch from Yuntang, China ran under the headline, "A Good Scoop." A better headline would have been "Late Again." The Baltimore Sun reported the news from Yuntang in a dispatch by Frank Langfitt on April 18, two days before the Times did.

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

Smartertimes.com is usually devoted to finding fault with the New York Times. But once in a very great while the Times has a story so good that you just have to tip your hat, and today is one of those days. The article is by Erik Eckholm. It is a dispatch from Yuntang, China, that appears on the front page of today's newspaper, and it reports on an attack by Chinese police and paramilitary troops on unarmed farmers. What's impressive is not just that the Times has this story, which Smartertimes.com hasn't seen elsewhere, but the level of detail, the directness of the account, and the chilling depiction of the Communist regime that emerges from the article. "If the Communist regime knows we are meeting with the foreign press, they might level our village," one resident of Yuntang tells the Times.

An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports on a visit by President Bush to Connecticut. "Actually, Connecticut did not show much kinship toward Mr. Bush in the last election," the Times reports. "In the primary, the state, like the rest of the Northeast, voted for Mr. Bush's Republican rival, Senator John McCain, and in November it voted overwhelmingly for the Democrat, Al Gore." This sentence seems to be asserting that Mr. McCain beat Mr. Bush in every Republican primary in the Northeast. That's just false. Mr. Bush beat Mr. McCain in Maine's March 7, 2000, primary, 51 percent to 44 percent. And Mr. Bush beat Mr. McCain in New York's March 7, 2000, primary, 51 percent to 43 percent. Surely New York and Maine are considered part of the Northeast.

The New York Times this morning blows some wind into what seems like a pretty routine statement by Secretary of State Colin Powell, running out the news under a three-column wide lead headline asserting that Mr. Powell "assails Israel" and had engaged in "harsh criticism." No one is quoted in the article calling Mr. Powell's statement's "harsh" or describing it as an assault, so it's hard to understand where the Times gets these headline words from.

One clue may come in the little editorial tucked in at the end of the article on Mr. Powell's remarks. "On the other hand, senior officials are aware that leaving the two sides to their own devices is most likely to increase tensions and therefore create regionwide instability," the Times reports. The phrasing "are aware" suggests that what follows is an obvious commonplace truth: "senior officials are aware that the sky is blue." But what the Times says senior officials are "aware" of in this case is in fact a highly debatable point. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that leaving the Arabs and Israelis to their own devices, without a lot of harsh criticism or assaults on Israel by the state secretary -- but with a continued steady flow of American military assistance to the Israelis -- would be likely in the medium to long run to decrease tensions and spread freedom and stability. The Times assumes that "instability" is something to be avoided, but in the short term, what's wrong with destabilizing some of the awful dictatorships that hold sway in the Middle East? That could lead to more stability in the long term. Short-term "stability" is what the State Department and its lackeys at the Times are interested in promoting instead of freedom. In any event, the sentence would be less objectionable if instead of writing "are aware" the Times had written "say." How does the Times know what the "senior officials" are aware of, anyway? Is it inside their brains? Probably at some point in the game one of these senior officials said something to a reporter. So why not say, "said," rather than "are aware"?

A news article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports on the chances that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. will be forced to sell the New York Post. The article twice identifies as a "public interest group" a group that opposes Murdoch's purchase of a chain of television stations. There are plenty of Americans who think that allowing Mr. Murdoch to buy the stations is in the public interest. The "public interest group" in question files lawsuits and intervenes in regulatory matters according to a pattern that generally favors more government restrictions on private businesses. The Times may be of the opinion that this constitutes the public interest, but the article at hand is a news story, not an editorial. And it's funny how the Times hardly ever describes conservative think tanks or litigation groups as acting in the "public interest."

Smartertimes.com pointed this out on March 27, 2001, with respect to another Times article that referred to a liberal advocacy group as a "public interest group," and the Times news desk circulated that Smartertimes.com item to the Times news department on April 4, 2001 as part of its internal "Best of the Greenies" publication. A Times editor scrawled below the reference in question in that case, "Better to call this an 'advocacy group.'" It's hard to see what the point of circulating those sort of memos to the newspaper's staff is if the staff is going to respond by ignoring the memos and simply repeating the error of identifying liberal advocacy groups as "public interest" groups.

The same article from today's Times reports that "The News Corporation's acquisition of Chris-Craft has been opposed by the institute, the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and other groups that contend it would reduce diversity in media ownership." It's just amusing that the Times is still taking seriously the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's opposition to corporate mergers. Just about every other news organization in the country, from the Los Angeles Times to the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times, has by now figured out that this is a ploy. The pattern is that the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition receives "donations" from the corporation seeking approval for the merger and then subsequently drops its opposition to the merger. In this case, the ploy may not even be that sophisticated; Rev. Jackson may just be retaliating for the tough coverage he has been receiving from New York Post columnist Rod Dreher. The Times article gives no indication at all that the newspaper is aware of these issues or patterns. It just takes the Rev. Jesse Jackson's opposition to the merger wholly at face value. (Disclosure: The New York Post occasionally pays Smartertimes.com for the right to reprint excerpts from Smartertimes.com on its editorial page.)

Late Again: The New York Times metro section carries on its front page today an article about the fact that Ellis Island passenger lists are now available on the Internet. That's old news to readers of the Los Angeles Times, which carried a full feature on the same topic yesterday.

Edge Cities: A front-page article in today's New York Times brings in the stunning news that some suburbs are getting denser and turning into cities. This is shown by data from the 2000 census, the Times reports. Funny how the Times manages to write this article without ever once using the phrase "Edge City" or referring to the 1991 book by that name by Joel Garreau. And it's funny how Mr. Garreau managed to notice that this was going on, and get a book into print about it, fully a decade before the Times waddled in with its report based on census data. The Times report is not particularly satisfying, because it focuses on population density and doesn't tell readers much about commercial and retail development in the suburbs.

Arsenic in the Water: Two news articles in today's New York Times refer to the Bush administration's decision on "the amount of naturally occurring arsenic that would be allowed in municipal drinking water." The standard in question would apply to all arsenic, naturally occurring or otherwise. One Times article notes that "the mining industry" opposed a tougher standard, which might be a tip to an intelligent editor that "naturally occurring" arsenic isn't the only thing at issue.

Profit Margin: A graph that runs with the continuation of an article in today's New York Times about a Pennsylvania hospital purports to show the "profit margin" of hospitals, as a national average. This information is essentially meaningless, because a national average combines the results of for-profit hospitals, which aim to maximize profits, with those of non-profit and government-run hospitals. Non-profits don't have "profits," they have deficits or surpluses, which may be the result of charitable donations. Instead of creating "profits" they pay out the extra money in compensation to executives (to take a cynical view) or use it for better patient care (to take a charitable view). Government-run hospitals often try to avoid having surpluses; if they ran surpluses, their budgets might get cut for the next year. The whole system is so distorted by perverse incentives created by the heavily regulated nature of the health care industry that it is really meaningless to speak of an average "profit margin" for the hospital industry a whole, or to compare the "profit margin" of a government-run hospital to an average that includes non-profits and for-profits, as the Times graph does.

A news article in the business section of today's New York Times discusses a Vermont newspaper called the Rutland Herald. The Times writes, in an article without a dateline, that the Herald "remains anchored in this squat, unlovely city in otherwise lovely central Vermont." Does the Times really need to stick in that swipe at Rutland as "unlovely"? Smartertimes.com would bet that at least some of the people living there find it lovely. Whether you would find it lovely or not is an opinion that would probably track with how you feel about small New England cities. Actually describing the city's neighborhoods, its downtown, its businesses and its people would be more useful to Times readers than is passing along the newspaper's subjective judgment of whether the city is lovely or "unlovely."

Sins of Omission: The lead, front-page article in this morning's New York Times, about the Federal Communications Commission's plans to relax the regulations on cross-ownership of newspapers and television stations, mentions that the move would benefit "the companies controlled by Rupert Murdoch." But it's strange that the Times, a newspaper based in New York, doesn't spell out more clearly for its hometown readers what the changes would mean for the New York newspaper and television stations controlled by Mr. Murdoch. It would have made the article more relevant and interesting to New York readers if the Times had mentioned the call letters and channel numbers of the New York television stations affected by the regulations.

Unusual: A dispatch from Tokyo in the international section of today's New York Times has a sentence that says, "The news, which came in an unusual late morning statement from the Imperial Household Agency, seemed deliberately couched in ambiguity, perhaps out of caution after the recent loss of a child." What's unusual? Is it unusual for the Imperial Household Agency to release any statements at all? Or are they just usually released in the early mornings or the afternoons rather than the late morning? The Times article is in this regard no help at all to readers. It asserts that the statement is "unusual" and then leaves readers wondering what is unusual about it.

Marshall Plan: The "Essay" column on the Op-Ed page of today's New York Times reports on Andrew Marshall. "Pentagon brass shuddered when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld named this legendary shatterer of shibboleths to be his adviser on 'net assessment' and made him a key player in the review that will reshape our armed services," the Times column says. The implication is that Mr. Rumsfeld naming Mr. Marshall as adviser on "net assessment" is a new development that has Pentagon brass shuddering. In fact, as Paul Gigot noted in a 1997 column, Mr. Marshall has run the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment "for six presidencies." George W. Bush's administration makes it seven. Mr. Marshall's involvement in the defense review is surely newsworthy, but the sentence in the Times column oversells the fresh shudder-inducing aspect of the net assessment job, in which Mr. Marshall is an institution.

A front-page article in today's New York Times about President Bush's treatment of California passes along unchallenged the following quote from "an outside adviser who knows Bush well": "They're scared of the place. They're snake bitten. They put $22 million into the state and Gore spent zero. And they lost by 13 points." In fact, according to the California Secretary of State's office, Mr. Bush lost California by 11.8 percentage points, not "13."

"Inadequately Regulated": A generally nuanced and interesting dispatch from Bangladesh on the front page of today's New York Times reports: "What Bangladesh has to offer the global economy is some of the world's cheapest labor -- and what this impoverished nation has received in return is the economic boost of a $4.3 billion apparel industry, the fuller pockets that come with 1.5 million jobs and the horrors that arise from 3,300 inadequately regulated garment factories, some of which are among the worst sweatshops ever to taunt the human conscience." The Times doesn't really support its opinion that these factories are "inadequately regulated." In fact, a few paragraphs later the article notes that the country's laws require overtime pay and holidays. The problem, it seems from the article, may be not inadequate regulation but inadequate enforcement of the existing regulations. Or evil owners who are refusing to comply with the existing regulations. And it seems like most of the workers and factory owners quoted in the article don't say the regulation is inadequate, either -- the Times reports that after a fire at one garment factory that killed 52 people, among the demands of the surviving workers was "a swift reopening of the factory."

Default: This morning's New York Times Book Review contains a review of a book about Las Vegas. The book asserts that the Cuban missile crisis was caused by a "tantrum" in which President Kennedy ended up, in the reviewer's paraphrase, "forcing Nikita Krushchev to protect his client by placing missiles in Cuba." The book further asserts, according to the review, that President Reagan was the "emcee" of a "slow-motion coup d'etat" largely underwritten by the mob. The Times reviewer opines that "most of the book's soundings seem true." If they are true, it sounds like a matter for the Times front page. And isn't the task of the reviewer, in part, to distinguish what is true, not merely to pronounce that findings "seem true"?

No One: Here's a sentence from the Week in Review section of this morning's New York Times: "The way Mr. Bush has defined himself in this budget, to no one's real surprise, is as an ideological conservative." Well, that would be to the surprise of "no one" except maybe the Times editorial writers and the columnists on its op-ed page. One of those columnists wrote in his "Abroad at Home" column on March 31, under the headline, "The Feeling of a Coup," "All this from a man who ran as a 'compassionate conservative,' concealing his hard-edged ideology, and who could not get half the voters to vote for him even in that guise." If Mr. Bush really ran "concealing his hard-edged ideology," as the columnist claims, how come it is to "no one's real surprise" that he has come out with a budget defining himself "as an ideological conservative"?

An article in the business section of today's New York Times reports on a lawsuit accusing Nuance Communications and five of its top executives of securities fraud. The article never names the law firm that filed the suit and it never names a single one of the "shareholders" making the accusation. The one person identified as a critic of the company is identified only by an Internet screen name, "lostnuance." If the Times is going to pass along to its readers an allegation of securities fraud that at this point is merely an unproven claim made in civil court, it would make sense to name the persons making the allegation. The Times article reports how much stock the Nuance executives sold before the price of the stock went down, but it makes no mention of how much Nuance stock, if any, the executives still own. If they really were engaged in "securities fraud," how come federal regulators haven't intervened? It sure looks like the Times is carrying water for the contingency-fee class-action lawyers at the Little Rock law firm of Cauley, Geller, Bowman & Coates (http://www.classlawyer.com) on this one.

Welfare and Poverty: A brief item in the national section of today's New York Times claims, "Most of the participants in Wisconsin's pioneering program to get welfare recipients into the workplace are still living in poverty, a study by the state's Legislative Audit Bureau has found." The study found nothing of the sort. If you don't believe Smartertimes.com, go read the study here: http://www.legis.state.wi.us/lab/Reports/01-7tear.htm. While the press release summary of the study trumpets "The 1999 Incomes of Most Former Participants Were Below the Poverty Level," in fact, the study only looked at the about two-thirds of former welfare recipients who filed Wisconsin tax returns. Of those two-thirds, if you count the earned-income tax credit, 46.7 percent of the former welfare recipients were above the federal poverty level in 1999, the study says. Another study of the Wisconsin system that counted other, non-cash benefits such as food stamps, child care subsidies and medical assistance benefits found that 92 percent of former welfare recipients were above the poverty level. The Legislative Audit Bureau's study also acknowledges that it didn't count child support as income. Given all these details -- the fact that the incomes of a third of the former welfare recipients are entirely unknown, the fact that non-cash benefits and child support weren't included -- it's a poor show for the Times to pass along unchallenged this supposed finding that "Most of the participants in Wisconsin's pioneering program to get welfare recipients into the workplace are still living in poverty." The effect is to reinforce the notion, already prevalent among many Times readers, that the newspaper has something against welfare reform.

'Alarmed Whites': The front-page New York Times coverage today of the Cincinnati riot dwells on the fact that police there have shot dead 15 black men in the past six years. It makes no mention, however, of whether the number of police shootings is high or low for a city of Cincinnati's size, which would be a useful fact for readers seeking to evaluate the situation. The Times soft-pedals the actual rioting going on in Cincinnati, referring to it as "protest and vandalism," and reporting that "groups of young blacks had raided stores, set fires and alarmed whites."

"Alarmed" is a curious euphemism for what these gangs of rioters were doing to whites. Here's a more direct account from Thursday's Cincinnati Enquirer: "In Avondale, a mob of black youths that had been pelting passing cars with bricks stopped a car on Reading Road and dragged a white woman into the street, beating her until other neighborhood residents rescued her. Kim Brown, an Avondale resident who was a witness to the attack, said members of the mob pulled the woman out of the car and 'started busting her up.' Then, Ms. Brown said, other neighborhood residents stepped in to pull the woman to safety."

Today's Times dispatch, like yesterday's, manages to avoid the term "riot," which is the term that the Enquirer is using to describe the situation. While blacks in Cincinnati are not rioting, according to the Times, Christians in Sudan are. The Times international section reports in a brief item that "Fifty-three Christians convicted of rioting over government efforts to move their Easter ceremony out of a public square have been flogged, the Sudanese Council of Churches said." There's no explanation by the Times of exactly how the behavior by the Sudanese Christians rose to the level of "rioting," while the behavior of some black youths in Cincinnati apparently did not.

Calm in the Mideast: The New York Times comes through this morning with one of its typically vile editorials on "The Need for Calm in the Mideast." The spectacle of the Times editorial page lecturing Ariel Sharon and the democratically elected government of Israel from the left on the likelihood that Mr. Sharon's actions risk "worsening Israel's security problems" is just breathtaking. The editorialists might consult a front-page dispatch from Jerusalem in today's New York Times, which reports, "many Israelis, despite the bloody present and the uncertain future, like what they are hearing." The notion that the Times editorialists are better equipped that Mr. Sharon and the Israelis themselves to determine what effect Israel's actions will have on the Israeli security situation is probably enough to make many readers with an appreciation for Israel and its democracy lose their "calm."

The corrections column of today's New York Times carries the following item: "A front-page article yesterday about the mayoral primary election in Los Angeles misspelled the surname of a professor at California State University at Fullerton who commented." In the New York edition that Smartertimes.com bought yesterday morning, there was no front-page article about the mayoral primary election in Los Angeles. The article quoting the professor in question appeared inside the national section. The article may well have been fronted in the Times national edition. But even so, to hundreds of thousands of New York readers this morning, the correction will make it look like the Times' standards of reporting have so eroded that the newspaper's editors are unable to describe accurately what was on their own newspaper's front page the day before.

"Racial Protests": The New York Times stylebook contains a caution about the loose use of the word "riot." But the newspaper's tiptoeing around the situation in Cincinnati strikes Smartertimes.com this morning as a bit contorted. A dispatch from Cincinnati in the national section of today's New York Times refers to "sporadic vandalism," "violent protesters," "street violence" and "racial protests." It reports that vandals "have staged hit-and-run raids on dozens of stores, looting some of them." It reports that more than 40 persons have been treated at hospitals, more than 100 people have been arrested, a curfew has been imposed, and there is serious talk of calling out the National Guard. Sure sounds like a riot to Smartertimes.com. Certainly, to refer to the situation as "racial protests," as in, "The last racial protests that attracted outside attention in this city were in 1968, in the aftermath of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." -- is an inappropriate resort to euphemism. Not every "racial protest" involves looting and violence, and to refer to a riot as a mere "racial protest" erodes a meaningful distinction. The Associated Press is referring to three days of "rioting" in Cincinnati. The Washington Post this morning refers to the 1968 Cincinnati riots as "riots" and quotes a 16-year-old referring to the current activity as "riots." The New York Times, on the other hand, seems reluctant to call a riot a riot.

Keep the Press Out: An editorial in today's New York Times comes out against allowing the camera-toting press access to the execution of Timothy McVeigh, arguing that "by publicly televising Mr. McVeigh's execution, broadcasters would be showing the very kind of act -- the taking of a human life -- for which Mr. McVeigh is being executed. The telecast would appeal to the basest instincts of the viewing public, and would inevitably coarsen our society." This logic would also bar cameras from wars, and, if carried to its logical conclusion, would have prevented the publication of some of the most memorable and Pulitzer-prize-winning news photographs -- photographs that have been republished in the Times. If the Times is as opposed to the death penalty as it claims to be, it should want to show the execution so that the American public can see what its government is doing. The coarseness, such as it is, is in the government's act, not in the press's broadcast of it. In any case, the Times isn't finally persuasive that the decision on whether to coarsen the culture by broadcasting the execution should rest with the government rather than the news organizations themselves. The implicit argument is that the constitutional imperative against cruel and unusual punishment trumps the constitutional imperative for freedom of the press. But the Times never explains why one should outweigh the other.

A dispatch from Jerusalem in this morning's New York Times reports on mortar attacks launched by Palestinian Arabs against Israeli targets. "Some 65 homemade mortars have been fired in the last couple of months," the Times reports. A "homemade mortar" sounds like a "homemade chocolate-chip cookie" or a "homemade loaf of bread." How does the New York Times know that all 65 of these mortars were made in homes and not, say, smuggled in from Egypt or Lebanon, or manufactured in factories established by the Palestinian Authority or Hamas? Has the Times sent a correspondent to inspect the mortars and certify that they were "homemade"? A mortar is, as Webster's Second puts it, "a short-barreled cannon with a low muzzle velocity, which throws shells in a high trajectory." It's possible to make a mortar and shells in a home, but the likelihood that these 65 Palestinian Arabs did so independently with no central coordination or instruction or distribution of materiel seems pretty low to Smartertertimes.com.

With a Slammer!: Here's the headline on an article in today's New York Times about Passover food inspections in Israel: "Here Come Israel's Passover Police!" What's with the slammer! What is this, the New York Post! Try to control yourself!

Late Again: Today's New York Times carries a front-page article about a Bush administration plan to stop citizen lawsuits against the government on behalf of endangered species. That's old news to readers of the New York Times Company's local newspaper in Boston, the Globe, which yesterday carried on its front page an article by Robert Schlesinger reporting the same news. The Globe's story quoted Senator Kerry, Rep. George Radanovich, and an Interior Department spokeswoman named Stephanie Hanna; the Times article quotes -- you guessed it -- Mr. Kerry, Mr. Radanovich and Ms. Hanna. The Times Company could save some money on its Washington bureau and get its New York readers the news a day sooner if it just picked up the Globe-provided coverage directly. At the very least, the New York Times could have done its Boston subsidiary the courtesy of mentioning the Boston paper's story in today's Times follow-up.

Tax and Spend: To get an idea of why the New York Times so opposes President Bush's tax cuts, check out today's editorial page. One editorial supports raising the hourly fee for court-assigned lawyers who defend poor criminal defendants to $75 or $60 from $40 or $25. (That would work out to more than prosecutors make and would also establish a pattern of a huge percentage increase that could then be followed up by all the other workers whose wages are set by the government.) Another editorial says that "the Center for Science in the Public Interest sensibly also argues for more money to improve the F.D.A's enforcement capacity." This is the same Center for Science in the Public Interest that an article in the March 21 "Dining In, Dining Out" section of the New York Times identified as "usual suspects," "food police" and "movie popcorn equals death." The point is, the reason the Times is against the tax cut is that it wants the government to spend more money.

The "Reckonings" column on the Op-Ed page of today's New York Times reports that "the story of the family farm sold to pay the estate tax turns out to be a rural legend -- nobody has been able to find an actual example." Since the New York Times has been unable to find "an actual example," Smartertimes.com humbly offers some assistance. Here are some cases cited on deathtax.com:

1. The case of K.L. Bliss of Sand Springs, Montana, who testified before the Senate Finance Committee's Subcommittee on Taxation on March 15, 2001:

Chairman Nickles and Distinguished Members of the Senate Finance Committee:

On behalf of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA), which is the trade association of America's cattle farmers and ranchers, and the marketing organization for the largest segment of the nation's food and fiber industry, thank you for your interest in my comments regarding the burden that the death tax places on hard-working American families. I appreciate the opportunity to share with you the devastating affect death taxes have on the ability of cattlemen and women to pass their family businesses on to the next generation.

I am a rancher from Sand Springs, Montana, a small community about 160 miles northeast of Billings. My family has ranched in Montana since the early days of the 1900s. I am a member of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the Montana Stockgrower's Association and the Public Lands Council.

For the past several Congresses, relieving the death tax burden has been a top priority for NCBA. We commend the Committee's hard work in making significant progress toward the ultimate goal of eliminating death as a taxable event from the federal tax code. Through our own resources and as a member of the Family Business Estate Tax Coalition, we are committed to working with you and the Committee to making repeal of death taxes a reality. This hearing is evidence that repeal of death taxes remains a top priority for many Members of Congress.

From the cattle industry's perspective, the death tax is the primary obstacle in keeping our family-owned businesses intact and viable during the transition from one generation to the next. Nearly one-half of our members have been in business more than 50 years and 15 percent of our members have operated their family business for more than 100 years. These are the folks who for generations have contributed to the economy of the local communities, and who are the foundation of an industry that represents 20 percent of the U.S. agricultural gross domestic product (GDP).

The agricultural GDP annually generates over $150 billion in local and national economic activity. When you add the high level of economic activity from the public monies generated, such as fuel taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, income taxes and related revenues, one must question the wisdom of a federal policy that effectively erodes the base of the rural economy.

I pay over $20,000 in real estate taxes and $3,600 in personal property tax each year. Other taxes, such as state and federal income taxes vary greatly because, as a rancher, I do not control the price I receive for my product or what is paid for goods and services.

My grandfather came to Montana in the late 1800's and homesteaded near Broadus, Montana. He passed away in the 1940's and my grandmother eventually sold that ranch to help my parents purchase the ranch that my wife, Cheryle, and I operate, along with my son, Matt, and his family today. My family has operated this ranch since 1955, and I am proud to be a third generation Montana rancher.

My parents were determined that my brother and I would get an education. That meant I would be going to college and my mother would have to move to town so that my brother could attend high school. My father could not operate the ranch alone, so my parents chose to move to Missoula, Montana where we could both attend school. They leased out our ranch and sold all of the livestock in 1968 so that we could continue our education.

In 1973, when I finished college, my brother and I moved back to the ranch, and we purchased livestock and equipment to begin ranching again. In order to undertake this venture we had to go into debt. Also, during this time, my mother and father were going through divorce proceedings. To pass on part of the ranch and to reduce the size of the estate, their agreement stipulated that my father's half of the ranch be split between my brother and myself.

My brother was killed in a crop spraying accident on our ranch in 1980. As a result of his death, his property, and his one-fourth of the ranch went back to my mother. At that time, my mother was assessed a state death tax of $5,891 on my brother's one-fourth, even though my father used the unified credit to gift his part of the ranch. By then, she had decided to move back to the ranch and had sold the Missoula home, and invested the proceeds into stocks.

In 1981, to consolidate assets, my family formed Bliss Livestock Corporation. My mother, father and I contributed land and other assets and each party owned 70 percent, 21 percent, and 9 percent respectively. My mother's share included the property she had inherited from my brother.

I managed the entire operation after my brother's death in 1980 and accumulated debt to fund growth. During the mid-eighties, my mother started gifting to me Bliss Livestock Corporation, in order to decrease the value of her estate. My mother had lived through the "Great Depression" and it was very difficult to convince her of the necessity of more extensive estate planning. My lawyers, accountants and I continued to urge her to do more, but her Depression era experience was worth more to her than any advice regarding the future. Given her reluctance to reduce the size of her estate, in 1991, I purchased a $200,000 life insurance policy on her that cost me $81,800 over four years.

My mother and father both passed away in 1998 and I inherited their share of Bliss Livestock Corporation, as well as a $92,000 federal death tax bill and a $29,000 state death tax. Because we had used the unified credit in my brother's passing, the amount of unified credit that could be used toward the death tax when my parents passed away was decreased, making this death tax bill larger than it otherwise would have been.

On the positive side, just prior to my parent's passing, Congress had created a special family business exemption. Had that not occurred, my death tax would have been in excess of $425,000 and I would have been forced to liquidate the assets that my family depends upon for a living.

Ranching is a debt intensive business. Over the years I have been indebted to fund short-term obligations to operate on a daily basis, and long-term to buy property and equipment. I have averaged about $650,000 in long term debt, not including taxes, to fund the operation. I currently have roughly $400,000 in long-term debt and a $140,00 short term debt that I am paying on annually. Debt has to be repaid out of operating income from farming and ranching revenue. When crop prices are low, as they have been for the past several years, and calf prices are low like they were in the 90s, it is difficult to make an operation cash flow. For the next thirteen years, I will be paying off the death tax debt. Add in my operating debt payments, income taxes, and high operating cost, it becomes difficult to stay in business.

To create an economically viable operation, I have tried to do all the right things. I have grown the business, invested wisely and increased the value of my operation by making improvements. I have also initiated environmental stewardship projects that improve water quality, wildlife habitat and pasture management. Notable organizations and institutions have recognized our innovation and hard work such as our ranch being featured in the Winter Grazing Success booklet, and as a host ranch for the Governor's Range Tour in Montana.

We are currently working on a 26 mile water pipe line, on mostly federal land, to improve range conditions by providing additional water sources for cattle and wildlife. This project cost us over $70,000 last year and we will have to spend another $40,000 to complete it this year. Most of this money is borrowed so we will be several years paying back the loan. I believe that environmental stewardship is one of the most important things we do as ranchers, and we want to pass on the ranch to the next generation in better shape than we received it. The money for everything we do in this regard comes from the family ranch.

Everytime we have made a profit, we have reinvested it back into the ranch to improve or expand our operation, but a tax of $92,000 is a lot to take from a family business. If my wife Cheryle and I were to die right now, I don't believe we would be able to leave our ranch to my son Matt and his family.

My wife and I were able to expand in the 90's and currently our estate is worth $7 million. With the present death tax, my son would have to pay $1.5 to $2 million to the federal government and a significant amount to the state of Montana. In order to pay the tax he would need to sell a large portion of the ranch. This would leave him a ranch that is less efficient and less economically viable.

I have been gifting shares to my son, but at the current non-taxable gift level it could take up to 700 years to gift the entire estate to him. Life insurance is an option, but a $1.5 million policy is cost-prohibitive given the payments I must make on the current death tax and my operating debt. Even if my son could arrange to pay a $2 million death tax bill over 10 years, he would still owe over $200,000 a year plus interest. A ranch like ours just does not generate that much cash flow.

Ranches the size of ours are the lifeblood of small rural communities. We are large enough to provide jobs, and purchase large amounts of goods and services that support main street businesses. Death tax not only takes money out of the pockets of hard working ranch families; it is also money that I can't invest in my business or use to support my rural community.

I started working this ranch at six years old driving a tractor in the hay field. The assets I received from my parents were not a windfall. I operated the ranch for 25 years before they died, and took a great deal of financial risk that almost cost us the ranch in the early 1980's. I started in 1973 with an old house and a couple of old wooden sheds and with years of hard work and good management, our ranch today is one of the most productive and improved ranches in the county. Hard work should be rewarded, not penalized by a death tax.

Our ranch is more than just a business or a home; it is a lifetime commitment by past, present and future generations. We have worked hard all our life on this ranch, and at some point we'd like to be able to do more than buy fence posts and insurance policies. This is my reality, but could become my son's nightmare if the death tax is not eliminated.

Some would have you believe that only the richest 1 or 2 percent ever pay death taxes. My wife sure doesn't feel rich; she still has the same old carpet that was put in the house in 1976.

Death is a certainty for each of us. Unfortunately, it also unleashes the IRS, which can take up to 55 percent of a business and its assets before the next generation has the opportunity to carry on the family tradition. Statistics indicate the average age of a cattleman is 55 years, which suggests there currently are a lot of ranch families who will soon face the burden of federal death taxation. Statistics also indicate that the number of cattle operations has declined 20 percent since 1981, a trend that many feel is accelerated by the burden death taxes pose on surviving family members.

NCBA feels this burden has contributed to families selling their family farming and ranching enterprises in anticipation of the death tax. In addition, many of our members report that their efforts to plan for the impact of death taxes has led to management decisions that are not always in the best interests of operating a profitable enterprise.

We also believe, in addition to enhancing the well-being of the beef industry, that death tax reform will provide society in general with environmental benefits. Any business that is successful over a long period of time is one in which the principals pay close attention to the maintenance, up-keep and improvement of the production facility. For cattlemen, their production facility is the land Ð land that they and their ancestors have nurtured to ensure its ability to support their beef herds, and land that they share with a natural ecosystem that includes wildlife habitat, watersheds, and riparian areas.

A cattle operation is a capital-intensive enterprise typified by having most of its assets invested in the land or cattle. In the event of the death of a principal family member, the sale or the land and/or cattle becomes the primary source of funds available to meet the costs of death taxes. When this occurs, ranches or farms get split up, particularly in areas of aggressive urban/suburban growth and escalating land values. The net result is that land that once provided nutritious beef or other staples for our diets and habitat for Mother Nature's flora and fauna is instead used to grow houses, shopping malls, and roads.

Taxing capital at death is frustrating when one considers that the money used to buy, maintain and improve these assets was taxed when earned. Adding to the insult are the death tax rates which can impose a top rate of 55 percent Ð which is especially troubling when compared to the top capital gains tax rate for individuals of 20 percent.

NCBA is a member of the Family Business Estate Tax Coalition, a large group made up of trade associations and organizations representing the vast majority of this nation's family owned enterprises. This group has worked in a bipartisan fashion to build the case of the negative impact that the death tax places on family businesses. The message of the Coalition is simple, and perhaps redundant, but it needs to be repeated.

Liquidity is the fundamental characteristic that distinguishes the estates of family owned businesses from those of individuals holding marketable securities and/or other liquid assets. Publicly traded stock can be sold to pay the death tax, doing little harm to capital investments that are critical to the productivity of the business and the overall financial well-being of a company. But a family-owned business, whether it's a ranching operation or a restaurant, must sell critical assets Ð and often the business itself must be sold Ð to pay death taxes, or suffer under the resultant debt load necessary to continue in business.

Our campaign to repeal the death tax is about jobs, economic growth and the financial stability of this nation's small and medium sized communities. On behalf of the NCBA, we thank you and your colleagues for holding this hearing. We encourage you to move boldly in your efforts to provide relief from the burden of the death tax.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman for the opportunity to visit with you and the Senate Finance Committee today. I look forward to further discussion on the death tax which has such negative consequences on family businesses and rural communities. I will be happy to answer any questions you or the Committee may have.

2. The case of Lee Ann Goddard Ferris of Ketchum, Idaho, who testified before the Senate Finance Committee on April 10, 1997:

Good morning. On behalf of the 600,000 members of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), I appreciate the opportunity to present the views of small business owners on the subject of estate taxes.

My name is Lee Ann Goddard Ferris and I have been a member of NFIB for more than 10 years. My family lives in the central part of Idaho. Our family's cattle ranch is 45 miles northeast of the Ketchum/Sun Valley area in the Lost River Valley, outside of Mackay, Idaho. The ranch consists of 2,600 deeded acres and a cow-calf operation with 700 head of cattle. My youngest brother, Ross, lives with and manages the ranch with my mother. Although I am still very involved in the ranch, my husband and I also own and operate a design business in Ketchum.

My two brothers, my sister and I all grew up working alongside my father, mother and grandfather. We worked weekends, holidays and summers branding, moving cattle, riding the range and fixing fences. We didn't have a lot of material things, but we had our family, the land and the lifestyle.

On October 5, 1993 my father was accidentally killed when his clothing got caught in farm machinery. He was 71 and very healthy. He worked from dawn until dusk, and he loved the land and his family. We were always a very close-knit family, and the hub of our family was my father and the ranch. Even though my brother, Jack, my sister, Cary, and I don't live there anymore, we all go home along with the grandchildren to help with seasonal work. My daughter, Natalia, and I take as much time off in the summer as we can and work at our summer cow camp in Copper Basin moving cattle. My mother puts on a lot of church and community picnics and barbecues down by our swimming hole. Every June our family enters the local parade with a float representing our ranch. All of the other ranchers and their families in the valley do the same. Last year the theme for the parade was "Mackay's Heritage-Ranching, Mining and Logging."

My father's death was the most devastating event that any of us has ever gone through. The second most devastating event was sitting down with our estate attorney after his death. I'll never forget his words, "There is no way you can keep this place, absolutely no way." Still in shock from the accident I said, "How can this be? We own this land. We have no debt! We just lost my father, and now we are going to lose the ranch?"

Our attorney proceeded to pencil out the estate taxes that would be due after my mother's death, and we all sat in total shock. It had taken my grandfather and father their entire lifetimes to build up the ranch, and now we can't continue on and the grandchildren will not have the land and rich heritage it provides.

It has been three and a half years since my father's accident, and we still don't know what we are going to do. We only know that we will not be able to keep the ranch unless something is done with the estate tax law now.

The estimated estate tax on our family ranching assets is $3.3 million. We gross approximately $350,000 per year from the cattle. Without the land being paid for and tight operating costs, we would not be able to make money from the business. To spread the $3.3 million out over 14 years at four percent interest is of absolutely no value to us. That would mean that we would have to pay more than $241,650 per year, which is virtually impossible. Currently we are selling off one of our spring ranges in order to buy a $1 million life insurance policy for my mother in the event that she should suddenly die. This would allow us to pay off one-third of the estate taxes and avoid a fire sale.

This tax situation has put a tremendous strain on my mother. She worries constantly and has had many sleepless nights. I don't know if any of you could ever imagine how hard it has been on her. She doesn't have her husband anymore. She worked hard her whole life and gave up a lot of material things to put her after tax dollars back into the land to pay it off. Now unless this tax law is changed or abolished she will have to leave her home, which she loves, and our family will not have a base from which to carry on.

The same scenario is happening to many of the ranchers in our valley. Eighty percent of the ranches have been owned by the same families for two and three generations. The value of the land has risen dramatically in the last five years. All of these ranchers, live on very modest incomes, and most of them can barely educate their children. I am certain that none of them will be able to pay this tax. The town of Mackay is almost solely supported by the ranchers who buy feed, gas, food and clothing. The community will not be able to survive without them. What is happening is that these ranches are being bought by wealthy absentee owners who do not run cattle and who fly in only once or twice a year. This has already happened to two neighboring ranches. Both of the owners, both second generation ranchers, were killed in accidents. Their families could not pay the estate taxes and sold the ranches to wealthy southern Californians. I have heard it said that the estate tax exists to redistribute wealth--to take from the "rich"; presumably to benefit others less fortunate. Let me tell you, from where I stand I know that this tax accomplishes the opposite.

For my family, the tax means we will not be able to continue running the ranch that has been our heritage for 60 years. This Congress says it is pro-family however, I know from personal experience that the current estate tax law is anti-family. The tax will force us to sell the ranch to a wealthy absentee owner who is unlikely to run cattle, or keep the workers employed, or contribute to the community.

Surely if Congress does not provide relief from this tax, many other families will suffer a similar fate. Ultimately, I wonder whether towns like Mackay as we know it will continue to exist.

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I urge you to ask yourselves: Why does this tax exist? Is it worth the great harm it has caused to my family and many others like us? If it is not worth the harm, then the tax shouldn't exist, and I hope you will do everything in your power to eliminate the federal death tax.

Thank you again, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to testify before you today.

Agent and Officer: A front-page article in today's New York Times reports on Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich. The article begins with a reference to "a former Mossad agent who works for Marc Rich." This is a violation of Times style. Here's the entry from the Times stylebook: "agent (intelligence). Experts confine the term to someone, usually a foreigner, who has been recruited or suborned to work on behalf of an intelligence service." The Times recommends using the word "officer" instead "for the agency's staff employees, even those working under cover abroad." The entry concludes, "an officer recruits agents." The Times' description of the employee of Marc Rich makes it sound like the person in question was a Mossad officer, not an agent, even though the paper uses the word "agent."

New in "Letters about Smartertimes.com": An exchange about indigent defense.

Here's a segment of an important paragraph in today's installment of the New York Times' three-part series on indigent defense. "Low pay discourages experienced appeals lawyers from taking cases, leaving the work to younger, less qualified lawyers, Mr. Carrigan said. 'A lot of newly admitted attorneys who work from their homes, who are raising families, take appeals cases as a convenient second income for the family,' he said. 'It's not a good situation.'"

Talk about your retrograde anti-family attitudes. If a corporate executive spoke like this, the New York Times would be after him for expressing age bias (what's wrong with "younger"?), for expressing sex bias (what's wrong with "raising families"? And whose income counts as the "second"?), and for expressing opposition to enlightened policies like flex-time and tele-commuting (what's wrong with working from home?). But instead of a corporate executive, the speaker in this case is a lawyer who handles criminal appeals cases for indigent defendants. And instead of criticizing him, the Times uses his arguments as the centerpiece of its own argument in its news article. He's the first expert quoted giving context in today's installment of the series.

If the Times wants to make these sort of Neanderthal arguments, it should at least go all the way and provide some details to back them up. But it doesn't. In the example the newspaper gives later in the article of a case that "illustrates the range of hurdles an indigent defendant can encounter under New York City's system for providing appellate lawyers for the poor," the Times never tells readers about the age or family status of the lawyers for the indigent defendant. The Times also never tells readers whether the lawyer's income is the family's "second." That could be because the Times made the intelligent judgment that such information was irrelevant to the core question: the quality of the representation provided by the lawyer. Why not apply the same judgment to judiciously trim the quote from the lawyer tsk-tsk-ing about how "It's not a good situation"? The series is already thousands of words long, so long that it is broken up into three parts, so long that after the first expert lawyer quoted to give context in today's article there are two other experts who also bemoan the quality of indigent defense work at the appellate level. So what would be lost by trimming the first expert's unsupported suggestions about the connections between the age and family status of lawyers and their qualifications?

Supply-Side Silliness: An attempt by the New York Times business section this morning to write about supply-side economics falters when it comes to defining the topic. Here's one example: "At its heart, supply-side economics -- also often known as neo-classical economics -- holds that decisions made by individuals and businesses should not be distorted by regulations and taxes." For one thing, supply-side economics is not "often known as neo-classical economics." They are two different things, and the universe of neo-classical economists is a lot larger than the universe of those who would describe themselves as supply-siders. Martin Feldstein, for example, is a neo-classical economist who sometimes annoys the supply-side purists because he is a bit of a deficit hawk. The Times definition also blurs economics and politics. "Should" is a value judgment, the stuff of politics; what economics can do is help politicians assess the effects that their policies will have on economic growth. Most supply-siders would say that taxes and regulations tend to distort the decisions made by individuals, and that a society with fewer distortions would tend to have greater economic growth. But that's different from saying there should be no distortions at all, ever.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that in criminal cases, the poor have a constitutional right to adequate legal representation provided at taxpayer expense, and Smartertimes.com agrees. But if the best the New York Times can come up with to show that the indigent defense system is not working is today's long installment in its series on "two-tier justice," well, then the pickings are pretty thin. In fact, the main topic of the Times article today seems not to be the need for better legal representation for the poor, but the need for higher pay for lawyers.

The Times reports that "Judges, lawyers and defendants say the system is at the breaking point." The Times says that "Their chief complaint is New York's pay, $40 an hour in court and $25 an hour out of court, the second lowest rate in the nation." But the two examples the Times provides of lawyers earning these fees for representing poor persons accused of crimes are a lawyer who was paid $125,041 by the city last year and a lawyer who was paid $118,027 by the city last year. Another big complaint seems to be that these lawyers lack "secretaries" and "message takers."

Smartertimes.com is ready to be convinced that the system is failing, but the fact that criminal defense lawyers for the poor are eking by on $125,000 or $118,000 a year and going without secretaries somehow seems less than compelling evidence. Many New York Times reporters, in this age of voicemail, go without secretaries and earn less than those sums annually. (Never mind that the article doesn't explain why lawyers would need to employ both a secretary and a "message taker," unless they were working at a big corporate law firm that was in the habit of passing along its inflated costs directly to its corporate clients.) The Times and the advocates that the newspaper quotes never explain why the right to adequate counsel dictates that that counsel must be paid twice as much as, say, a New York City public school teacher. And they also never explain why the taxpayers' limited resources would be best devoted to paying these court-appointed lawyers more than they already make, instead of giving raises to teachers or probation officers or drug rehabilitation counselors.

The description of New York's pay as "the second lowest rate in the nation" seems a bit slanted. It may be the second lowest rate in the nation for outside court-appointed indigent defenders. However, as the article explains elsewhere, many other states rely heavily on public defender offices. And defenders in those offices are often paid not by the hour, but, like prosecutors, on a straight annual salary. A hardworking entry-level public defender in plenty of other jurisdictions could well end up making less than the hourly wage the Times cites and would definitely end up making less than the annual fees of $125,00 or $118,000 that the Times cites.

Near the end of today's article complaining about the low pay for lawyers, some failings of the lawyers are cited. "In one case, a lawyer filed no motions and failed to request the proper jury instructions. In another, the attorney made an incorrect legal argument," the Times reports. But while the Times claims the lawyers are underpaid and that they screwed up, the Times never proves that the screw-ups are the result of the low pay. As Microsoft and Al Gore have both learned recently, even the best and highest paid lawyers can mess up sometimes.

China Hand: An article in the international section of today's New York Times reports on the maneuverings between America and Communist China. It quotes a man identified as "a former American ambassador to China, J. Stapleton Roy, who is now a member of Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm headed by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger." It would be helpful if the Times told readers whether Kissinger Associates has any clients with interests in Communist China, and what they are. That would be useful for readers trying to evaluate Mr. Roy's comments.

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Massachusetts and operating off the New England Final edition of the New York Times.

This morning's New York Times magazine is a special "How To" issue that offers a wonderful illumination of the Times mindset. The article about "How to Run a Successful Silicon Valley Business" turns out to be a primer on being a prostitute. Another article is titled "How to Rob a Bank."

The same issue of the Times magazine carries a question-and-answer style interview with Denise Rich that is an example of the same kind of softball treatment the Times gave Denise Rich last Sunday. As Smartertimes.com said last Sunday, "If this Times reporter was allowed to hang out with Denise Rich and interview her on the condition that no questions be asked about the pardons and the donations, then the Times should disclose it to readers. If the Times asked about the pardons and Denise Rich refused to answer, then that, too, should be disclosed to readers. Otherwise the newspaper looks like it is buttering up Ms. Rich in the hope of obtaining a more substantive interview with her in the future. Or the newspaper looks like it is displaying a strange lack of curiosity about the Rich pardon and Denise Rich's involvement in winning it."

As it is, Denise Rich's relationship with the Times looks like it is coming uncomfortably close to that described in an explanation elsewhere in today's Times magazine of why President Bush has been accessible to regional reporters who do not cover him regularly: "it helps him reach niche-market constituencies, and it's also pretty safe. They're not likely to pepper him with uncomfortable questions."

Arsenic in the Water: The lead editorial in today's New York Times accuses President Bush of taking a position on "poisoned drinking water" that is "aggressively hostile" and "politically suicidal." The editorialists might check out a more sensible news article in today's Times Week in Review section, which notes that arsenic "occurs naturally in soil, rocks, water, plants and animals." The news article says the change Mr. Bush plans to roll back -- a Clinton arsenic standard of 10 parts per billion would revert to 50 parts per billion -- would prevent an estimated 21 to 30 deaths per year, and cost $32 per year "per household that needed treatment." The article doesn't say how many American households would need the treatment, so it's hard to assess the total cost. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University put the cost at $1.4 billion a year for moving the standard down to 5 parts per billion from 50. The Mercatus Center actually has a nifty analysis of the arsenic issue available for downloading at regradar.com (search for the word arsenic.)

But a few additional points are worth marking. First, you didn't hear any squealing out of the Times editorial page while the Clinton-Gore administration went the first seven years of its administration without changing this standard from 50 parts per billion. Second, you didn't hear any squealing out of the Times editorial page when the Clinton-Gore administration, in the last year of its administration, backed away from its proposed new standard of 5 parts per billion to a more lax 10 parts per billion. Third, you didn't hear any squealing out of the Times editorial page about the high levels of arsenic downstream from the zinc mine on Al Gore's family property in Carthage, Tennessee. (You would have to read the Wall Street Journal to find out about that.)

Finally, beyond the cost-per-life-year analysis of the Mercatus Center and the partisan hypocrisy analysis of Smartertimes.com, the Times approach to clean water is suspect even on the environmentalist terms of the Times itself. The extensive filtration and treatment required by the Clean Water Act and the cleaner-than-nature-itself arsenic standard makes it pretty much pointless for water authorities to maintain large tracts of forested land around reservoirs. After all, the water is going to end up being treated, anyway, so why worry about protecting the watershed? If the Times policies and logic had obtained a few decades ago, the land surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir in Central Massachusetts (a major supplier of drinking water for Boston) would today be filled with parking lots instead of bald eagles and old growth trees.

Tenure Track: An article in the Education Life section of today's New York Times reports on women scientists in universities. The Times reports: "Professor Steitz never believed there was discrimination until she became a department chairwoman and realized how easy the system is to manipulate, how many subjective decisions by a department head affect a person's work -- whether to grant tenure, certainly, but also whether to give someone a secretary; who to award the extra lab space, research assistant or grant; who to send to conferences, where presenting papers can confer prominence and the right networking can lead to recommendations for the big prizes, even the Nobel." It's hard to imagine that tenure at any serious university can be granted or denied merely as the result of a subjective decision by a department head. In some cases there is a department-wide vote; in other cases there are deans and presidents and provosts and ad hoc committees involved.

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Massachusetts and operating this morning off the New England Final edition of the New York Times.

An article in this morning's New York Times reports on federal efforts to preserve for history's sake the sites where America developed the atom bomb.

The article takes a markedly hostile view toward nuclear weaponry. The Times reports, "Nations traditionally make monuments of their grandest and most glorious places. The campaign for B Reactor, which opened in 1944 under the supervision of the physicist Enrico Fermi, reflects a growing willingness to also protect historic sites that evoke unpleasant and painful memories, and in some cases are actually hazardous."

Those two sentences seem to be the Times news department asserting its opinion that the development of the atom bomb was not a grand or glorious achievement of American science in the war for freedom against fascism, but rather "unpleasant" and "painful." Surely, the use of nuclear weapons and some aspects of the development of them were unpleasant and painful, but probably less so than the alternative, which might have been an American defeat in World War II or at the very least more extensive American casualties in conventional warfare. Or consider what might have happened had America not developed the atom bomb, and instead waited for the Soviet Union to do so.

The "no nukes" tone of the article is confirmed by one of the first quotes, from Senator Murray of Washington. The Times tells us she envisions a place "kind of like the Holocaust Museum," she said. "It's not a place to enjoy a day, but where you learn what can happen."

As Senator Murray must understand, to compare the American development of the atomic bomb to the Nazi Holocaust is just a stunning example of moral equivalency. The atom bomb was developed to defend the free world against the Nazis. Its development probably had the effect of saving lives -- unlike the Holocaust, which was a calculated effort to take lives for no good reason.

The Times article goes on to report that "at the Greenbrier Resort in Warm Springs, W.Va., nearly 200,000 visitors have paid up to $25 to tour the ultimate Strangelovian relic: the cavernous cold war bunker built to shelter members of Congress from a nuclear attack."

It's just unseemly of the Times in a news story to mock a reasonable civil defense measure as "the ultimate Strangelovian relic." For one thing, the idea of "Dr. Strangelove" was that the military and mad scientists were usurping the rightful roles of the civilian political authorities. The idea of putting Congress in a bunker in the event of a nuclear attack runs counter to that concept, because it suggests that even in the event of a nuclear war, the constitutional system of checks and balances, complete with separate executive, legislative and judicial branches, would remain intact.

Finally, it's a breathtaking oversight that an entire article could be devoted to the sites where the atom bomb was developed without mentioning what is probably the most important site of all. That is in Chicago, where, in a commandeered squash court under the grandstands of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues on December 2, 1942, achieved the first self-sustaining controlled release of nuclear energy. The site of Chicago Pile No. 1 was designated a national historic landmark in 1965 and marked with a Henry Moore sculpture in 1967. It's just weird that the Times could write this whole article on historic sites related to the atom bomb without mentioning the word "Chicago."

Take Your Pick: The metro section of today's Times runs an Associated Press dispatch reporting that "Twenty-one cases of pneumonia in college-age students have been identified in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Broome Counties and in the Bronx, and officials believe the students were infected during spring break vacations in Acapulco, Mexico." The same item reports that "Nationwide, more than 100 cases have been discovered among people who stayed at the Calinda Beach Resort Hotel in Acapulco in the first weeks of March."

An item in the national section of the Times, also from the AP, reports, "At least 100 college students nationwide have contracted a respiratory disease while on spring break in Acapulco, Mexico, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported today. All the students spent time at the Calinda Beach Hotel and reported getting sick about 10 days after returning home. Officials from the health agency said they believed the disease might be histoplasmosis, a fungal infection that typically is easily treatable."

Do the students have pneumonia or histoplasmosis? The metro section says one; the national section says the other. What's a reader to do? It would be nice if the editors at the Times were able to detect these inconsistencies before inflicting them on the paper's readers.

New in "Letters about Smartertimes": New Haven defends itself, sort of.

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Massachusetts and operating this morning off the online edition of the New York Times.