A news article on the education page of today's New York Times amounts to an editorial against standards. The article runs under the headline "The Pitfalls of Make-or-Break Tests," and reports the fact that when 73 percent of City University of New York students who took a placement test in reading failed the test, "CUNY officials and the faculty re-examined the test, which has a top score of 53, and decided to reduce the passing score to 36 from 40."

Now, there are dozens of conservative education experts out there who would bemoan this as a case of lowering standards instead of improving performance. This Times news article quotes none of those experts, choosing instead to write in its own, unattributed opinion, "The lower passing score helped many students; the passing rate jumped to about 60 percent."

The Times news department may think students who can't read are "helped" by being moved along the education assembly line regardless of their skills, but, again, there are dozens of conservative and even not-so-conservative education experts out there who would note that lowering the passing score hasn't "helped" anyone. No additional skills have been imparted; no student is a better reader; there's just been an accounting change. The passing rate "jumped" not because the students all of a sudden learned how to read, but because the definition of passing was changed.

Late Again: The New York Times waddles in late this morning with an article under the headline "Capitol Hawks Seek Tougher Line on Iraq." The Wall Street Journal had this on Monday under the headline, "White House Call to Alter Iraqi Sanctions Draws Criticism from GOP Hard-Liners."

Passive Aggressive: The following passive constructions were used in the "My Job" column in the "Workplace" section of today's New York Times: "In a flash, punches were thrown, and glasses were tossed and shattered. Security and the police department were called to straighten out the dispute." The energy and verve were removed from the writing.

The New York Times has a front-page news article today ruing the fact that Bill Clinton's term expired before he was able to finish appeasing the Communist dictatorship in North Korea.

It's all phrased according to the journalistic conventions of a Times news article, but when you come right down to it, it's clear that the article is expressing a view that is identical to the one in the Times editorial today on "A Visit by South Korea's Leader."

The reason the Times is so disappointed that the Clinton administration didn't conclude its deal with North Korea seems to be that, had the deal gone through, it would have taken away an argument from proponents of missile defense. Here's how the news article puts it: "The episode remains vitally relevant because the North Korean missile threat has been the main driving force behind the debate in Washington over American missile defenses, and because President Bush has yet to declare whether he plans to carry through or modify the Clinton administration's strategy."

It's overstating it to say "the North Korean missile threat has been the main driving force behind the debate in Washington over American missile defenses." The missile threats from Iran, Iraq, Communist China and Russia are driving forces as well; if they aren't, they should be.

The Times news department lets us know where its own views are on the matter by concluding the article with the note that "critics inside and outside the government say Mr. Clinton made a mistake by not sending Ms. Sherman to Pyongyang despite the Florida problem."

"They did not run out of time; they ran out of courage," the Times quotes the author of a book on Korean diplomacy as saying.

And then the Times trots out Madeleine Albright to express her own regret that the deal with North Korea was not finalized before the end of the Clinton administration.

There are dozens of policy experts out there who would say something like, "Thank goodness America and free Asia escaped without Clinton pledging $1 billion in aid to prop up this awful communist dictatorship in exchange for a false sense of security that the dictator would abandon his missile program." The Times doesn't have to agree with those policy views. But it sure would be nice if, when the Times quoted experts in its news articles, the newspaper would occasionally include the anti-appeasement point of view, just for the sake of fairness and balance, in addition to the usual Times view that is expressed in today's editorial and in the voices of the carefully selected experts that the Times relies on to give context to its news reports.

Pataki Names a Woman: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times runs under the headline: "Pataki Names a Woman to Head Environmental Department." The article mentions prominently that "She would be the first woman to hold the job." Unless there is some unknown history of discrimination against women that is particular to the state environmental conservation office, it seems odd that the Times makes such a big deal of the fact that the appointee is a woman.

This is from the lead front-page news article in today's New York Times: "The speed with which the Republicans are trying to ram through the rate reductions, without any talk of compromise, has alienated conservative Democrats who might have been ready to respond to Mr. Bush's calls for bipartisan compromise."

That description of "speed" and the lack of compromise is the New York Times news department talking; the opinions aren't attributed to anyone else. And it's just warped. The rate-reductions under the plan passed by a House committee last week would not go into full effect until 2006. Mr. Bush has been talking about his tax plan since he was campaigning in the Republican primaries last year. That's speed?

As for compromise, the death-tax relief has already been stripped from the Bush plan now under consideration by Congress; as the Times article itself points out, the income tax rate reductions account for only about $1 trillion of the $1.6 trillion the tax cut is estimated to cost using the government's flawed, mostly static analysis of the effects of the tax cuts on government revenue. There's no "talk of compromise" because the Republicans have already compromised by cutting loose $600 billion worth of tax cuts and by not putting the full rate reductions in effect until 2006.

And for all the talk about conservative Democrats being "alienated," the Times manages to write this entire article under the headline "Bush Pushes Hard To Woo Democrats Over to Tax Plan" without mentioning one Democrat that Mr. Bush has already won over, Senator Zell Miller of Georgia.

To get a real sense of where the New York Times is coming from on the question of tax cuts, check out the piece that runs on today's op-ed page. It starts out lulling readers into thinking it favors the Bush plan: "President Bush's planned tax reduction is not excessively large or tipped outrageously toward the well off."

But read on, and you find out that the opinion piece actually advocates reducing the top tax rate by only a paltry three percentage points, to 36.5 percent from the current 39.5 percent. That is still far above the 28% top rate that President Reagan managed to get through a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, and it is higher than the 31 percent rate that President Bush acceded to when he broke his "read my lips" pledge. The piece also argues for retaining the death tax, arguing that keeping the tax in place means that "The families of Bill Gates and his Silicon Valley colleagues can still feel noble about giving up some of their enormous wealth." The desire to induce a feeling of nobility is not much of a justification for a mandatory tax; if the billionaires want to feel noble, nothing is stopping them from giving their money away to charity voluntarily. There's nothing particularly noble about complying with the law.

Lost in D.C.: A sidebar to today's front-page New York Times article on "Medicine Merchants" reports that "A wing of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington bears the name of Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, who died in 1987." This makes it sound like the Smithsonian Institution is one big building and the Sackler is a wing of it. In fact, the Sackler Galley is a freestanding museum or division or part of the Smithsonian.

A news article on the front page of this morning's New York Times reports that "Germany has become Israel's most important ally outside the United States." Well, there's no disputing Israel's ties to Germany, but there's a case that could be made that Turkey is a more important ally to Israel than Germany is. It is closer and more strategically located in the Middle East.

The Times article this morning paints a rosy picture of the German-Israeli relationship, but it neglects to mention two issues that have recently caused some tension between Berlin and Jerusalem. The first is Germany's extensive trade and financial ties with Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism and a resolute enemy of Israel. The second is the fact that, since the Social Democrats have replaced the Christian Democrats at the head of the German government, Germany has voted against Israel on several United Nations resolutions. The dispatch in today's Times about "how good Israeli-German ties have become" would have been more credible had it dealt with these difficulties by acknowledging them rather than ignoring them.

An article in the national section of today's New York Times runs under the headline "Studies Point Up Racial Discrimination in Special Education." Well, the studies might show racial discrimination, but the Times article offers no evidence from them that indicates any such discrimination. What the Times article reports instead is a racial disparity: "Black students are three times as likely as white students to be labeled 'mentally retarded' or 'emotionally disturbed' and put in special education classes," the Times reports, citing studies purporting to show that "black and Hispanic students receive a poorer, more segregated education."

This disparity could be the result of racial discrimination against black and Hispanic students, as the Times suggests, but there could also be a number of more innocent explanations that the Times article fails to consider. It could be that school officials are actually better at detecting genuine learning disabilities and emotional disturbances among blacks and Hispanics than among whites, and that, rather than wrongly sticking blacks and Hispanics in special education classes, the system is failing whites by failing to detect their problems. It could be that there actually are more blacks and Hispanics who are retarded or emotionally disturbed than there are whites. And it could be that black and Hispanic parents whose children are stuck in crummy government-run monopoly schools are gaming the system by trying to get their students into special education classes because the parents know that those classes are much smaller and have more money spent per pupil.

There's no mention in the New York Times of a recent report by the California state auditor, which, according to a report in the February 8, 2001, Los Angeles Times, found that a disproportionate share of students getting extra time on the SAT because of "learning disabilities" were white students from wealthy families -- some of whom didn't need it. Auditing the files of 330 students in 18 public schools, it found the basis for their special treatment to be questionable in 60 cases, or 18.2%. Students at private schools were four times as likely as ordinary students to get extra time, according to the L.A. Times account. No one is accusing the authorities assessing learning disabilities in California of "racial discrimination" because they are diagnosing more such disabilities among wealthy white students; the more common conclusion is that the students are gaming the system to get more time on their SATs. Of course, it is also possible that wealthy white students in private schools are, in reality, more likely to be genuinely learning disabled than black and Hispanic students are, or that their disabilities are more likely to be diagnosed.

So when white students are judged learning disabled in disproportionate numbers, they are probably gaming the system, while when black students are judged learning disabled in disproportionate numbers, they must be the victims of "racial discrimination." Today's Times article doesn't seriously explore any of these complexities, preferring to go for the obvious, and apparently unsupported, "Studies Point Up Racial Discrimination in Special Education." Nor does the Times disclose that the co-director of the "Civil Rights Project at Harvard," which released the studies the Times is writing about, is Chris Edley, a Harvard law professor who also served as President Clinton's top aide on the issue of race relations.

'Tendonitis': A front-page article in today's New York Times about efforts to impose new regulatory burdens on businesses refers to "tendonitis." The correct spelling of the ailment is tendinitis; the Times stylebook has an entry on exactly this point.

The lead editorial in this morning's New York Times praises, on freedom of speech grounds, a 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned a congressional ban on Legal Services lawsuits challenging welfare reform. After going on for a while praising the "free-speech stance" of Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in the Legal Services case, the Times writes, "Justice Kennedy was unconvincing in trying to explain why the First Amendment prohibits muzzling government-paid lawyers but somehow allows the muzzling of doctor-employees in the family planning program."

So, according to the Times, the First Amendment freedom of speech requires that Congress fund lawyers to sue to overturn welfare reform and that Congress fund doctors to advise on abortions. The Times also interprets that same First Amendment to require the city of New York to fund anti-Catholic art exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum. How, possibly, then, can the Times endorse the McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform," as it has been doing, even to the point of condemning the AFL-CIO for daring to point out that the labor federation's own free speech rights would be violated by the McCain-Feingold provision preventing unions from airing political commercials in the months before an election? The McCain-Feingold restrictions, remember, are arguably even a worse violation of the First Amendment than the welfare-lawyer, abortion-doctor and anti-Catholic-art cases, because they would impose a ban on privately funded activities rather than simply withdrawing public funds from an activity that could still take place legally with private funds.

One of the Times' own columnists acknowledges today that "Part of McCain-Feingold is very possibly going to be tossed out by the Supreme Court." It is enough to make one suspect that the agenda the Times is promoting isn't really about free speech, but about opposition to welfare reform, support for abortion rights and support for anti-Catholic art.

Anyone: A "political memo" that runs in the metro section of today's New York Times reports, "No matter whether Mrs. Clinton is being the dutiful junior senator from New York, offering a prescription for the ailing upstate economy, or inveighing against President Bush's tax cut, all anyone seems to want to talk about is her husband's scandal-plagued presidency." This is gutsy. The Times devotes acres of front-page space and editorials to Bill Clinton's "scandal-plagued presidency," then soberly observes that it is "all anyone seems to want to talk about." Smartertimes.com thinks there are plenty of people who want to talk about other things, but they are not getting much help from the Times' unseemly fixation on Mr. Clinton's exercise of what was, after all, his constitutional authority to issue pardons.

A news article in the national section of today's New York Times begins, "WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 -- In his first visit to Capitol Hill since his rancorous confirmation, Attorney General John Ashcroft met today with black lawmakers and tried to ease their concerns about how he would handle the job." It's just false to call that "his first visit to Capitol Hill since his rancorous confirmation." Mr. Ashcroft was on Capitol Hill on February 27 to watch President Bush give his speech about the budget. He was clearly visible in television broadcasts of the speech, which took place on Capitol Hill.

Epicenter and Hypocenter: A graphic in the national section of today's New York Times explains, "The epicenter is the surface location directly above the hypocenter, the focus point of an earthquake." The graphic shows the hypocenter of the Seattle quake as "33 miles" below the epicenter. How, then, to explain the following sentence in the news article that accompanies the graphic: "Today's epicenter was some 35 miles deep, whereas the other two quakes occurred just a few miles from the surface"? If the epicenter is "the surface location," how can it be "some 35 miles deep"?

A Conservative's Dream: A news analysis in the national section of today's New York Times asserts, "In fact, the budget Mr. Bush published today is a conservative's dream: it slows the pace of spending, cuts a few of the programs championed by the previous administration and returns $1.6 trillion to taxpayers over the next decade." This is another example of the narrowness of the Times' conception of conservatism. A slew of conservatives have been grumbling that the Bush tax cut is too small, that it doesn't include a capital gains tax cut and that it would reduce the top marginal income tax rate to a rate that is still higher than the ones that applied at the end of the Reagan administration and even at the end of the first Bush administration. Conservatives are also complaining that the 4% spending increase is too much; they argue that the president should have the ambition not merely to slow the pace of spending but to reduce the size of government. And there are still other conservatives who complain there isn't enough additional defense spending in the budget. So, far from being "a conservative's dream," the Bush budget has plenty of conservatives restless.

The metro-section gossip column of today's New York Times reports that an umbrella group called American Muslims for Jerusalem is planning a boycott of Estee Lauder Cosmetics after Ronald Lauder's appearance at a rally in support of keeping Jerusalem united under Israeli sovereignty.

The Times describes the boycott planners as "some of the largest and most influential Muslim-American organizations"; it doesn't mention that the sponsors of American Muslims for Jerusalem include the American Muslim Alliance and the American Muslim Council, groups so extreme in their hatred of Israel and their refusal to condemn terrorist attacks that even Hillary Clinton returned campaign contributions from leaders of the groups during her Senate campaign.

The Times describes the rally Mr. Lauder attended as "a rally of religious and nationalist Israelis." It's funny how the Times never uses the word "nationalist" to describe, say, Americans who don't want to turn Washington over to rule by America's enemies. There's nothing wrong with Israeli nationalism, but, as a word choice, the Times might have just as easily chosen "patriotic" or "Zionist" or "Jewish" instead of "nationalist" to modify "Israelis." Or, even better, the paper could have dropped the adjectives and just said that the rally opposed the division of the Israeli capital.

The Times might have noted that Ronald Lauder in fact has little involvement in the cosmetics company, which is run primarily by Leonard Lauder, who is Ronald's brother.

And anyway, since when is a politically motivated boycott centered on a foreign policy dispute fodder for a gossip column? Why doesn't the Times handle this in a regular news article that would have allowed the exploration of these issues in some depth?

Finally, the Times mangles the name of the group Mr. Lauder heads. The Times calls it the "Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations"; in fact, it is the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Big Increases: The lead editorial in this morning's New York Times refers to the Bush budget's "big increases in education, defense, science research and a few other areas." Looks like those patsies over at the Times editorial page fell for the Bush administration spin yet again. While President Bush is proposing an increase in spending on health research, funding for the U.S. Geological Survey is slated for a 22 percent cut and funding for the National Science Foundation is set for an annual increase of 1 percent, as the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal have reported. Not exactly "big increases."

Narrow-Minded: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports on Mayor Giuliani's proposals for spending on housing. The article is a typical case of the Times habit of drawing its experts for commenting on the news from a narrow ideological spectrum. The most conservative position expressed in the article is the mayor's proposal, which contemplates more tax dollars being spent on "housing" in exchange for certain policy changes. The others paraphrased include "some city housing advocates" who are disturbed that not enough of the $688 million in new government spending comes from the city itself. Also mentioned are "city council officials" who "said they regretted that the mayor had offered the housing money with strings attached" but who "said they were confident that in the end, the government's investment in housing would increase." Completely absent from the article is the voice of any free-market-oriented analyst who might suggest that the appropriate action to create more housing in the city would be to reduce regulations, taxes and rent controls, without spending more government money.

A "Public Lives" profile of the heiress Agnes Gund runs in the metro section of today's New York Times under the headline, "Rich, Yes, but Even More Different: Liberal and Fun." The headline seems to imply that most rich persons are conservative and not fun. In fact, there are plenty of rich persons who are liberal, in part because they are so rich that they can afford to pay high taxes and still be really rich. Or because they can afford to pay lawyers to create trusts and structure their holdings to avoid taxation. They can also afford to send their children to private school, so they are not particularly passionate about conservative-backed radical reforms of public schools. And they can afford to live in rich, safe neighborhoods in buildings with doormen, so they are not particularly passionate about conservative efforts to get tough on crime. This is the breed known as the "limousine liberal."

The Times profile reports that Ms. Gund "is known for unconventionality in the things that she chooses to buy and the causes that she supports. (She says she is 'pro-choice'; and advocates gun control, for instance.)" Wow, those are two unconventional positions for a wealthy New York liberal woman: support for gun control and abortion rights. Who could have possibly imagined! How does Ms. Gund stand the social pressure from all those pro-gun, anti-abortion-rights wealthy New York liberals? How unconventional!

Come on.

Bad for the Country: Under the headline "Political Missteps by Organized Labor," the New York Times has an editorial this morning denouncing the AFL-CIO for daring to speak up for its own rights to free speech. "The union move is bad for the country," the Times declares. The law the AFL-CIO opposes would ban the labor federation from running ads mentioning political candidates in the 60 days before elections. The Times actually favors this ban, despite the fact that it is a clear violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. One can only imagine how the Times would react to a federal law that aimed to ban the newspaper from running editorials or news articles that mentioned the political candidates in the 60 days before elections. The editorial doesn't even attempt to explain why the unions should have less of a right to voice their opinions than the Times does. The closest the Times gets is the assertion that the flood of money into politics is "corrupting." The money is spent overwhelmingly on speech and on television commercials that make political arguments. How more speech is "corrupting," and how limiting the rights of non-New York Times speakers is somehow less corrupting, the Times leaves unexplained.

Lost in the Middle East: The lead, front-page article in today's New York Times reports on Secretary of State Powell's trip to the Middle East. "Talks between Israel and Syria broke down last year during the Clinton administration, which held to the idea that it was possible to conduct only one track of peace talks at a time," the Times reports. The Clinton administration may have convinced the Times that it held the idea "that it was possible to conduct only one track of peace talks at a time," but Israel, Syria, the PLO and Jordan all seem somehow unconvinced, as did the American diplomats who helped conduct those peace talks simultaneously.

The same Times article claims that arming Iraqi opposition movements "would be very unpopular in the region." Well, one reason it might be unpopular is that the leading opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, stands for principles of freedom and democracy, which run counter to the principles of most governments in the region. A newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, in the one free and democratic country in the region, Israel, has in fact been editorializing in favor of arming the Iraqi National Congress. Another reason the idea may be unpopular is that the Clinton administration botched it the last time around. The Times makes this observation about unpopularity in the region as though it were spoon-fed it by General Powell, without any critical thinking about whether some countries, such as Jordan, Turkey and Israel, would come around to the idea if it were undertaken with some seriousness by Washington.

Subject-Verb Agreement: A dispatch from Tel Aviv on the front page of this morning's New York Times contains the following sentence: "The enticement to enter into a political settlement with a man long considered Labor's ideological arch-enemy are eight cabinet seats, about a third of the total, including the high-profile ministries of defense and foreign affairs." The Times needs to work on its subject-verb agreement. The subject of the sentence is "enticement," and the verb should be the singular "is," not the plural "are."

An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports on the efforts of "Acorn, an education reform group," to block the privatization of the management of five New York City public schools.

Identifying Acorn as "an education reform group" is like calling the Bolsheviks "a government reform group." The Times' own stylebook cautions about this, noting that "reform suggests not just change but improvement," and directing that "change" or "overhaul" can be "more neutral synonyms in the news columns."

What is Acorn, exactly? Well, for one thing, its agenda is certainly not limited to education reform. The group was known in the 1980s for its advocacy of squatting; the Acorn web site reports that "economic upheaval had forced many people to default on mortgages, ACORN sought to place needy people in the resulting vacant homes. This required the forceful and illegal (though logical and moral) seizing of the properties -- squatting." In addition to illegally seizing private property, Acorn coordinated a March 1995 protest that forced the cancellation of a scheduled speech by Rep. Newt Gingrich at a meeting of the National Association of Counties.

The Times article also neglects to mention Acorn's own record of helping to run schools in New York, a record which is less than exemplary. In 1994, Acorn helped create an Acorn school in Brooklyn called P.S. 245. The most recent state-generated report of results on math and reading tests showed students at the Acorn school performing worse than those at other New York City schools and worse than students at other similar schools. Four of the fourth graders tested at the school met the state's reading standards, while 20 failed to meet the standards. Seven of the fourth graders met the math standards, while 16 failed to meet the standards.

Finally, the Times article manages to mangle the name of a group that is allied with Acorn against privatization. The Times calls the group "Jews for Economic and Racial Justice"; the correct name of the group, however, is "Jews for Racial and Economic Justice."

A dispatch from Jerusalem in the international section of today's New York Times refers to "Larry Shartz, the spokesman for the American Embassy in Tel Aviv." The man's last name is correctly spelled "Schwartz," not "Shartz."

'St. Anne's': An article in the Fashions of the Times magazine section this morning is about a pink dress. "Posen met Malle through her cousin Aura at St. Anne's School in Brooklyn, which is also where he met Lola and Stella Schnabel and de la Huerta," the Times reports. The school in Brooklyn is named Saint Ann's, with no "e." The Times makes the same error in a front-page article in the Sunday Styles section. The article, about a male model, reports that "He dropped out of St. Anne's School in Brooklyn Heights." Again, the Times has the school's name wrong; there's no "e."

'Popular Union of Kurdistan': An article in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times refers to a Kurdish group as the "Popular Union of Kurdistan." The group, often known by its initials as the PUK, is actually the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan; the Times has the name of the group wrong.

Prominent Democrats: An Op-Ed Page forum in today's New York Times attempts to answer the question "What Kind of Party for the Democrats?" The answer, according to the Times, seems to be one dominated by the same liberal warhorses that it was dominated by 20 years ago. Rather than carting out Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro, The Times might have gotten answers to the question from some more centrist new faces in the party, such as Joe Lieberman or Zell Miller. As it is, Al From looks like a token.

Stoner Boyfriend: Also from the Fashions of the Times magazine today, in an article about the BMW 2002: "I really liked the car because it looked like something your stoner boyfriend would drive you to the beach in." Well, looks like the New York Times isn't participating in that ads-for-content program run by the White House drug tsar.

A "Public Lives" profile in the national section of today's New York Times reports on Howard Mechanic, a Vietnam War protester who became a fugitive and was pardoned by President Clinton. The Times says Mechanic's "return to good standing" has been "anything but controversial." The profile is a whitewash of Mechanic's record. It omits his more colorful statements, like, "The law, courts and pigs protect the propertied interests." It omits the fact by appearing at the antiwar protest where he was arrested, Mechanic violated a court order that specifically named him and enjoined him from protesting. It omits the fact that by becoming a fugitive he left in the lurch a professor who had pledged his home as collateral for Mechanic's bail. It omits the fact that, running for city council in Scottsdale, Arizona, he lied about what college he went to and then, when he was about to be found out, lied by telling voters he had leukemia and was withdrawing from the race.

You don't have to be a Cold War hawk like Smartertimes.com is to think these facts are relevant; even the New York Times magazine included them in a profile of Mechanic that it ran on April 30, 2000. Granted, the space allotted for this morning's article is much shorter than that allotted to the magazine article. But it doesn't take much space to get across the idea that Mechanic's case is more complex than today's Times whitewash suggests it is. Do the Times editors think the paper's readers have such short memories that they can slip this kind of thing in and have no one remember the earlier magazine article?

Supply and Demand: More evidence that the New York Times does not understand economics comes in an article in the metro section of today's paper. The article runs under the headline "Ticket Price for a Movie Goes to $10 at Loews," and the article reports "The movie theater business has been deeply troubled as a result of a building spree led to a vast oversupply of theaters." Never mind the missing word; there is also a pullout quote in the article that says, "A business suffering from a vast oversupply of theaters." The way supply and demand curves work, according to the New York Times, apparently, is that when there is an oversupply of something, the price goes up. This is in defiance of conventional economics, but the Times has never been bound by the strictures of conventional economics.

Smartertimes.com doesn't deny that there is a glut of movie theater seats nationwide. But the key factor affecting the price of a movie ticket in Manhattan is not the supply of movie theater seats nationwide, but the supply of movie theater seats in Manhattan. And despite the addition of new megaplexes at Times Square and at Kips Bay, the fact remains that buying tickets way ahead of time is the only way to get in to see a popular new release on a weekend night, or even a Thursday night, at theaters in the Village or the Upper West Side. Show up on a weekend night there without having bought tickets in advance, and it is obvious that "vast oversupply" is not the relevant business problem being faced. (Never mind the relevant social problem being faced of what to do for the rest of the evening given that the movie you wanted to see was sold out.) In fact, the demand for tickets at the current price exceeds the supply. Which is why the ticket prices can be raised.

Aptitude Test: An article in the national section of today's New York Times about testing and college admissions describes the SAT I as "an aptitude test." Even the sellers of the SAT have stopped claiming it is an aptitude test; while SAT once stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test, the name of the test was changed about a decade ago to Scholastic Assessment Test, and now it is just called SAT I. The same paragraph that identifies the test as an aptitude test reports that officials say the scores are linked to school quality. So why describe the test as an aptitude test if it is not?

President Bush yesterday all but cut the legs out from under the free, democratic resistance to Saddam Hussein, and the New York Times today misses the story.

It's not that the Times didn't have a reporter at the press conference yesterday where Mr. Bush made his remarks -- the paper clearly did. And it's not that the Times failed to run a front-page news article about Bush's comments on Iraq -- the paper clearly did. And it's not as though the paper didn't reproduce the president's remarks -- the paper clearly did. What's missing is any useful context and any recognition by the Times that Mr. Bush's comments were a disappointment to backers of the cause of freedom in Iraq and perhaps even a violation of American law.

Here's what the front-page Times news article, in its second-to-last paragraph, quotes the president as saying: "The secretary of state is going to go listen to our allies and as to how best to effect a policy, the primary goal of which will be to say to Saddam Hussein, 'We won't tolerate you developing weapons of mass destruction and we expect you to leave your neighbors alone.'"

It's clear from the full transcript of Mr. Bush's remarks that that is exactly what he meant when he described the policy: he repeated the formulation almost identically a second time in his remarks.

Here, by contrast, is what the Iraq Liberation Act -- which was sponsored by Senators Lott and Lieberman and which was signed by President Clinton on October 31, 1998 and which is now ensconced in Title 22, Section 2151 of the U.S. Code -- has to say about the matter: "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."

Now, granted, as a matter of law, the word "should" allows some wiggle room, and, under the Constitution, it is primarily the president and not the Congress who has responsibility for foreign policy.

But there is a significant underlying policy debate here. The policy described by Mr. Bush is a weaker version of the original "containment" policy outlined by Clinton aide Martin Indyk. (Weaker, because it drops even the pretense of insisting on U.N. weapons inspections.) The policy outlined in the Iraq Liberation Act is a "rollback" policy akin to that developed during the Cold War by the AFL-CIO in Poland and the Reagan administration in Nicaragua, a policy of regime-change through aid to the democratic opposition.

It had been an open question which side of this debate Mr. Bush would come down on. And the president could still change his mind as he realizes the futility of the containment approach and the appeal of the rollback approach. But with his remarks yesterday, the president put himself firmly in the containment camp. The New York Times doesn't have to agree with Smartertimes.com about the wisdom of rollback, but it sure would be nice if the paper noticed this debate was going on and explained to its readers which side appears to be winning.

Corporate Tax Breaks: A news article in the business section of today's New York Times reports on the status of a "Bid for Corporate Tax Breaks" to go along with President Bush's tax-cut plan. One might think the Times would have a good understanding of the corporate tax-break issue, seeing as how it is asking the city and state for a special tax break for its new headquarters tower near Times Square. But here are some of the "business tax cuts" enumerated by the Times in its news article today: "to make health-insurance premiums fully deductible for self-employed people" and "to expand the individual retirement account." These tax cuts might help the health insurance industry and the financial services industry, but they'd also help individuals; they are not so much "corporate tax breaks" or "business tax cuts" but individual tax cuts. Smartertimes.com would argue that all business taxes are ultimately taxes on the individual anyway, because the businesses simply pass along the costs of the taxes to their employees, customers and shareholders. Smartertimes.com would also argue that simplifying the tax code and lowering the rates across the board is better policy than creating special carved-out tax breaks for government-approved behavior, whether it is saving for retirement or buying health insurance. But the Times doesn't have to agree with Smartertimes.com about all that, and you don't, either, to realize what a big stretch it is to call IRA expansion and making health insurance fully tax-deductible for the self-employed "business tax breaks." Doing that just looks like a way to make the tax cuts seem less appealing to Times readers.

This morning's New York Times is in full moral dudgeon over the news that Hugh Rodham, Hillary Clinton's brother, was paid $400,000 in two pardon cases.

"The payments to Mr. Rodham are the latest in a string of embarrassments for the former president," the lead, front-page news article in the Times opines.

"Another Pardon Disgrace," thunders a Times editorial, calling the fees "certainly unethical."

"What he did was absolutely unethical," chimes in the moral conscience of the Clinton years, Terry McAuliffe, who is quoted in the Times news article.

Well, granted, this story broke late yesterday, but missing from the Times coverage is any shred of context that would explain that, by Washington standards -- and by a reasonable standard -- Hugh Rodham's behavior is not so disgraceful or unethical or unusual at all. Smartertimes.com realizes that this position is going to irk the Clinton-haters on the right and the good-government types on the left, but before rushing to judgment, those who are already astride their high horse about Hugh Rodham might stop to consider: Senator Alfonse D'Amato's brother, Armand, lobbied Congress and lobbied Senator D'Amato. A federal appeals court ruled that Armand had broken no laws by doing so.

And it is not just Italian-American Republicans from Long Island who do this sort of thing. One big lobbying firm in Washington during the Clinton years was known as Podesta.com. The firm's name partner, Anthony Podesta, is the brother of Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta. Another principal at the firm, according to the Associated Press, was Jeff Ricchetti, brother of the deputy White House chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti.

Even friends of Al Gore, that emblem of squeaky-cleanness, get into the act. The Washington Post reported on June 14, 1999, "Washington lobbyist Peter Knight, invariably described as 'like a brother' to Vice President Gore, is leading the Gore campaign's $55 million fund-raising strategy. At the same time, Knight is providing corporate clients like telecom powerhouse Bell Atlantic and defense giant Lockheed Martin with intelligence on inside White House thinking."

The truth is, it is unreasonable to expect the brothers and friends of government officials to accept vows of poverty or to renounce their First Amendment right to petition the government. And it is unreasonable to accept those paying for lobbyists to hire lobbyists who have no personal connections to the targets of the lobbying.

The "everyone does it" excuse does not absolve the Clintons or Mr. Rodham of responsibility for their actions. At the same time, though, the Times, and the American voters, should have realized what they were getting into when they elected the Clintons. Basically, if you wanted the squeaky-clean candidate, you would have gone with Ralph Nader or Paul Tsongas. The Clintons gave their backers certain policy results, even some centrist ones -- welfare reform, military action in Bosnia, Nafta -- in exchange for the backers' looking the other way at their ethical foibles.

The more sensible and consistent way to judge these pardon decisions would be on the merits: Did the criminals deserve the pardons? If the pardons were undeserved, then they were wrong no matter how scrupulous the process. If the pardons were deserved, then they were right no matter how many Clinton relatives were hired and no matter how much money the relatives were paid.

In fact, at least one detail in the Times coverage this morning makes Hugh Rodham sound like an honorable guy: he charged one of the pardon recipients on a "contingency fee" basis. No pardon, no payment owed. If Mr. Rodham were really out to exploit his position, he would have hustled all sorts of pardon applicants for fixed fees, and left them high and dry without having actually gotten them pardons. The Rodham pardon contingency fee, if you look at it this way, has an air of rectitude about it akin to the L.L. Bean guarantee of satisfaction or your money back.

Anyway, the Times doesn't have to agree with the Smartertimes.com view on this; it just would be nice to see some of this background included in the newspaper's coverage.

Most Demanding: An article in the international section of today's New York Times reports, "Cardinal Egan, who spent more than 20 years in Rome, is still feeling his way into the most visible -- and demanding -- Catholic pulpit in the United States." New York might be the most visible and demanding Catholic pulpit in America, but one could also make a good case that Los Angeles is. In any case, this is an opinion worth hedging or attributing rather than simply asserting in a news article.

The national section of today's New York Times includes a graphic listing "Other Major Recent Espionage Cases in the United States." The graphic, which is organized by year, is credited to the Associated Press, but the Times has some responsibility for choosing to run it instead of a similar chronology that could have been generated by the Times staff. The list of "Major Recent Espionage Cases" includes that of Felix Bloch, who was never charged with spying, and of Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel, a country friendly to America. But it strangely omits the case of Theresa Squillacote and Kurt Stand. Squillacote, a Pentagon lawyer, and Stand, a regional representative for the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations, were dedicated communists who were recruited by East Germany while they were campus radicals at the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s. They were caught in 1997 and convicted in 1998.

Predictable: A "Ramallah Journal" article in the international section of today's New York Times reports on an exhibit honoring Palestinian Arabs killed in the uprising against Israel. "Israeli critics would say that the exhibit, '100 Martyrs -- 100 Lives,' glorifies death and encourages the cult of the shaheed, or martyr," the Times reports. That is, Israeli critics "would say" that, if they had actually been called or quoted by the Times, rather than having their criticisms assumed. Funny how the Arabs in the article are interviewed and allowed to speak for themselves, rather than having their views summarized by a reporter estimating what they "would say" had the reporter bothered go to the effort to ask.

Come to think of it, this technique could be used throughout the paper and could be a way of greatly reducing the Times' phone bills and labor costs. Rather than having to actually report the news, Times writers could simply sit around and speculate about what figures in the news "would say" about various events. The technique is particularly useful with Israelis and conservatives because it allows the Times reporters to avoid the distasteful task of having to actually talk to any of them.