The New York Times this morning runs a front-page news story and an editorial about a potential federal prosecution of two New Jersey state troopers. A state judge in New Jersey this week dismissed attempted murder and aggravated assault charges against the troopers, who have been caught up in the debate over "racial profiling"; now the federal Justice Department is stepping in, with the encouragement of the Times. Both the Times news story and the editorial, however, omit any reference to an important constitutional point that bears on any such federal prosecution following a state acquittal. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states, "nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb." This is the prohibition on double jeopardy, and it is part of the bedrock of the American legal system. It has, unfortunately, been eroded in recent years by both the federal prosecution of the Los Angeles police who beat up Rodney King and by the federal prosecution of the perpetrators of the anti-Semitic riots in Crown Heights. Never mind the merits of the original charges in each case; according to the Constitution, the prosecutors only get one run at the accused. If the state prosecutors want to appeal the New Jersey judge's ruling, they can go ahead, but if the state prosecutors lose, having the troopers then hauled up on federal charges arising from the same incident is unconstitutional. Even if the Times doesn't agree with this interpretation of the Constitution, it would be nice if the newspaper at least grappled with the point.

Them Apples: In the middle of apple season -- actually, nearing the end of apple season -- the Times today runs a front-page dispatch on the apple industry and the plight of apple farmers. The Times is, of course, based in New York state, which is home to some of the most lovely apple orchards on Earth. The editor of Smartertimes.com has been making twice-weekly stops at a farmer's market in Brooklyn over the past month to pick up apples of the Empire, McIntosh, Northern Spy and Winesap varieties, as well as some Cortlands for pie-baking. So where does the Times send its reporter to find out how the apple industry is faring? Washington state. It's as if the Times ran a front-page feature on the bagel datelined Los Angeles, or a front-page feature on the corned-beef sandwich datelined Miami. It's this sort of thing that is enough to make a reader regret the Times' ambitions as a national paper and wish the newspaper would just aim to cover New York well.

Puddle: An editorial in today's Times runs under the headline "A Judicial Threat to Clean Water" and comments on arguments made before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. Leave aside the Times' typically slow response time -- event happens on Tuesday, editorial appears Saturday. The editorial comes down in favor of the federal government having the power to regulate "wetlands" that serve as "habitats for migratory birds." This power is a nightmare for landowners, who wind up having to file environmental impact reports of hundreds of pages with the Environmental Protection Agency if there is a parking lot on their property that has a puddle in it where a Canada goose happens to stop once a year. But the Times, of course, is unconcerned about the effects of expanded federal regulation on private landowners. The Times says the federal regulation should be acceptable because the puddle at issue in the Supreme Court case is being threatened by a landfill. "What is being regulated here is waste disposal, an economic activity plainly within the scope of Congress's commerce power," The Times writes. This is a doozy of a test-principle to apply to federal environmental regulations. We wonder where the Times would come down if the wetlands and migratory birds were being threatened by something the Times thinks the federal government has no power at all to regulate. Say, an abortion clinic, or a Hollywood recording studio churning out filthy rap lyrics.

Unwed Motherhood: The Times manages to run a lead story in its Arts & Ideas section today about unwed motherhood without mentioning that the growth in the phenomenon has been leveling off in recent years. Instead, the beginning of the article portrays it as a runaway trend: "The statistic has not lost its power to shock: about a third of the births in this country each year are to unmarried mothers. By almost any measure, the rise in the proportion of babies born outside marriage, from less than 1 in 20 in 1960 to 1 in 3 now, has been among the most profound changes in American society." But that rise has mostly subsided. According to the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percent of live births to unmarried mothers among blacks declined to 69.1 percent in 1998 from 70.4 percent in 1994. The percent of live births to unmarried mothers of Hispanic origin declined to 41.6 percent in 1998 from 43.1 percent in 1994. Among Asians and Pacific Islanders, the percent of live births to unmarried mothers declined to 15.6 percent in 1998 from 16.2 percent in 1994. These statistics are offset slightly by increases in unwed motherhood among non-Hispanic whites, but for all Americans, the 1998 statistic was 32.8 percent of live births to unmarried mothers, up just slightly from 32.6 percent in 1994. The government breaks the statistics out by race, and 1998 is the most recent year for which the statistics are available. Some of the decline may be the result of the 1996 welfare reform act, which reduced the financial incentive that had been provided by the government to women who bore children out of wedlock.

Fuzzy Math: A story in the national section of today's Times reports unchallenged President Clinton's accusation that "The surplus is supposed to be $2 trillion." In fact, Congressional Budget Office estimates of the ten-year surplus are now closer to the $4 trillion range, which makes Mr. Clinton's complaint about the size of George W. Bush's tax cut seem less credible. But the Times just passes along Mr. Clinton's assertion about the size of the surplus as if it were undisputed.

One of the most annoying things about the New York Times is metropolitan coverage that gives readers the sense that the Times is unfamiliar with basic facts about the city that is supposed to be the newspaper's home town. So, an article in today's metro section about a new way for the city to charge fees to trucks that park on the streets claims "Variable parking rates, depending on the time of day and the duration of the parking, have also been used in Europe, but not in the United States, experts said." It's unclear which "experts" the Times is referring to, but they can't be anyone who has ever looked for parking in Manhattan. There are dozens of commercial parking garages in Manhattan that offer some kind of "in by 7, out by 7" rate to early arrivals, and dozens of others that charge different rates on nights and weekends than they do by the hour during the weekdays. The news in the story is that government is finally catching up with the pricing efficiencies that have long held sway in the private sector. But the Times story is oblivious to this.

Take Your Pick: The metro section of today's New York Times contains a news story about Hillary Clinton's day of campaigning that reports Mrs. Clinton "released the latest in a parade of notably negative advertisements." An "ad campaign" box that runs on the same page of the metro section and which is written by a different reporter analyzes Mrs. Clinton's latest commercial and says, "This is one of the few negative ads in the campaign." How can these sentences both be true? Is there any editor who reads all this stuff before it goes in the newspaper? Or are readers just supposed to decide for themselves which account in the Times to believe?

Free To Be, You And Me: In an editorial that you have to read to believe, the New York Times today writes: "Marlo Thomas has the right idea. An ardent Democrat, she went on the 'Today' show Thursday to reprimand her husband, Phil Donahue, for helping Ralph Nader spread the fallacious message that it makes no difference whether Al Gore or George W. Bush wins the presidency. Ms. Thomas set an admirable example." First of all, Mr. Nader hasn't been claiming it makes "no difference"; he's been saying it makes little difference, or not much difference. Second, all Mr. Donahue did to help Ralph Nader was to have him as a guest on his TV show and make a few campaign appearances with him. Does the Times want Mr. Donahue to bar Mr. Nader from his show, the way that Mr. Nader has essentially been barred from the news columns of the Times? Under the plan for public financing of political campaigns that the Times says it favors, taxpayer funding would help all candidates spread their messages. How does the Times propose to deal with the problem of candidates using that federal money to spread messages the Times regards as "fallacious"? By sending the candidates' wives out to reprimand them?

The Times editorial goes on to say, "It is past time for everyone, including Mr. Gore, to get tougher on Mr. Nader." Tougher? The Times has been running scathing editorials about Mr. Nader for months now -- if they get any tougher, they are going to be calling for having Mr. Nader arrested. What is Mr. Nader's sin that gets the Times so worked up in a lather? You guessed it: he's a member of the Times' least favorite group, the rich of the non-Sulzberger variety. "Mr. Nader, with his nearly $4 million net worth, can afford to be indifferent about the public policy fallout of a Bush victory," the Times writes. But in fact, Mr. Nader is a perfect example of the foolishness of the Times' approach to wealth. Mr. Nader was not born to great wealth, unlike, say, the Sulzbergers. He has a $4 million net worth because he lives frugally, works hard and invests wisely. Why should readers share the Times' contempt for him? Would it be better if he had spent his money eating at fancy restaurants like the ones the Times reviews in its dining section, or if he had worked less hard over the years at researching and writing books that sold well? If anything, it's the rich who can afford to be indifferent to the public policy fallout of a Gore victory; they need the marginal tax breaks and economic growth and improvements to public schools promised by Mr. Bush less than middle- and low-income taxpayers do. That is why Mr. Gore is ahead in wealthy states like New York, California and Connecticut, but Mr. Bush is ahead in poorer states such as Alabama and Kentucky.

Then the Times editorial goes and calls Mr. Nader a male chauvinist. Actually, it accuses him of engaging in "male chauvinism carried to a new extreme." A new extreme! All Mr. Nader suggested was that a Bush-appointed Supreme Court wouldn't necessarily mean the immediate criminalization of all abortion in America. This is not male chauvinism; it's true. As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in his New York Press column this week: "There is no threat to abortion rights coming from anywhere in this country. Republicans persist in appointing such pro-choicers as Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter to the Supreme Court. But even if the Court were to consist of five Clarence Thomases and four Antonin Scalias, there would be nothing it could do to stop Congress and the states from legislating their own abortion laws--which they'd do in a heartbeat if Roe v. Wade were ever overturned." The Times claims Mr. Nader is not concerned because he is not one of the "60 million American women of childbearing age." The Times claims Mr. Nader "would be jumping up and down if it were his constitutional protections and his physical health and his medical autonomy that were being put at risk." But the whole crux of the abortion debate is that in, say, the admittedly extreme case of a woman who is 8-months pregnant and suddenly wants to have an abortion because she doesn't want to have a daughter and would prefer to have a son, it is not only the woman of childbearing age but the father and the potential life that have a stake in the decision. By suggesting that the only ones whose rights are at stake in the abortion battle are women of childbearing age, the Times is doing a disservice to fathers and to female fetuses who might be aborted for sex-selection reasons. If it is only the mother's view that matters, why was the Times so adamant about wanting to send Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba?

Mideast Peace: A New York Times editorial today on the "Elusive Mideast Truce" claims that "further escalation of the fighting would serve no one." It worries about the "devastating" results that would ensue if the fighting did not "stay confined to the West Bank and Gaza Strip." But as David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, regionalizing the conflict would actually serve America's and Israel's best long-term interests by eliminating the centers of Islamic radicalism and Baathism that are funding and promoting the attacks on Israel and on American interests in the region. In other words, further escalation of the fighting in the short term could serve Israel and America -- not to mention that it could help liberate the millions of Arabs now suffering under the boot of brutal dictatorships.

This morning's New York Times devotes its entire obituary section to a lengthy tribute to "Ring Lardner Jr., Wry Screenwriter and Last of the Hollywood 10." The Times prints, in addition to the obituary, capsule descriptions of the other members of the Hollywood 10, who were jailed and fined in 1950 for contempt of Congress during congressional investigations into Communism in Hollywood. The obituary points out that Lardner was a Communist from 1937 through the 1950s and that he said during a 1987 visit to Moscow, "I've never regretted my association with Communism." The Times obituary casts Lardner as a victim of American abuses and as, in a way, morally superior to those who cooperated with the congressional investigations into Communism in America. The obituary ends with the image of Lardner graciously shaking hands with a writer who cooperated with the committee, and it quotes Lardner saying, "I don't believe in blacklisting." For all the attention from the Times in this obituary to the abuses in America, the newspaper's coverage has a strange blind spot for the crimes that were carried out by the Soviet Communist regime of which the Communist Party, U.S.A. was a wholly owned and operated subsidiary. Those Soviet abuses far exceeded any carried out by American authorities.

Middle of October: A front-page dispatch from Jerusalem in this morning's Times refers to "the American-brokered truce that was agreed to at Sharm el Sheik, Egypt in the middle of October, but never fulfilled." Why get all vague and refer to "the middle of October"? The truce agreement was announced October 17. Can the Times not be bothered to look up the exact date?

Belt-Tightening: A dispatch from Ramallah in the international section of today's Times reports on the toll that the violence in the West Bank has taken on the Palestinian Arab economy. The Times doesn't mention the toll that the violence has taken on the Israeli economy. That toll has been substantial, as tourism and retail sales have taken a significant hit.

Republican Fascists: An article in today's Times on the effort by labor unions in New York to help unionists in Pennsylvania and Michigan assist Al Gore's presidential campaign concludes with the following quote from Dennis Rivera, the president of 1199, a big New York health care union: "This resembles the Second World War, when the United States was sending arms to the British so they can fight the Germans." The Times lets this over-the-top comparison of American Republicans to Nazis go by without even raising an eyebrow, and certainly without making it the lead paragraph of a story that runs under a headline about "negative attacks." It's almost certain that is how such an extreme comparison would be treated by the Times if it had been made by a key political ally of a Republican candidate.

The education page of today's New York Times carries a column claiming that "supply and demand factors cannot explain much, if any, of the growing college wage premium." The columnist seems to be arguing that the American labor market is an exception to the laws of economics that hold true everywhere else and that relate price to supply and demand.

The column says that "In 1978, the chief executive officers of major American corporations earned about 29 times the pay of average workers in their companies. By 1999, this multiple had grown to 107 times. Managerial employees have also benefited from salary increases that outpace those typically received by college graduates as a whole. These compensation trends for managers and investment professionals do not result from shortages of college graduates to enter these fields. More likely, they stem from an attitudinal change that makes great inequities more acceptable in American society."

This is just flaky. "American society" doesn't set executive compensation; boards of directors do. And of course the compensation of managerial and professional employees is set by supply and demand. If the education columnist needs a reminder of this, he might check out the story on the front of the business section of today's Times, which runs under the headline "Management/ When Top Jobs Go Begging/ Talent Gaps Send Companies Scrambling for a Shoehorn." That article paraphrases one executive recruiter as saying that until recently, the executive population has grown in line with gross domestic product. "But these days, supply and demand are moving in opposite directions," the story says. The business-page story is no gem, but at least it displays some understanding of the workings of the labor market, which is more than can be said of the education-page column.

Communists: In an Internet column published last week, Ronald Radosh wrote about "The New York Times' Love Affair With Communism." The love affair with communism continues at the workplace section of today's Times, in the column on "My Job." The column is written by a Russian artist, who says that his life has become worse since the days of the Soviet Union. "In Soviet days, I would go off and do some painting just for myself, because I had stable wages. I had my job at the school. I painted posters for all the political parades. There was a lot of work for May Day and Revolution Day. I painted Lenin hundreds of times. Not just anyone was allowed to paint Lenin. You had to have a higher art degree, which I had. We also painted a lot of banners, with words like 'Glory to the Communist Party.'" The context in which this "My Job" column should be viewed is that of Mr. Radosh's column on "The New York Times' Love Affair With Communism."

Iraq and Foreign Aid: A front-page dispatch from Cairo in this morning's New York Times reports on flights by high-ranking delegations from Egypt and Jordan to Iraq. The story misses an important angle, though. Section 534 of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act of 2000 states that no American foreign aid should be provided to nations that violate the international sanctions on Iraq. Senator Helms and Rep. Benjamin Gilman pressed this point last week in a letter to the American secretary of state. It's just weird for the Times to run a front-page story on the flights to Iraq without mentioning that they could jeopardize billions of dollars in American foreign aid to Egypt and Jordan and without mentioning that the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the chairman of the House International Relations Committee are raising a ruckus about it.

Mainstream Muslims: A front-page story in today's Times about the dispute over Hillary Clinton getting campaign cash from apologists for Arab terrorists claims that the American Muslim Alliance and the American Muslim Council "are generally regarded as mainstream in their views." Generally regarded as mainstream by whom? By the Times? Maybe. But if the Times expects readers to believe that most Americans or most New Yorkers consider it mainstream to support suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israeli civilian targets, the Times itself is out of the mainstream.

The Times and the Mayor: The metro section of today's Times includes a dispatch about Mayor Giuliani's praise for Rep. Rick Lazio's positions on Israel. The article reports, "Mr. Lazio's campaign has also not asked Mr. Giuliani to appear in minority neighborhoods, where the mayor is disliked and feared." Feared? This claim isn't attributed to the Lazio camp; it's just a flat-out assertion by the Times, and it is over the top. There's little evidence to support it. Some blacks and Puerto Ricans in New York may fear the New York City Police Department, but they probably fear criminals even more. They certainly don't fear the mayor; he's a slight man with prostate cancer who has been in a warm mood lately because he is happy about the Yankees' victory in the World Series. There is nothing to be afraid of. The general use of the term "minority neighborhoods" to describe areas in which the mayor is supposedly disliked and "feared" is also sloppy. Do Chinese Americans or Orthodox Jews dislike and fear the mayor? They are minorities, too. The Times just can't seem to contain its own dislike and fear of the mayor.

The lead editorial in today's New York Times is devoted to criticizing Rep. Rick Lazio for "irresponsible smear attacks" against Hillary Clinton. The Times calls Mr. Lazio's tactics "absurd and extreme" and "unethical." The Times' complaint seems to be that Mr. Lazio's allies made phone calls accusing Hillary Clinton of doing something that she in fact did do -- taking money from sympathizers of terrorists like the ones that attacked the USS Cole. If the Times doesn't think there was anything wrong with Mrs. Clinton taking the money, it should criticize her for having returned the money, which she did after the matter was exposed. By returning the $51,000, Mrs. Clinton is essentially acknowledging the money was tainted, and she opens herself up to legitimate attacks.

But on the topic of "irresponsible smear attacks," consider Mrs. Clinton's TV commercial, titled "Friends," that began running on October 26. A "scorecard" analyzing the ad was buried inside the Times metro section on October 26. The scorecard, prepared by the Times news staff, called the commercial an "attack ad" that is "a flat-out distortion meant to confuse viewers about Mr. Lazio's record in the House." Yet today's editorial about "irresponsible smear attacks" makes no mention of Mrs. Clinton's attack ad, focusing only on Mr. Lazio's legitimate phone calls. It's enough to make a reader suspect that what really bothers the Times is not "irresponsible smear attacks" but the polls showing Mr. Lazio gaining on Mrs. Clinton.

Diet Craze: An article in the national section of today's New York Times rues the demise of a Chicago television newscast that had been attempting to be serious. The Times describes that serious newscast in contrast to those that feature "segments on the latest diet craze." Those unserious programs operate under the assumption, according to the Times, which turns up its nose, "that people need to be drawn in through celebrity gossip and miracle diets introduced by bubby anchormen and anchorwomen." No mention of the Times' own series on obesity that has been running on the front page during the past month under headlines like "Days Off Are Not Allowed, Weight Experts Argue" and "Fraudulent Marketers Capitalize on Demand for Sweat-Free Diets." No mention, either, of the Times' "Public Lives" column, which is filled with celebrity gossip.

Traditionally Democratic: The "Campaign Briefing" column in the national section of today's Times reports that "George W. Bush headed west, for states like California that traditionally vote Democratic." It's a wild overstatement to say that California "traditionally" votes Democratic. Has the Times heard of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or Pete Wilson? California has recently tended Democratic, but traditionally, it has either been a swing state or Republican.

Dis-Honored: A story on the front of the metro section of today's New York Times reports on efforts to improve the City University of New York. The article reports on a proposal for a new university-wide honors program. "Some professors have expressed concerns that minority students may not be well represented in a university-wide honors program," the Times reports, without further elaboration. Well, it sure would be nice to know who those professors were and how they expressed their concerns. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

The Camp David Understandings: The Times runs in its international section today a dispatch from Jerusalem that refers to "the understandings reached at Camp David." As Smartertimes.com pointed out when the Times used this phrase on October 23, this is a misunderstanding of the nonunderstandings. The Times itself reported on July 26 of this year that the Israeli and Arab negotiators left Camp David "empty-handed." The July 26 article referred to "the meeting's failure to produce an agreement." And the July 26 article paraphrased Mr. Barak: "All understandings reached at Camp David, he said conclusively, are moot." In other words, Mr. Barak doesn't have to renounce the "Camp David understandings," because there are none. The summit ended without an agreement, and Mr. Barak said immediately at that time that Israel was not bound by any of the offers it made during the course of the negotiations.

The business section of today's Times contains an article about magazines using the Internet to sign up new subscribers. The article quotes the president of American Online claiming that AOL had sold 500,000 subscriptions to Time Inc. magazines in the past 5 months. The Times writes that the "figures beg a compelling set of questions for the magazine industry," and then proceeds to list a number of questions: "Will subscriptions gained online be as reliable as those obtained through traditional methods? Is there a possible liability in the vogue on the Internet for signing up so-called 'evergreen' subscriptions?" This is a pretty loose use of the expression "to beg the question," which technically is a description of a fallacy in logic, the fallacy of assuming as proved the very thing one is trying to prove. The article goes on to paraphrase a publishing executive as saying that "if less than 50 percent of subscribers did not fulfill their payments, then Time Inc. risked sending out millions of free issues to people who never intended to pay their bills, or 'bad-pay copies.'" That is an awkward, sloppily written sentence in several ways, but once you figure out what the Times seems to be attempting to communicate, it seems clear that the sentence would make more sense if the word "less" were replaced with "more."

Tony Schwartz: A letter to the editor in today's New York Times that purports to be from the creator of the original "Daisy" political advertisement from 1964 is signed "Tony Schwarz." A news story in Friday's Times referred to the creator of the political ad as "Tony Schwartz." It's unlikely that Mr. Schwartz legally changed the spelling of his name over the weekend.

The New York Times Magazine today runs a longish article about the former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, that is noteworthy more for what it says about the Times than for what it says about Mr. Gingrich.

The article lets readers in on the fact that, even after the report of the Thompson Committee in Congress conclusively detailed the attempt by the Chinese Communists to influence the American election, the Times is still in denial. So, the article quotes Mr. Gingrich as saying, "In 1995 and 1996, between the unions, the Democrats and the Chinese Communists, I took 125,000 negative ads." The Times reporter is quoted as replying, "The Chinese Communists?" Mr. Gingrich replies, "Where do you think Clinton got part of the money?" The Times reporter is quoted as saying, "Isn't that pretty indirect?" No, really, it's not indirect, it's scandalous, and it's exasperating that the Times is still trying to minimize it.

The article goes on to claim that Mr. Gingrich "united the traditional party of the establishment behind an incendiary language scarcely heard in Washington since the days of Pitchfork Ben Tillman." What is the Times talking about? The article contains one quote Mr. Gingrich allegedly said in 1993 that might be characterized as incendiary, but the language he rallied the Republicans around was mainly carefully poll-tested phrases such as "opportunity society" that had overwhelming popular support and can hardly be characterized fairly as "incendiary."

The article goes on to claim that "in late 1995 the Republicans forced a shutdown of the government over their demand for a balanced-budget bill, thus sacrificing forever whatever moral advantage it had gained over the president." Never mind the use of "it" instead of "they" to refer back to "Republicans." For one thing, President Clinton is just as much to blame for the government shutdown as the Republicans were. For another thing, the notion that the Republicans, by shutting down the government, sacrificed "forever" whatever moral advantage they had over Mr. Clinton is just absurd. The Times doesn't even bother trying to substantiate this notion or to support it by marshaling any facts. The Times just flatly states its opinion, as if it were incontrovertible.

The Republicans "failed," the Times article about Mr. Gingrich goes on to assert, "because the American people did not in fact hate government, or the Democrats, or even the liberal culture. Not only did Clinton win the battle of public opinion, but on all those issues that had to do with personal values and cultural choices -- abortion, gay rights, school prayer, even the despised National Endowment for the Arts -- the G.O.P. made virtually no progress. And these failures culminated in the fiasco of the impeachment battle." Similarly, the article speaks of "the rejection" of the Republican "cultural agenda." This is just plain divorced from reality. This is nowhere more clear than in the way the Democratic Party's presidential ticket is conducting itself this year. If the American people have so throughly rejected the Republican views on "personal values and cultural choices," why did Al Gore choose as his running mate the Hollywood-bashing Senator Joseph Lieberman, who was the first Democratic senator to take to the Senate floor to condemn Mr. Clinton for Mr. Clinton's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair? Why is Mr. Gore himself making such a big deal of how happily and long he has been married to Tipper? Why is Mr. Gore going around on the campaign trail soft-pedaling his defense of abortion rights and soft-pedaling his support for gun control? Why is Mr. Gore billing himself as the candidate of small government and vowing not to expand the government payroll by a single additional worker? Even Mr. Clinton himself allowed the Defense of Marriage Act to become law, handing the Republicans in Congress a victory against gay rights. If the Republican agenda has been so thoroughly repudiated by the American people, why are the Democrats running on that agenda? Needless to say, the Times article doesn't grapple with these facts.

There They Go Again: The world view the Times displays in the magazine article about Mr. Gingrich resurfaces in the lead article in the Week in Review section of today's Times. The Week in Review article claims "the fact of the matter is that diatribes against a big federal bureaucracy don't resonate on the stump these days the way they did in Ronald Reagan's heyday." Again, the article gives no evidence for this assertion. The article also doesn't even bother to explain why, if this argument "doesn't resonate," both Al Gore and George W. Bush, who have lots of expensive polls and no interest in wasting the precious few closing days of the campaign making arguments that don't resonate, are each campaigning as the small-government candidate.

The same Week in Review article throws in a disparaging adverb about the Bush campaign in an otherwise parallel construction. "The Bush campaign desperately wants to cast the vice president as a Democratic caricature: spending big, promising big, regulating big and using the tax code to interfere with your life. Meanwhile, Mr. Gore's operation wants Americans to dismiss the Texas governor as a captive of big business, who will sacrifice the middle class in the name of cutting the government." The Bush campaign "desperately wants," while the Gore campaign just plain "wants." Talk about getting desperate.

A front-page story in this morning's New York Times suggests that American Muslims are somehow being unfairly excluded from the American political process. The article begins and concludes with the story of Salam Al-Marayati. The article describes Mr. Al-Marayati as the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles and says he "is not regarded as a man who sees a conspiracy around every corner." Well, he is not regarded by the Times as such, at least. But maybe the Times is choosing to ignore Mr. Al-Marayati's public record. According to the Zionist Organization of America, Mr. Al-Marayati has been quoted in a magazine, the Minaret, as saying, "Jewish unlawfulness is tolerated because powerful brokers can dictate terms on Congress and the Administration." He has also been quoted as saying, "Just as Hitler forged a conflict between Judaism and Christianity, apologists for Israel crave for Islam to be at odds with both Judaism and Christianity." An editorial in the Minaret, on whose six-person editorial board Mr. Al-Marayati sits, said, "The supporters of Israel have created a quiet reign of terror in the U.S." Another Minaret editorial defended the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy and called on American Muslim groups to champion Garaudy's case before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

Well, maybe Mr. Al-Marayati doesn't see a conspiracy around every corner, just in the corners where American Jews, supporters of Israel, or those who accept that the Holocaust actually happened live. All of which tends to undermine the thesis of this front-page Times article, which is that Muslims are somehow getting treated unfairly. In fact, when Mr. Al-Marayati's nomination to a counterterrorism commission came under attack, American Arabs chalked it up to anti-Arab racism, not anti-Muslim sentiment. But now that an Arab-American, Ralph Nader, is taking the presidential race by storm, the Times can't really make a case for the difficulty of Arab-Americans gaining influence in American politics. So it has to resort to claiming a bias against Muslims. This too, is absurd -- Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam variant has had no problem insinuating itself into the American political process this year. Even Senator Lieberman has been asking for a meeting with Rev. Farrakhan.

Yet the Times article claims, improbably, that "like other immigrant and ethnic groups before them, Muslim Americans have seen their efforts rebuffed, resisted and blocked by the groups that came before them. There is still no Muslim member of Congress. There are more than six million Muslim Americans, but a crescent-and-star sculpture did not join the Christmas tree and menorah in the park in front of the White House until 1997. It was only during the Clinton administration that the White House began holding dinners for Muslim Americans celebrating the end of the Ramadan fast." There's no evidence given in the Times article that the reason for the lack of a Muslim member of Congress or the lack of a crescent-and-star sculpture in front of the White House is that they were "blocked" by "the groups that came before" Muslims. What "groups" are the Times talking about? Jews? Talk about seeing a conspiracy behind every corner.

The truth is, despite the best efforts of the Times to turn this into a case of bias like that which confronted other "immigrant and ethnic groups," the obstacles that the Al-Marayati types are facing in American politics have to do not with their religion nor with their national origin but with the substance of their expressions of anti-Semitism and of their support for anti-Israel and anti-American terrorism. The Times story goes through the motions of quoting a Jewish leader who makes that argument, but it is clear from the way the story is framed that the Times agrees with Mr. Al-Marayati, not with the Jewish leader.

Race and Medical School: For an example of murky thinking about race, check out the report in today's Times about medical school applications. The article says that "the number of students applying to medical schools has shrunk by a fifth in the last four years, reflecting what health professionals described as a growing disenchantment with managed care, coupled with blossoming opportunities in other fields." At the same time, the article reports, "after shrinking for several years, the number of blacks, Hispanics and American Indians applying increased slightly." This is puzzling. Does the "growing disenchantment with managed care, coupled with blossoming opportunities in other fields" not affect the decisions of blacks, Hispanics and American Indians? And why is the Times paying such close attention to these racial categories? The article tells us that "the numbers of non-Asian minority women" applying to medical school fell slightly, but it doesn't tell us what that number is, or how it compares to the proportion of "non-Asian minority women" in the rest of the population. There's a reference to "underrepresented minorities," which we guess means blacks, Hispanics and American Indians.

To get a clearer view of what is going on, Smartertimes.com had to dig out a September report from the Association of American Medical Colleges. That report says that 18 percent of medical school graduates in 1998 were Asian American, while Asian Americans represent only 4 percent of the American population. That same report said 15 percent of medical school graduates in 1998 were black, Hispanics and American Indians. Those groups, the report said, are 25 percent of the overall American population. Judging by that report, non-Hispanic whites were "underrepresented" in American medical schools. Unless there is a racial spoils system allocating slots in medical school by quota in exact proportion to a racial group's proportion in the general population, some groups are likely to be over-represented, and some groups are likely to be underrepresented. Today's Times story sheds no light on this topic. If anything, by omitting information about the number of Asian students, it obscures what's really going on.

Note: Don't miss Ronald Radosh's new article on "The New York Times' Love Affair With Communism."

The New York Times' coverage of the presidential campaign gets pretty erratic today.

A "political notebook" item that runs in the national section of today's Times refers to staged "camera-friendly encounters" between Al Gore and "real people." "Thus far, the gimmick has worked precisely as intended," the Times article reports, after mentioning that one of the staged encounters involved Mr. Gore walking to school with Bobbie and Mollie Goza. "A picture of Mr. Gore with the Gozas appeared today in the New York Times." Is the Times admitting it fell for a Gore campaign gimmick?

Another dispatch about the presidential campaign reports on an appearance in Florida that George W. Bush made with Senator McCain. Mr. McCain, the Times reports, "even went so far as to bring the recent bombing of a Navy ship in Yemen, which killed 17 Americans, into the political fray." Talk about injecting opinion into a news story. That sentence would have been better if it just said, "Mr. McCain said that Mr. Bush would better manage the security of American troops in dangerous places like Yemen." Instead, the article nudges readers with the words "even went so far as," as if to say to readers, "gosh, can you believe Mr. McCain said this?" In fact, it's perfectly reasonable for the Clinton administration's decision to coddle the tyranny in Yemen to become a campaign issue -- the decision has cost the lives of 17 sailors.

A piece in the Times about a new Bush campaign commercial misses one of the central symbols of the ad. The piece reports that as part of the ad "Boy Scouts raise a flag." But it misses the resonance of the Boy Scouts as a symbol for voters concerned about gay rights and other cultural issues -- a point that the ad's creators surely had in mind.

Finally, an editorial in today's Times criticizes Ralph Nader's third-party campaign, saying that "The country deserves a clear up-or-down vote" between the two major party candidates. "We would regard Mr. Nader's willful prankishness as a disservice to the electorate no matter whose campaign he was hurting," the Times claims in the editorial. Oh, come on. Smartertimes.com didn't go back and scour the record trying to find Times editorials calling on Ross Perot to drop out of the 1992 and 1996 elections. But we sure don't remember any such editorials. Maybe that's why the Times is writing, "we would regard" rather than "we have regarded."

Hillary and Hamas: A front-page dispatch in today's Times about ties between Hillary Clinton and supporters of Arab terrorists contains a couple of whoppers. First is a reference to a Muslim leader referring to "a United Nations resolution that he said gave the Palestinians the right to resist oppression by all means." The Times handles this with a parenthetical aside saying that the Muslim leader "said the resolution was passed in the 1980's, but was unable to provide other details." This is just plain lazy. Why is the Times relying on some Muslim leader for background on U.N. resolutions? Why doesn't it check with the American State Department or with the U.N. or with the government of Israel, which would inform the Times that there is no such U.N. resolution authorizing Palestinian Arab armed resistance. It is entirely imaginary, and the Times should say so, rather than quoting the Muslim referring to the nonexistent resolution while coyly, parenthetically casting doubt on the resolution's existence.

The same article claims that counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson "became well known when he initially strongly suggested that the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of Arab terrorists." This is not true. Mr. Emerson made that suggestion about the Oklahoma City bombing in a television interview. If he wasn't well known before making the statement, why was he being interviewed on television? If Mr. Emerson wasn't already well known, why was anyone paying any attention to what he thought about the Oklahoma City bombing?

In a rare endorsement of a Republican in a race for U.S. Senate, the New York Times today throws its editorial support behind Rep. Bob Franks of New Jersey in his campaign against a wealthy Democrat, Jon Corzine. It's a truly bizarre editorial: the newspaper's main complaint against Mr. Corzine seems to be that rather than spending his money on the baubles advertised in the pages of the Times, he is investing his own money in the American political process. "By spending an estimated $60 million on his campaign, Mr. Corzine effectively smothered the ability of Mr. Florio and later Mr. Franks to get their messages out. As election day nears, Mr. Franks has been pummeled with negative, misleading campaign ads that he does not have the money to answer," the Times editorializes. It leaves unsaid how it would prefer that Mr. Corzine spend his money, which is, after all, his.

What's amazing here is that the Times' antipathy toward the non-Sulzberger rich (a group that Mr. Corzine, by virtue of his career at Goldman Sachs, is a member of) seems to trump the newspaper's views on all other political issues, from gun control to education spending. The editorial even acknowledges this, saying, "If political philosophy were the only consideration, we'd be for Mr. Corzine."

The editorial is just plain wrong when it says that Mr. Corzine's spending has "smothered" the ability of his rivals to get their messages out. For one thing, his rivals' messages have gotten out; witness the news coverage of the campaign, today's Times editorial, and polls showing that even while being massively outspent, Mr. Franks is still competitive in the race. If anything is smothering Mr. Franks' ability to get his message out, it is the unreasonably low limits on campaign contributions. The Times supports those limits as part of its advocacy of campaign finance "reform," but the limits have the legal effect of allowing Mr. Corzine to fund his own campaign but preventing a right-wing counterpart to Mr. Corzine from funding Mr. Franks' campaign.

Queens Arsenal: The New York Times today reports in an unbylined, 5-paragraph brief inside its metro section the arrest of a Queens man. The man kept at his home an arsenal that included, according to the Times, "15 rifles, 18 handguns, two military fuses, brass knuckles, assorted swords, a pint of black powder and thousands of rounds of ammunition." The radio station 1010 WINS and the TV station New York One both reported that the arrested man was a member of the National Alliance, a white supremacist group. The Times omits that information, which, if true, could well elevate the story beyond the level of an inside-the-section, unbylined brief.

Wrong Name: What is it with the New York Times that it can't spell names correctly? Today's wrong-name victim is the press secretary to Richard Cheney. Her name is Juleanna Glover Weiss, which the Times might be familiar with because she served as the press secretary to Mayor Giuliani during the mayor's campaign for the U.S. Senate. The Times, in a story about Mr. Cheney's stock-market profits, today renders her first name incorrectly as "Juliana."

Gore's Fingernails: This information, from an article about Al Gore's health in today's Times, bears highlighting: "He is also a nail-biter. In the interview his nails were bitten to ragged edges. Asked if this was a lifetime habit, Mr. Gore said he did it 'every once in a while' and did not link it to nervousness or anything else." Sometimes, every once in a while, the Times comes through with a little fact like that that actually is enough to make the paper worth buying.

Here's the lead paragraph of today's front-page New York Times story on the presidential campaign: "At a time when Vice President Al Gore should be scrapping for votes in large swing states like Ohio and Michigan, he is devoting virtually his entire week to campaigning in smaller states that he should be able to ignore -- even his home state, Tennessee." This use of the word "should" in this sentence should set off alarm bells among those who wish that the Times would adhere more closely to the journalistic convention of not openly rooting for one candidate or another in its news coverage. The word "should," according to Webster's Second, is used to express "propriety, necessity," for example, "children should get hot lunches." In the view of Mr. Gore's backers, perhaps, the candidate should be scrapping for votes in large swing states at this point in the campaign season. But the Times doesn't attribute this sentiment, leaving readers to assume that it is the newspaper's own view. Imagine a newspaper story that began, "At a time when Vice President Gore should be seeking gainful employment in the private sector for the period following his impending loss in a landslide, he is devoting his entire week to scrapping for votes in an election that he should have realized long ago that he was going to lose." That sentence, written from the point of view of a Gore opponent, is about as biased as the lead paragraph in today's Times story, which is written from the point of view of a Gore backer.

And if the first paragraph of this news story weren't enough, consider all the reasons the article trots out to explain Mr. Gore's precarious position in the polls: "The vice president's struggle to solidify his geographic base stems from several factors, political analysts said. Some are national, like his inability to reassure voters about his credibility and amiability, and the lingering tendency of some voters to associate Mr. Gore with a scandal-ridden White House. Others are more localized, including demographic changes in some states and the strength of Mr. Nader, the Green Party candidate, in places like the Pacific Northwest and Wisconsin." Not once does the article contemplate the possibility that the reason Mr. Gore is in trouble is that more voters agree with George W. Bush on the issues. For instance, there is a possibility that more voters think that more of the budget surplus should be returned in a tax cut than want it spent in Washington. There is a possibility that more voters don't want to abolish the internal combustion engine. There is a possibility that more voters believe in small government and individual responsibility. But rather than viewing a potential Bush victory as an endorsement of his conservative agenda or as a mandate to govern based on it, the Times is getting ready to dismiss such a victory as the product of Mr. Gore's personality and of the Nader phenomenon. Smartertimes.com wouldn't expect a news article in the Times to endorse the idea that Mr. Bush is winning because voters agree with him on the issues, but in an article that is purportedly based on what "political analysts said," it seems strange that the article doesn't even consider the substance explanation as a possibility.

Pyongyang Pander: A front-page Times dispatch from Pyongyang today includes the following sentence: "The incongruity of Dr. Albright, who has made democracy a leitmotif, applauding a mass propaganda show dedicated to the 55th anniversary of the Korean Workers Party, was most likely lost on her hosts." Oh? Smartertimes.com reckons that the secretary of state's North Korean hosts knew exactly what they were up to in putting a representative of America in the position of applauding their odious display. The incongruity wasn't lost on them; they were most likely relishing every second of it.

Muslim Holy Sites: An article in the metro section of today's Times refers to the violence "that erupted after the visit of Ariel Sharon, the hard-line Israeli politician, to Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem." Usually, the Times refers to the Temple Mount as a site holy to both Muslims and Jews. This latest version of the events omits any reference to the fact that Mr. Sharon was visiting a Jewish holy site, making it sound like the site in question is holy only to Muslims. Never mind the fact that Mr. Sharon didn't actually visit the Muslim holy sites but just walked around on a plaza outside them.

Today's New York Times carries a front-page dispatch about how Wall Street is getting into the pornography business. "Just under 1.5 million hotel rooms, or about 40 percent of all hotel rooms in the nation, are equipped with television boxes that sell the kind of films that used to be seen mostly in adults-only theaters, according to the two leading companies in the business," The Times reports. "Based on estimates provided by the hotel industry, at least half of all guests buy these adult movies, which means that pay-per-view sex from television hotel rooms may generate about $190 million a year in sales."

Well, call Smartertimes.com naive, but the idea that more than 50 percent of hotel guests on any given night are watching pay-per-view porn movies seems highly unlikely. We'd guess the percentage is significantly lower. Calculating backward from the Times' $190 million revenue estimate, that's 19 million screenings at $10 each. If 1.5 million hotel rooms have the pay-per-view boxes, that means each box is only playing about 13 movies a year. Even allowing for less than 100 percent occupancy rates and for some variation on either side of the $10 per-movie rate, 13 nights out of 365 isn't 50 percent, not by a long shot. Maybe the problem is the vague construction of the claim that "at least half of all hotel guests buy these adult movies." It's unclear whether the Times means at least half of hotel guests have bought one in the past year, or have bought one ever, or buy one each night of their stay.

The Camp David Understandings: The Times runs in its international section today a dispatch from Jerusalem that reports that Ariel Sharon's "key condition" for joining a national unity government with Ehud Barak "is that Mr. Barak renege on the Camp David understandings." Hold on a minute here. Before the Times gets everyone worked up about the prospect that Mr. Barak is going to renege on the "Camp David understandings," let's check back to a Times dispatch from July 26 of this year. That dispatch reported that the Israeli and Arab negotiators left Camp David "empty-handed." The article referred to "the meeting's failure to produce an agreement." And it paraphrased Mr. Barak: "All understandings reached at Camp David, he said conclusively, are moot." In other words, Mr. Barak doesn't have to renege on the "Camp David understandings," because there are none. The summit ended without an agreement, and Mr. Barak said immediately at that time that Israel was not bound by any of the offers it made during the course of the failed negotiations. For the Times to now manufacture an offense out of Mr. Sharon's demand that Mr. Barak renege on nonexistent understandings is just flaky. It's a misunderstanding of the nonunderstandings.

Trouble Spots: Today's Times has an editorial calling on Israel to "make sure that its civilians. . .stay away from trouble spots." This is just classic. The whole Middle East is a trouble spot, starting with Jerusalem, Israel's capital. What would the Times like Israeli civilians to do, vacation on cruise ships in the Mediterranean until the entire Arab-Israeli conflict is resolved? Can you imagine the Times writing an editorial saying that black civilians during the civil rights protests in America should "stay away from trouble spots"? Or that gays after the murder of Matthew Shepard should "stay away from trouble spots"? The reason that the land of Israel is a "trouble spot" is that anti-Semitic Arab terrorist states and gangsters are inciting mobs and armed militias there to kill Jews. The idea that the Jews should respond to this by staying "away from trouble spots" reminds us of the old joke about the two Jews who are about to be executed by a firing squad. The executioner asks them if they have any final requests. One of them for a cigarette and is met with a sharp elbow from the second, who whispers furiously, "Don't make trouble." Today's Times editorial advising Israel to keep its civilians "away from trouble spots" is of this same mindset.

This morning's New York Times devotes the cover of its Arts & Leisure section, as well as two full inside pages, to the newspaper's planning for a new headquarters tower near Times square. The article is worth reading in full for what it says about the Times' self-image.

The article, by the Times architecture critic, begins with the words, "We were getting a lot of mail from readers complaining that I never write about New York buildings." Well, those letter-writers have a point -- most Sundays, the Times publishes a dispatch by its architecture critic from some European city that most readers will likely visit rarely, if at all.

Further down, the critic discloses some of his opinions about architecture. "I have minimal interest in personalities or politics, except as these play out on a symbolic or allegorical plane," the critic writes. "The symbolic level is where architecture itself kicks in. When it does, land use rises above the level of real estate speculation. Buildings earn the space they occupy on other than economic terms."

This approach interprets architecture as something more akin to oil painting than to architecture. In Smartertimes.com's view, architecture is best understood in a more practical way -- and shouldn't be divorced from politics, personality or economics. In fact, the best architecture critics realize this. The author Jane Jacobs, for instance, thought deeply about the economics of cities as well as their structures, and she understands the way the two are inextricable. The New Yorker's Paul Goldberger understands the way that personalities of builders and patrons shape buildings and neighborhoods, and you can tell from his writing that he thinks this is important, not merely on a symbolic or metaphorical level, but to the individuals who use buildings and live in neighborhoods. The Boston Globe's Robert Campbell constantly considers price and value and people and politics when he writes about buildings and plans, instead of sneering at those matters from the lofty realm of a preference for writing about metaphor and symbolism.

If this all sounds a little abstract, well, compare it to these lines from the article in the Arts & Leisure section of today's Times: "One thing we know about the monoculture is that it is protean. Its appearance constantly morphs. This mutability diverts attention from the fact that the underlying economic power relationships remain the same."

To figure out what the critic means, we read on: "My generation was strongly influenced by Robert Venturi's 1966 book, 'Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.' We came to appreciate the non-straightforward, the hybrid, the slightly deranged. Some of us also came to suspect that pure rationality too often serves to mask a highly irrational will to power."

Okay, so the critic is against power, particularly economic power. So, the critic claims, is the Times: "Yes, the Times is a powerful institution, but of a particular kind. It is not part of so-called 'black car' culture. We take subways. . . . The newsroom itself, as well as its coverage of news, has been powerfully affected by debates over authority that have unfolded in architecture and throughout the culture. The paper has the responsibility to challenge and correct, not blindly affirm, the corporate world's view of itself."

There you have it. Laid out, as plain as day, beneath all the talk about the morphing protean "monoculture," is the Times' self-image: a countercultural, subway-riding, anti-authoritarian vanguard whose motto might well be changed from "All the News that's Fit to Print" to "Fight the Power."

Well, fair enough, if readers and advertisers want to support a newspaper aimed at shattering the "underlying economic power relationships," they are probably better off reading the Times than the Daily Worker, if only slightly better off.

What is amusing, though, is that the countercultural vanguard at the Times is laboring under a pretense. The Times critic notes in passing that the design advisory group he attended that decided on an architect for the new Times tower was "occasionally joined by representatives of the 42nd Street Redevelopment Authority, a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation, and of the Economic Development Corporation, a city agency." Left unsaid is the fact that the Times Company needs the help of the city and state if it is to seize by eminent domain the land on which the new tower is to be built. The city and the state must also approve special tax breaks that the Times has demanded as a condition of building the tower. How such a supplicant relationship affects the Times' ability to challenge authority and power, the critic leaves unexplored.

And, as for the Times critic's claim that the newspaper is not part of "so-called 'black car' culture," well, the critic says he was invited to join the architect-selection process at the invitation of Michael Golden, the vice chairman of the Times company.

And, according to "The Trust," a 1999 quasi-authorized biography of the family that owns the Times, young Michael Golden arrived at his family's 277-acre Connecticut estate as a child not by riding the subway, but in the following manner: "Every summer, usually before the Fourth of July, the four young Goldens arrived at Hillandale without their parents, making the trip from Chattanooga by train in the early years and later by plane. In New York they were met by Joseph, the Sulzbergers' personable chauffeur, who took their luggage and ushered them into the family limousine."

Barak and Separation: A story on the front page of this morning's New York Times is based on the following fiction: "For decades the vision of a new Middle East has reigned, a maximum cooperation model. But in the last few weeks, as the violence has settled into a prolonged conflict, the new Middle East has collapsed rather quickly into the old Middle East. And so the ideas of building fences rather than bridges have resurfaced." This is just a misconception. The Forward newspaper's Hillel Halkin filed an Israel Diary column for that newspaper in 1995 about a fence that was being built between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Yitzhak Rabin was quoted in October of 1994 as saying, "We cannot keep having this mixture of Jews and Arabs. We have to decide on separation as a philosophy. There has to be a clear border." Ehud Barak was quoted by the Washington Post in March of 1995 as saying, "Separation is the only possible answer." In October of 1995, a Jerusalem Post headline read: "Barak: No Security Without Separation." The notion that separation and fence-building are new ideas that have become dominant only in the past few weeks is just false; they have, unfortunately, been the underlying assumptions of the mainstream of Israel's Labor Party for years.

As Smartertimes.com has noted before, when the New York Times starts throwing around the phrase "most economists," it is time to watch your wallet. A story in the Times national section today pulls a slight variation on the "most economists" stunt. The article runs under the headline "Lieberman Declares His Party Built the Boom," and the paragraph at issue discusses which presidential candidate's plan is most likely to lead to deficit spending by the federal government. Here's how the Times handles it: "Most independent analysts agree that Mr. Gore's plans are more likely to keep the government within its means, but many believe that both candidates' proposals run the risk of overspending the surpluses."

This should set off alarm bells for any skeptical reader. What is the Times' definition of an "independent analyst"? The article doesn't say. Did the Times actually conduct a survey of "independent analysts" to ascertain that "most" think that Mr. Gore's plan is less likely to produce a deficit? If so, how many "independent analysts" were included in the survey? How were they selected? How many more of the "independent analysts" surveyed thought Mr. Gore's plan is less likely to produce a deficit? This Times news story doesn't quote a single one of these purportedly independent analysts. It doesn't name a single one. It does not give the readers any indication of what expertise the "independent analysts" have that would lend any credibility to their forecasts about the federal budget. It's all enough to make a reader suspect that the Times is taking its own opinion about the economic plans of the candidates and fobbing it off on the readers in its news columns under the guise of "most independent analysts."

News Blackout: The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and Inside.com all reported yesterday on the Tribune Company's sale of its magazine group to Time Inc. The Post reported that the New York Times Company was a losing bidder for the magazines. The Journal and Inside.com reported that the Times Company's losing bid had been made in conjunction with American Media, which publishes supermarket tabloids including the National Enquirer. The Times handles this news today by publishing a wire-service brief inside its business section. The brief omits any mention of the Times Company's bid for the magazines, and the brief also omits any mention of the Times Company's apparent cooperation with American Media.

Barak's Platform: A front-page news story in today's New York Times about political developments in Israel begins with the sentence, "Prime Minister Barak, elected on a platform of peacemaking, announced tonight that he was prepared to take an indefinite 'timeout' from the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort." It's a gross oversimplification to say that Mr. Barak was elected "on a platform of peacemaking." Mr. Barak was elected also on a platform of "red lines" on which he would not compromise. Among the red lines was a united Jerusalem as Israel's capital; also among them was the preservation of Israeli settlements on the West Bank in concentrated blocks.

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet: An article by Jerry Seinfeld in today's New York Times compares the Subway Series in baseball to the American Civil War. "I bet major league pitchers today probably throw about as hard as the little balls that came out of those muskets," Mr. Seinfeld writes. Well, not exactly. As a standard high-school history textbook puts it in its chapter on the Civil War, "The improved range of modern rifles multiplied casualties."

The New York Times today unleashes a top-of-the-front-page report on the relationship between President Clinton and Vice President Gore. The article quotes "Mr. Gore's close friend Martin Peretz, one of his Harvard mentors, who now owns The New Republic." Mr. Peretz is quoted as saying of the Gore-Clinton relationship, "I don't think this was a real friendship." The Times itself says that news of the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky "essentially ended whatever friendship had existed with his vice president." This all appears on page A26 of my New York edition of the Times, where the story continues from page one. And it just so happens that on page A25 of the Times today, there is a story that runs under the headline "Gore Intensifies Attacks on Bush Tax Plan." That article reports on a television appearance on Thursday by Mr. Gore in which Mr. Gore said of Mr. Clinton, "He's my friend." So, Mr. Peretz says Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore are not really friends; the Times says any friendship that did exist is now over; but candidate Gore himself is out on the campaign trail proclaiming that he and Mr. Clinton are friends. Does this count as another Gore whopper? And if so, why doesn't the Times bother to include Mr. Gore's ritualistic, if perhaps false, claim of friendship in the long article on the relationship, rather than relegating the quote to the end of a news story on the day's campaign developments?

Hillary and Gore: The same front-page report on the Clinton-Gore non-friendship says that Hillary Clinton listens to Mr. Clinton's campaign advice -- "and not coincidentally, in the view of several Clinton aides, seems to be doing better in her race than the vice president is in his." The Times lets this slide unchallenged, but it is a claim of Clintonesque chutzpah. As the Times itself reports in its metro section today, Mr. Gore was in New York yesterday, and Mrs. Clinton "leapt at the chance to campaign . . . with a politician who polls show is significantly more popular among New Yorkers than she is." The Clinton aides may claim that Mrs. Clinton is "doing better" than the vice president, but they -- and the Times -- seem to have neglected the fact that in the only state where Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gore are both on the ballot, New York, Mr. Gore is "significantly more popular" than Mrs. Clinton.

Soak the Rich: Another front-page news story in today's Times tells readers that the federal budget surplus was the result of "higher tax rates on the rich," particularly an increase in the highest income tax rate, to 39 percent from 28 percent a decade ago. There's a lively political and economic debate about the effect of tax increases on federal revenues, and the Times article only gives one side of the story. It fails to even consider the argument that tax cuts increase federal revenues by creating economic growth. In the Reagan years, for instance, federal revenues increased after the income tax rates were reduced. So while the Times and the experts it quotes attribute the surpluses to "higher tax rates on the rich," it's quite possible that if the tax rates were kept at 28 percent, or if there were additional reductions -- like a further reduction in the capital-gains tax rate, a tax reduction whose revenue-producing effects the Times article also ignores -- the surpluses would be even bigger than they are now.

Keep the Public in the Dark: A New York Times editorial today objects to the timing of the release of the independent counsel's report on the firings in the White House travel office. The Times writes that the investigators "could and should have avoided dropping reports during the September-October campaign season." This is weird -- a newspaper suggesting that voters would be better off going to the polls with less information. Is the Times prepared to call all of its investigative reporting to a halt "during the September-October campaign season?" As a column on ABCNews.com asked about a similar recent Times editorial, if a draft of the independent counsel's report were leaked to the Times, would the newspaper refrain from publishing an article about it until after the election? The idea that voters aren't smart enough to take the independent counsel's report into account and weigh it with everything else in making a decision is of a piece with the Times' efforts to restrict political commercials under the guise of campaign finance "reform."

Facts and Fantasies: In an editorial today that runs under the headline "Campaign Facts and Fantasies," the Times adopts a standard of "percentage of national income" to make Mr. Gore's federal spending plans look small. Fair enough. But it's funny how the Times rarely used that standard in the Reagan years to describe the size of the federal budget deficit, and it's funny how it rarely uses that standard to describe the tax burden. When the Times talks about government spending, it uses percentages to make the numbers look small; when the Times talks about deficits and tax cuts, it uses absolute figures to make the numbers look large.

Electricity Regulation: An article in the metro section of today's Times informs readers that "electricity generation is no longer regulated, though its distribution is." Only the Times could claim that the massive conglomeration of government bureaucracies that still bear down on electric companies don't qualify as regulation. As the Times story itself notes later on in the article, a business deal that the electric company is in the middle of doing requires the approval of seven states. Connecticut alone is requiring the company to "take measures that would reduce residential nonheating prices by about 1 percent," and to impose a two-year ban on "involuntary layoffs of Connecticut workers." The business deal must also meet the approval of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Well, if the industry is "no longer regulated," we wonder why the company is going through the trouble of seeking the approval of seven states and four federal agencies for its business deal. Just for the fun of it?

King Abdullah: Times columnist Thomas Friedman today continues the newspaper's love affair with the Hashemite King, referring to "Jordan's visionary young King Abdullah." As Smartertimes.com noted on Monday, King Abdullah and Muammar Gadhafi, the Libyan terrorist tyrant, issued a joint communique after Gadhafi's official visit to Jordan from October 3 to October 7. That communique said that "the talks held by the two leaders reflected an identity of views on various issues of common interest," and it stressed "that Arab Jerusalem was an indivisible part of the occupied Palestinian lands, thus the Israelis must withdraw from it and from all the Palestinian and Arab occupied lands." Soon, no doubt, Mr. Friedman will be praising "Libya's visionary Colonel Gadhafi." Mr. Friedman's column today also makes the unfounded claim that "The Arab peace process with Israel has always been part of a larger embrace of modernization, gradual democratization and integration with the West." Gradual, indeed. Just ask Hosni Mubarak's political opponents (you might have to visit them in prison) or check the Jordan-Israel peace pact for a reference to the end of the monarchy (it's not there.) Or look closely at the track of the "peace process" that is Mr. Friedman's favorite, the one between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, and you'll find that its very underlying idea, as enunciated by none other than Yitzhak Rabin, was that Yasser Arafat's PLO would, by being exempt from monitoring by Western-style human-rights groups, be able to crack down more ruthlessly on terrorists than Israel, with its democratic system and due process, ever could.

Lazio and the Mets: A story in the metro section of today's Times reports that television personality Barbara Walters "shrieked in mock horror" after Rep. Rick Lazio, Mrs. Clinton's opponent, "revealed he is a Mets fan." "Reveal" is probably the wrong word for what Mr. Lazio did in the interview with Ms. Walters; it's well known that Mr. Lazio is a Mets fan. The Times itself has written about the fact in the past few days.