This morning's New York Times pounces on Governor George W. Bush for what the Times interprets as some sort of flip-flop with respect to missile defense. Here's how the Times writes it in its page-one story on President Clinton's decision to leave America defenseless: "On May 23, Mr. Bush signaled his support for Mr. Clinton's leaving the decision to the next administration rather than committing the country to a course based on incomplete information, saying, 'No decision is better than a flawed agreement that ties the hands of the next president and prevents America from defending itself.' But today, Mr. Bush adopted a much sharper tone, criticizing the administration's handling of the missile defense program."

In case you missed the point, the Times hammers it home again in a second news article, reporting, "Mr. Bush said he would welcome the chance as president to make the decision on deployment, but he wasted no time in criticizing 'the Clinton-Gore administration' for the announcement even though he had warned the White House earlier in the campaign not to take any actions that would ties his hands if he wins."

Note the use of the word "but" and the phrase "even though," which are nudges from the Times to the reader that might as well say, "Can you believe this hypocrite George W. Bush, changing his position on missile defense in an example of crass political opportunism?"

But the charge leveled implicitly by the Times against Mr. Bush is nonsense. There's no inconsistency between, on one hand, supporting the development and deployment of a missile defense and, on the second hand, saying it's preferable for Mr. Clinton to make no decision than to commit America to a permanent stand-down. If you read Mr. Bush's original quote, "No decision is better than a flawed agreement that ties the hands of the next president and prevents America from defending itself," it's pretty clear that Mr. Bush is hardly doing what the Times claims he was doing, signaling "his support for Mr. Clinton's leaving the decision to the next administration rather than committing the country to a course based on incomplete information." What he was trying to signal was his support for missile defense, and his opposition to any Clinton administration decision that would prevent him from deploying one. If Mr. Clinton wanted to deploy a missile defense immediately based on "incomplete information," there's no signal whatsoever that Mr. Bush would have any problem with that from a policy perspective, though, politically, it would deprive him of an issue to use against Al Gore.

Cheney's Options: Bowing to pressure generated by the Times, Richard Cheney announced yesterday that, if elected vice president, he would agree to forfeit about $3.5 million worth of options in Halliburton. Missing in the Times coverage of this issue today, and in previous editions, is any serious analysis of how Halliburton's stock price has responded to the selection of Mr. Cheney, the news reports about his options, the subsequent decline of George W. Bush's standing in the polls, and Mr. Cheney's announcement that he would forfeit the options. If there were any substance to the Times's concern that Mr. Cheney would influence American policy in order to help the Halliburton stock price, the market would already have bid up Halliburton stock in expectation of that possibility. If the stock really were going to be helped by Mr. Cheney's interest in keeping the price up, you would have expected the price to decline as polls showed the Bush-Cheney ticket less likely to be elected. You would also have expected the price to drop off following Mr. Cheney's announcement that he would forfeit the options. In order to isolate the Cheney effect on Halliburton, you could graph the stock against an index of other energy-services companies, and against the broader market indices. Our own bet, based on a quick look at the charts, is that the Cheney effect is nonexistent, and that, even as the Times wrings its hands about the potential conflicts of interest, the investors who would have the greatest stake in figuring out whether such a conflict were present have decided that it is chimerical. But if there were a Cheney effect on the Halliburton stock price, it sure would bolster the Times's case.

Mixed Metaphor: The lead story in the metro section of this morning's New York Times includes this sentence: "Although it appears that Mr. Mills is at war with Harold O. Levy, the city's school chancellor, the state commissioner may in fact be carrying the water for a lot of things that Mr. Levy would like to do, but cannot." Impressive guy, that Mr. Mills, "carrying water for a lot of things" even while in the middle of a "war."

What causes fires? Well, to judge by an article that appears on the front page of New York editions of this morning's New York Times, the answer is "development."

What prevents fires? Well, to judge by the same article in this morning's Times, the answer is, "more laws."

It's bizarre how the Times gets from a fire in Edgewater, N.J. to anxiety about development. It seems to be just buying wholesale the complaints of some city councilmen and residents, who are quoted making statements such as "We have one main road and three paid firemen. This development is not only jeopardizing our quality of life, but our safety, too," and "It feels like the almighty dollar has taken over this town." (What currency would the Times prefer, rubles?) As the Times puts it, the fire is essentially proof that "development is outstripping the ability of local governments to regulate it."

The Times article, which runs under the headline "Fire Raises Doubts About River Town's Boom" makes much of a variance that was granted to the building that burned in Edgewater that allowed it to be built six feet from the sidewalk rather than 30 feet. It also reports that Edgewater is "asking that all new buildings employ round-the-clock employees trained to deal with fires."

But if anyone at the Times knew anything about firefighting and New Jersey, they'd realize that lack of regulation and lack of resources aren't the problem.

An article in the August 13 edition of the Bergen County, N.J. newspaper The Record reported that, when it comes to fire-safety inspections, "New Jersey's requirements are perhaps the most stringent in the nation, said Glenn Corbett, a Waldwick resident who is a professor of fire science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. 'I can't think of another state that does the amount of inspections that we do,' he said. Fire officials say the inspections, combined with education campaigns about fire safety, helped lower the state's fire fatality rate to 10.9 per 1 million people in 1996 -- the 14th-lowest rate in the United States."

An article in the August 14 Record reported that Edgewater, a town with only 523 properties requiring inspections, employed a full-time fire prevention inspector and three part-time assistant inspectors.

A February 22, 1998 dispatch by Matthew Mosk, also in the Record, reported that the area hardly has a shortage of firefighting equipment. "Bergen County -- with one tenth the population of New York City -- owns 50 more trucks than the entire five-borough fire department," Mr. Mosk reported, noting that it is one reason that New Jersey has the nation's highest property taxes.

And if the Times's claim is correct, and development causes fire fatalities, then why have fire deaths fallen nationwide from 7,400 in 1977 to 4,000 in 1998, as the Record reported? There was certainly plenty of development in America from 1977 to 1998.

The Times makes much of the fact that there are three paid firemen in Edgewater, but the truth is, small towns have long relied successfully on volunteers and mutual aid from neighboring fire departments to fight big blazes.

What's going on here is that opponents of development in Edgewater are using the fire to press their case. The Times fell for it, big time, even though there doesn't seem to be much evidence to back it up. And of course, there is not a single developer -- not even a single proponent of development -- quoted in the Times's front-page article.

The lead, front-page story in this morning's New York Times is about Richard Cheney's speech criticizing the Clinton-Gore administration's performance on military readiness issues. The Times trots out Democrats posing as "defense analysts" to undercut Mr. Cheney's claims.

Here's how it's done. The Times article says, right on the front page, "Defense analysts acknowledged several of Mr. Cheney's arguments, but cautioned that he exaggerated some of the criticisms and ignored positive trends in the military under the Clinton administration."

Who are these "defense analysts" quoted by the Times? One of them, Michael O'Hanlon, is identified only as "a defense policy specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington." Brookings, of course, is never described as a "liberal" or "appeasement-oriented" think tank, the way that the Times invariably describes the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute as "right-wing" or "conservative." And the Times doesn't tell its readers that Mr. O'Hanlon's main government experience was at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1994 -- while the Democrats controlled the Congress and, with it, the CBO.

The other "defense analyst" carted out by the Times is a former Clinton administration official but is at least identified as such. Quotes from Senator McCain and General Colin Powell, who support Mr. Cheney's criticisms, are relegated to the very end of the Times story. The Times relies on a statement released by Mr. McCain. When it comes to General Powell, it's almost comical how begrudging the Times is in including his remarks, noting that "Mr. Cheney's aides encouraged reporters to interview another gulf war colleague of Mr. Cheney's, Colin. L. Powell." It's as if the Times has to apologize to its readers for including the comments of a non-liberal person, explaining, "well, we didn't want to call him, but Mr. Cheney's aides insisted."

It's not that Smartertimes.com thinks George W. Bush and Mr. Cheney should be given a free ride. It's just that the Times's critique of them is from such a predictably left-wing slant.

Pell Grant Silliness: A great example of where the Times could have challenged Mr. Bush intelligently on policy grounds, but didn't, is in the story in today's national section that runs under the headline "Gore and Bush Battling for Control of the Policy Agenda."

The story is written in the political tactics/horserace mold. But near the bottom of the article, we learn that Mr. Bush is proposing a $5 billion increase to the Pell Grant program, which redistributes taxpayer money through the federal government to help poor families pay college tuition bills. A chart that runs alongside the article puts the Bush spending plan to expand "college scholarships for disadvantaged students" at $6 billion.

Well, wait a minute here. Whether it is $5 billion or $6 billion, a massive increase in a welfare program that numerous private and government studies have shown doesn't work is heresy to conservatives and even probably some neoliberals. Economist Martin Feldstein has written critically about the Pell Grant program, noting that it functions essentially as a marginal tax that discourages parents from saving for college. Another expert on financing higher education, Thomas Kane of Harvard University, has criticized the means test for the programs for being "backward looking" -- in other words, the student gets the grant if he and his parents are poor when the student enters college, but the student doesn't have to pay the grant back, even if he graduates and becomes an investment banker. At many well-endowed private colleges, expanding the federal grant programs just means that the colleges can spend less of their endowment income on scholarships and more on things such as a car and driver and a fancy mansion for the college president. At most such colleges, there is already a private income redistribution system in place, because only the well-off pay full tuition. Even an official in the Clinton administration's own Department of Education, John Oberg, has acknowledged that there's no proven link between the Pell Grant program and access by the poor to higher education. He writes that "several studies have been unable to find a specific relationship between access and the federal government's largest grant effort, Pell Grants. One explanation for this failure is that federal student-aid is fungible in institutions' budgets, and is offset by changes in institutional grants." That is a bureaucrat's way of saying that if you increase the Pell Grant money, it doesn't mean any more poor students go to college, it just means there's more money left over for landscaping in front of the college president's mansion. In this case, the bureaucrat has a good point. It would be great if the Times would challenge the Bush-Cheney team by raising issues like this, rather than by carting out partisan experts to deny the obvious on military readiness.

'Today's Reading List': The arts section of this morning's New York Times contains a large story about the Catskills as a topic of literature. The article runs under a headline on the front of the section, reading "Yesterday's Borscht and Knishes Return as Today's Reading List." Inside, there is a sidebar listing "Today's Reading List." The most recently published book on the Times's "Today's Reading List" was published in 1998. Some of the books are as old as the 1970s. Which suggests that the article in today's Times could have been written any time in the past two years. Or else that the Times is a little behind in its reading. Or that a more accurate headline would have referred to a "Last Few Decades' Reading List."

Late Again: A story in the metro section of this morning's New York Times reports that Geraldo Rivera, the television journalist, is thinking about running for mayor of New York City. This is old news to readers of the New York Post, which reported yesterday in its Page Six column that Geraldo was considering a run for mayor. The story in today's Times does not credit the Post.

This morning's New York Times is full of sentences in news stories that stand in plain contradiction to reality. Consider:

A story in the international section about a meeting between President Clinton and the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, contains the following sentence: "Mr. Clinton is eager to resolve the decades-long standoff in the five months left of his presidency, but officials say that in reality the end of September, just before Israeli elections, is the last opportunity to reconvene a gathering of Middle East leaders." There are no major Israeli elections scheduled for just after the end of September. There just aren't. It's just not true. While Prime Minister Barak does face waning parliamentary support, his government has not fallen, and there has been no parliamentary vote to schedule new elections.

There's also a story on the front page of the New York Times about American plans to build a radar station in Alaska as part of a missile defense. The Times article contains the sentence: "There is universal agreement that building the radar site would amount to a treaty violation." Again, this is just plain not true. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, has said that the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 is moot, because it was signed with a power, the Soviet Union, that no longer exists. You can't violate a treaty that is no longer in force. So, again, this claim by the Times that there is "universal agreement" that building the radar site would violate the treaty is just not true.

Then, there is an article in the national section of today's New York Times about Senator Joseph Lieberman's view of religion in public life. The story notes that the Anti-Defamation League had issued a statement criticizing Mr. Lieberman for his emphasis on faith. Then the Times says, "The senator declined to discuss the statement today, ignoring reporters' shouted questions as he hurried from a convention of the Communications Workers of America that he had addressed here." But in fact, Mr. Lieberman did not decline to address the statement. He apparently did address the statement, but the Times apparently missed it. Another newspaper in New York, the New York Post, reported: "'I think faith is a source of strength and purpose in our society,' Lieberman -- the first Jewish candidate on a major party ticket -- told the Post in California after getting chided by the Anti-Defamation League. 'I respect them, but I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, because I believe it's the American way.'"

The same Times article mischaracterizes the ADL statement. The Times says the ADL issued a statement saying "religion should have no place in the political arena." The ADL statement said nothing of the sort -- in fact, it explicitly said, "Candidates should feel comfortable explaining their religious convictions to voters." The ADL statement said "there is a point at which an emphasis on religion in a political campaign becomes inappropriate and even unsettling." That's a far cry from the Times's paraphrase to the effect that "religion should have no place in the political arena."

Finally, in the same article, the Times parrots unchallenged the claim by the Lieberman camp that he "opposes organized prayer in public schools." As Smartertimes.com noted on Monday, while Mr. Lieberman was serving as attorney general of Connecticut he filed a brief in the Supreme Court case of Wallace v. Jaffree in which he supported an Alabama law permitting teachers to lead their classes in a prayer that said, "Almighty God, You alone are our God. We acknowledge You as the Creator and Supreme Judge of the world. May Your Justice, Your Truth, and Your Peace abound this day in the hearts of our countrymen, in the counsels of our government, in the sanctity of our homes and in the classrooms of our schools in the name of our Lord, Amen." In so doing, Mr. Lieberman sided with the Reagan administration's Justice Department, the Moral Majority, the Christian Legal Society and Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama. Opposing the Alabama school prayer statute were the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Jewish Congress. Mr. Lieberman even made a campaign issue of the matter in his successful run for the U.S. Senate against Lowell Weicker, criticizing Mr. Weicker for opposing school prayer.

An editorial in this morning's New York Times supports the idea of a new city law that would ban discrimination based on what the Times describes as "a person's expression of gender identity, self-image and appearance." The Times says the law would protect "People who have had sex-change surgery, cross-dressers and others whose gender identity does not conform to societal norms" against discrimination "in housing, employment and public accommodations."

We're surprised, frankly, that the Times wants to deal with this undeniably grave problem by passing a mere municipal ordinance. Why not a state or federal law, or even a Constitutional amendment? We wonder if the Times is prepared to apply the same standards prohibiting discrimination based on appearance to, say, the models the newspaper and its advertisers use in its fashion supplements. At least the Times editorial is refreshingly candid in this case about its lack of regard for "societal norms."

Al Gore, Socialist: A story in the national section of this morning's Times reports on Al Gore's increasingly strident attacks on the medicine industry. In an improvement, the Times today calls some of the pharmaceutical companies for comment. Mr. Gore's latest complaint seems to be that one company is spending more on advertising than on research, and that another company is charging more for the same medicine when used by humans than when prescribed by veterinarians for animals. Someone should tell the vice president that, under capitalism, the allocation of a private firm's resources between research and advertising is a matter for its management and shareholders to decide, not a matter that politicians should try to affect. There is no evidence that government will make that allocation more efficiently than the company's owners will. Someone should also tell the vice president that, under capitalism, companies are allowed to set their own prices for their products, and to discount those prices as they see fit. The medicine costs more for humans than for animals because the medicine company apparently figures that humans are willing to pay more for their own health than for the health of their animals. It's just another price variation, the way that airlines charge higher fares to go to Florida in the winter than in the summer, and the way that some movie theaters give senior citizens a discount. You might expect that when the presidential candidate of a major party is out on the campaign trail questioning the very assumptions of the economic system of the country he is running for president of, he'd get some tough treatment from the press on these matters. They could ask him, for instance, if there is any precedent in which the government successfully took over the pricing and spending decisions of a major industry during peacetime, as Mr. Gore is apparently proposing to do. But the Times seems lost on this issue. Its main response has been to consistently praise Mr. Gore for having a prescription drug "plan" and to just as consistently criticize George W. Bush for not having one.

Late Again: An article in the national section of this morning's Times reports on a new study of the effects of school vouchers on the standardized test scores of students in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio. The results of the study are old news to readers of The Washington Post, which reported them on page one of yesterday's editions. The Times story today doesn't cite The Washington Post article.

The national section of today's New York Times carries an article under the headline "Lieberman Seeks Greater Role for Religion in Public Life." The article contains the following sentence: "Unlike many conservative Christian politicians, Mr. Lieberman has not taken positions like advocating prayer in schools or saying that religious groups should take over much of the burden of social services now shouldered by the government -- a position taken by Mr. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee."

This is just outright false. The Times claims that Mr. Lieberman "has not taken positions like advocating prayer in schools." Yet Mr. Lieberman is on record in a brief before the United States Supreme Court as having advocated exactly that. The case was Wallace v. Jaffree, in which students challenged the constitutionality of an Alabama law permitting teachers to lead their classes in a prayer that said, "Almighty God, You alone are our God. We acknowledge You as the Creator and Supreme Judge of the world. May Your Justice, Your Truth, and Your Peace abound this day in the hearts of our countrymen, in the counsels of our government, in the sanctity of our homes and in the classrooms of our schools in the name of our Lord, Amen." Mr. Lieberman, who was then serving as attorney general of Connecticut, sided with the Reagan administration's Justice Department, the Moral Majority, the Christian Legal Society and Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama in defending the statute. Opposing the Alabama school prayer statute were the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Jewish Congress. Mr. Lieberman even made a campaign issue of the matter in his successful run for the U.S. Senate against Lowell Weicker, criticizing Mr. Weicker for opposing school prayer.

As for the matter of the involvement of religious groups in providing social services, it is not only Senator Lieberman but Vice President Gore himself who have basically agreed with what the Times characterizes only as George W. Bush's position on that topic. In a May 24, 1999 speech in Atlanta on "The Role of Faith-Based Organizations," Mr. Gore spoke of "A church's soup kitchen. A synagogue's program to help battered women. A mosque's after-school computer center that keeps teenagers away from gangs and drugs," and he said, "People are engaged in the deeply American act of not waiting for government to deal with the problems on their own doorsteps. Instead, they are casting a vote for their own wise hearts and strong hands to take care of their own."

A front-page article in this morning's New York Times about Governor George W. Bush's record on issues of concern to Hispanics embraces the myth that opposing bilingual education is somehow "hostile" to Hispanics. The article says, "In Texas, Mr. Bush's record shows that he has embraced his state's growing Mexican-American population, pointedly rejecting the hostility shown by some members of his party on issues like immigration and bilingual education." The article goes on to say, "Nationally, the political response to this new wave of immigration at times was hostile. Republicans in Congress fought to kill bilingual education and pushed for laws establishing English as the country's official language."

It's not "hostile" to Hispanics to oppose bilingual education that keeps Spanish-speaking youngsters segregated for years in classes that prevent them from learning to read and write in English. If anything, it's hostile to Hispanics to support such programs. The successful California ballot initiative opposing bilingual education as it was being practiced there was begun when a group of Mexican-American parents picketed their children's school because the school refused to teach the children English along with native speakers. The Times itself has reported the improvements in English performance that California students have shown with the end of bilingual education. How is it "hostile" to Hispanics to teach them the language they need to succeed in America?

The same article quotes a Democratic state senator complaining that Mr. Bush isnÕt spending enough state money to help Hispanic neighborhoods. "When you're the governor, and you've got 77 percent popularity and a $6 billion surplus, you can make big things happen in Texas," the senator is quoted as saying. We wonder how this $6 billion surplus squares with the Texas "budget woes" referred to in a July 20 Times headline, or with the Texas "deficit spending" that Larry Rockefeller alleged in an op-ed piece in the July 20 Times. Mr. Bush can't win. If he spends too much money, the Times assails him for having a state deficit and budget woes. If he spends too little money, the Times assails him for amassing a surplus while Hispanics go unhelped. In fact, even though it would seem to defy logic, the Times has managed to attack Mr. Bush for both sins at once.

Anti-Choice: The New York Times is avowedly pro-choice on the question of abortion rights. It claims to be so supportive of a variety of choices for consumers of the press that it wants to force Rupert Murdoch to sell the New York Post so that he doesn't own it and two New York television stations at once. So it seems baffling to see the newspaper sweep in, as it does this morning on the front of its metro section, with a news story attacking what the article calls the "dogma" of free-market competition for goods and services in the economy. The article is so ridiculous and wrongheaded that smartertimes.com urges you to actually read it yourself, in its entirety, to gain a full appreciation of the silliness that the Times is capable of placing in the lead position in its Sunday metro section.

One of the article's main claims is that there is a "sense of powerlessness and confusion that many people feel" when confronted with choices about what to buy. There is, the article says, "the growing sense that people are simply being asked to decide too much."

Not a single consumer is quoted in the story proclaiming himself or herself powerless or confused. Instead, we hear from a succession of college professors that the Times fobs off on readers as "prominent social critics." One psychologist is quoted complaining about "the tyranny of freedom," leaving a reader wondering just what kind of tyranny the professor would prefer as an alternative. Another professor, who is given the final word in the article, is quoted as saying, "Deregulation and privatization were sold implicitly on the assumption that everybody can win from this, but I'm hard pressed to find an example in the real world where that has happened." Right now, the professor is quoted as saying, "maybe somebody is winning, but it isn't the consumer."

Hello? If this professor is really hard-pressed to find an example of successful privatization or deregulation, he must be either living in a cave or relying on the Times for his information. One example of a success was the Airline Deregulation Act signed by President Carter in 1978. An article by John Robson in the Spring 1998 number of the journal Regulation points out that airline deregulation has been a success by just about any possible measure. There are lower fares: As Mr. Robson writes: "Measured in a variety of ways, airfares have consistently fallen under deregulation. Some economists have found that fares are 22 percent lower today than they would have been if the industry had stayed under government control. . . . [I]n April 1998 Northeastern University economist Steven Morrison, a leading authority on the economics of the airline industry, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that 1997 air fares, adjusted for inflation, were 40 percent lower than they were before deregulation. Since 1990, consumer prices in general have risen 20 percent faster than have average airline prices. Morrison and Brookings Institution economist Clifford Winston, in their 1995 study, 'The Evolution of the Airline Industry,' pegged the annual savings to air travelers at $12.4 billion thanks to deregulation. They also estimated that because of more convenient flights and a more efficient route system, passengers save another $10.3 billion each year in reduced travel time." The airline industry has also grown, Mr. Robson reports: 50% more persons were employed by the airline industry in 1998 than before deregulation, and the number of flights to smaller communities is up more than 50%.

And the list of successful privatizations and deregulations goes on: A 1992 study by the World Bank -- hardly a bastion of right-wing economic views -- found that "privatization -- properly structured -- yields substantial and enduring benefits. . . .Consumers won or broke even in a majority of cases." One example was the privatization of an electricity distribution company in Chile, which had the effect of reducing theft of electricity, "hurting those who were stealing it -- but allowing the company to lower prices to paying customers." Another Chilean success story, according to the World Bank report, is that country's phone company, which doubled its capacity in the four years after it was privatized.

The Times, needless to say, is oblivious to all this. Its view of airline deregulation is that the hub-and-spoke system has resulted "in less competition, not more." This ignores the research cited by Mr. Robson, who says that "even at dominated hubs, consumers are paying less than they would pay without deregulation."

Considering the deregulation of electricity, the Times article claims that "electricity is also just different. Unlike a telephone call, or an airline ticket, nobody ever really wants to buy electricity itself -- rather people buy its expression and result: a cold beer in the fridge, a light to read by. By the standards of American marketing, it is barely a product at all." This logic, taken to its conclusion, is an argument for government monopolies on flour ("Nobody ever really wants to buy flour itself -- rather people buy its expression and result: a warm cupcake, a fresh rye bread."), on gasoline ("Nobody ever really want to buy gasoline itself -- rather people buy its expression and result: a trip in the car to the supermarket, a drive to the beach."), on credit cards ("Nobody ever really wants to buy a credit card itself -- rather people buy its expression and result: a vacation charged to a travel agency over the phone, a book purchased online.").

Embarrassing Truths Department: This is from a "Political Memo" in the national section of this morning's Times: "Day after day, the Gore campaign has essentially driven the media coverage of the campaign for two weeks, from the favorable publicity when Mr. Gore picked Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut as his running mate and on through the Democratic convention -- and beyond." The Times finally admits it!

Late Again: The Times carries at the top of its front page today a story reporting on Mr. Lieberman's close ties to the insurance and health care industries. The article contains a quote from Karen Ignagni, who is the president of the Association of American Health Plans. It also contains a quote from a spokesman for Mr. Lieberman, Dan Gerstein, saying that the senator is not afraid to take on the companies when they are wrong. This is old news to readers of The Washington Post, which carried a virtually identical story on the front page of its Saturday editions. The Washington Post story, which was picked up in Saturday's edition of kausfiles.com, quoted Ms. Ignagni. The Post story also quoted Mr. Gerstein asserting that Mr. Lieberman is not afraid to differ with industry. The Times story doesn't mention or credit the report in the Post.

The use of the phrase 'most economists' in an article by the New York Times about a tax cut is an alarm bell that should tell readers to go into skeptical mode. Here's a classic use of the phrase, taken from a front-page article in this morning's paper about George W. Bush's tax plan. "For the last several years, the economy has been running at or above what most economists consider to be its capacity for noninflationary growth, and by putting more money into the hands of consumers, a tax cut could be expected to further stimulate growth."

This is an interesting sentence for two reasons. The first is that the story seems to buy into this notion of "most economists" that there is a limit on noninflationary growth. In most disciplines, the existence for several years of a reality that contradicts the theory might lead to a reassessment of the theory. If, for instance, the laws of gravity stopped working, you wouldn't expect the Times to blithely report that "For the last several years, objects have not obeyed what most physicists consider to be the laws of gravity." You would expect the physicists to reassess the theory. Yet the reaction of the Times and its "most economists" to several years of strong noninflationary growth is not to reassess the theory that says it is impossible, but to tremble at the possibility that Bush's tax cuts might -- perish the thought! -- actually unleash more growth, thereby causing inflation.

The second reason this sentence is interesting is that it concedes that tax cuts stimulate growth. We'll keep that in mind for the next time the Times editorials and Times columnists such as Paul Krugman use static analysis to claim that a tax cut will increase the deficit. It will be satisfying to be able to cite the Times' own news coverage in asserting that a tax cut "could be expected to further stimulate growth."

Unfortunately, if the Times' coverage is to be believed, the Bush camp is undermining its own case for a tax cut. The article about the Bush tax cut reports: "Mr. Bush's team said the fiscal stimulus would be very modest, and in any case would be far less than the stimulus created by the government spending increases backed by Mr. Gore and President Clinton."

Hello? The Republicans are now claiming that government spending creates more growth than tax cuts? First of all, that claim is probably not true, because private capital is spent more efficiently than government capital. Secondly, if the claim were true, it would undermine the entire rationale for Mr. Bush's economic policies. If Bush's economic advisers really think this, the Gore campaign should try to get one of them to say it in public and then immediately turn it into a television commercial for Mr. Gore.

Apparently, the Bush camp agrees with "most economists" who worry that too much growth could cause inflation. This leads to the comical phenomenon of a Republican presidential campaign actually arguing, with a straight face, that its economic plan is better because it would cause less economic growth than the Democratic plan would, and therefore would put the country in less danger of inflation. Part of the problem here is that Mr. Bush hasn't come out publicly for a gold standard. With hard money, all of this guesswork about the effects of taxes and spending on inflation would cease to exist.

A 'Large' Tax Cut: To get a further measure of where the Times stands on tax cuts, check out a news story in the metro section today. The first paragraph of the story states: "A day after he proposed large tax cuts if elected senator, Representative Rick Lazio today fended off skepticism from Democrats and sought to defend his plan as a way to continue and spread prosperity." Large? The Lazio tax cut is a paltry $776 billion over ten years. That's small compared to George W. Bush's proposed $1.3 trillion tax cut. It's tiny compared to the tax cut Steve Forbes proposed in the Republican presidential primary. And it's miniscule compared to the $4.4 trillion projected federal budget surplus. Only by the crimped standards of Al Gore or Hillary Clinton could the Lazio tax cut be considered "large." Yet the Times, in a news story about the size of the tax cut -- a news story, not an editorial -- comes straight out and describes the tax cut as "large."

Late Again: The Times national section today carries a report on the commotion in Marrietta, Georgia about the posting on the Internet of a list of the names of those who lynched Leo Frank in 1915. This is old news to readers of The Wall Street Journal, which on June 9, 2000 carried a front-page dispatch from Marietta about the controversy. The Times dispatch covers much of the same ground that the Wall Street Journal article did, but doesn't cite it.

This morning's New York Times carries a front-page dispatch from Poland that tries to find problems with the country despite its booming economy.

So, for instance, the article claims that "The telephone system, reluctantly changing from a state monopoly, is inefficient, compared with the Czech Republic's or even Romania's, and expensive." Well, we can't speak to the quality of phone service in the Czech Republic or Romania. But during Smartertimes.com's most recent visit to Poland, which was not too long ago, we had excellent phone service, better than in visits to Germany and Austria during the same trip through Central and Eastern Europe. The article gives no indication of how the Times is measuring whether a phone system is "efficient." It seems to us like there's not a whole lot of room for subtle judgments of the efficiency of the phone system of a country, anyway -- either the phones work or they don't.

The article goes on to say that "Poland's politics are messy and crowded, still driven by the ideologies of the battle, 20 years ago, against Communism." It says this with a note of disapproval, likening the country's politics to its allegedly bad traffic and roads. But why shouldn't the ideas that animated the battle against Communism -- such as respect for freedom, a commitment to democracy, opposition to state power and control -- still hold sway in Poland? It seems to us, and probably to many Poles, that those ideas are of lasting value. There is no reason for them to disappear with the fall of Communism.

Finally, the article says, "Although its roots are in a trade union, Solidarity is center-right in politics." A-ha. Now we see why the Times has manufactured a front-page dispatch on Poland's problems -- it's because the governing party is center-right. Note also the use of the word "although." The Times is suggesting by that word that it believes that the true interests of trade unionists would be better served by a left-wing, or center-left, party. In fact, there are plenty of reasons for trade unionists to support center-right politics. For one thing, union members work and are therefore inclined to support the right's efforts to reform or trim welfare programs for those who do not work. For another thing, collective bargaining can raise workers' wages to the point where the workers are prosperous enough to support efforts by the right to lower their taxes. In addition, wise union leaders realize that the success of labor is inextricably linked with the success of business, and they therefore realize that pro-business policies of a center-right government will benefit them. Finally, wise union leaders remember that the statist ideology of Communism was the enemy of free labor unions. The statists saw free labor unions as a threat because they were an independent force that could counter the influence of the government. Wise union leaders see the left's drive to expand the size of government as a dangerous pattern that could eventually threaten the influence of independent forces such as unions and churches. So, rather than writing, "Although its roots are in a trade union, Solidarity is center-right in politics," the Times would have been closer to the mark if it had written, "Because its roots are in a trade union, Solidarity is center-right in politics."

Energy Deregulation: The Times op-ed page today carries another in a series of Times articles blaming deregulation for the price increases being experienced by energy users in California. This edition of Smartertimes.com is being written from San Diego County, the front line of this battle. And we can report that the reason prices are going up is not deregulation but over-regulation. For years, price controls and environmental strictures made it not worthwhile for power companies to build additional power plants in this region. Now that some of the regulations have been lifted, there is still a complicated pricing mechanism in place where all the power must be sold at one price set by a low bidder. It's not deregulation that is running up the electric bills of consumers here, it is the aftereffects of the old regulations combined with the effects of the regulations that remain in place. Consumers are responding to the price increases by using less electricity and by stepping up conservation measures -- actions that you would think that the Times would want to encourage. But we guess that the Times's support for expanding government regulations trumps its environmentalism. In other words, higher energy prices are okay, in the Times's view, if they come from Al Gore's proposed BTU tax designed to discourage energy consumption; but higher energy prices are bad, in the Times's view, if they come from deregulation.

Not the First: A Times dispatch from Jerusalem in today's editions says Prime Minister Barak "won a landslide victory in Israel's first direct election contest for the post of prime minister." In fact, the first such direct election was in 1996 and resulted in the victory of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Let the Mexicans starve. That's the view, apparently, of the brain trust over at the editorial board at the New York Times, which, in an editorial this morning on immigration, puts itself firmly in the camp of nativist xenophobe Patrick Buchanan. Free movement of labor across the border between America and Mexico "is not practical anytime soon," the Time claims. It might result in -- perish the thought! -- low-wage Mexican workers competing "with the poorest, least skilled Americans." What we really need, the Times says, is "improved Mexican border enforcement."

This is so wrong in so many ways that it's hard to know where to start, but let's have a crack at this claim that letting in Mexicans would somehow harm the "poorest, least skilled Americans." Those Americans are already subject to competition, and are being hurt, now, as American companies move their factories to Mexico to take advantage of low-wage Mexican workers. An intelligent policy would encourage Mexican workers to come to America. The alternative apparently backed by the Times is to close off the American labor market, drive up wages and thereby encourage American factories to move to Mexico. Letting in the immigrants would create economic growth that would help all Americans. And their taxes could help pay for education and training to help lift up the poorest and least skilled Americans -- tax revenues that would be lost if factories moved to Mexico and the Mexican workers were kept out of America because of "improved" border enforcement.

The pro-globalization crowd at the Times has been leading the cheerleading for lowering the trade barriers with China. Immigration restrictions are just another kind of trade barrier, a restriction on the movement of labor rather than on the movement of goods and capital. It's inconsistent of the Times to favor an end to barriers on the movement of goods, but support restrictions on the movement of labor. (The Times is going to claim it actually favors a slight increase in visas for Mexicans, but that position, and its rhetoric, fall far short of the open-borders position enunciated by truly pro-immigrant newspapers such as, say, the Forward, or the Wall Street Journal.)

And there are some core principles here that go beyond economics. America is a land made great by immigrants. Why should those who happen to have been born here get a preference over those who were born in Mexico yet who yearn to take part in the American dream? Why should those with the good fortune to be born in America be shielded from competition from those who want to come here? There is no good reason, only the bad reasons of anti-Mexican racism or the more subtle prejudices of those whose ancestors came here a few generations earlier and who now want to shut the door on those who would join them from other parts of the world.

Cheney's Options: An editorial in today's Times about Richard Cheney's stock options in Halliburton acknowledges what Smartertimes.com pointed out in its August 18 edition: That is, as the Times puts it, "A Wall Street firm could sign a contract on his options, locking in his proceeds from the sale of that stock now." The editorial proceeds with the usual handwringing about how it is "especially troubling" that Mr. Cheney has some of his net worth tied up in an energy-related company, noting, "Oil touches on everything from relations with Venezuela to wildlife preservation in Alaska, from Middle East politics to the automobile industry." Okay. So why no fuss -- why not even a mention in this editorial -- of the fact that a large chunk of Al Gore's family net worth comes from a block of stock in Occidental Petroleum, an oil company?

The New York Times reports today, in a story that it runs on the front of its metro section in all apparent seriousness, that the city schools chancellor has "ordered the closing of 4 of New York City's worst-performing schools." At surface this sounds like a dramatic reform effort. But all it really amounts to is a reshuffling of personnel and the changing of some signs on the outside of buildings. The story doesn't say that any of the principals or teachers who ran the worst-performing schools will be fired or demoted. Probably they will simply be transferred to other public schools. The article does say that "the school buildings themselves will not be closed; they will be used for other educational purposes, like magnet schools." So you have the same buildings, the same staff, the same top management, the same government control, the same students. Merely the names of the schools and the distribution of some students and staff will change. It's enough to make a reasonable observer skeptical about whether the school closure plans will actually make much of a difference in student performance. Today's Times story, however, doesn't quote any education experts reacting to the closures or considering the question of whether they will have any significant effects.

You Are a Winner: The Times runs at full length in its national section an Associated Press dispatch reporting an $18 million settlement between Publishers Clearing House and 24 states and the District of Columbia. The states, including New York, charged that Publisher Clearing House sweepstakes mailings emblazoned with the notice "you are a winner!" duped some consumers into spending more than $2,500 each for magazine subscriptions. There's not a single quote in the story from a tort-reform advocate who might say something to the effect of "Anyone who would spend more than $2,500 on magazine subscriptions in hopes of winning the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes is so dumb that it is a waste of taxpayer money and a drain on the economy to try to save them from the consequences of their own stupidity."

Crimes of the Times: An article in the business section of this morning's Times reports on corporate executives who visit Attica prison in the company of an "executive coach." What's telling is the way the Times handles the criminal histories of the inmates the executives are meeting with. There is "Roger Weisser, an inmate in his 50's who has spent most of his adult life in prison for crimes committed while drinking." There's no indication of what the crimes were or who the victims were -- but, after all, from the Times's point of view, why would it matter, because Weisser was "drinking" and therefore the crimes were presumably the result of his having a disease, alcoholism, for which he bears no moral culpability. Then there is "Ellis Stokely, 50, who has been behind bars since his robbery partner fled police custody and an ensuing shooting left one person dead 25 years ago." Note the passive construction: it was the "shooting" that "left one person dead," not a particular criminal who shot a person dead. And it all would have been just an innocent robbery had it not been for Stokely's unnamed "partner." Right. Again, the Times runs this story out in all apparent seriousness, without even a single quote from a skeptical business-school professor or a more conventional management consultant who might wonder if the shareholders would be better served if the managers spent more time running their companies and less time engaging in philosophical discussions with Attica inmates.

The New York Times, in an editorial this morning, gives departing police commissioner Howard Safir a kick on his way out the door. It claims that Mr. Safir "engendered hostility among minority officers and the minority community as a whole," and that reductions in crimes "came at great cost to minority New Yorkers, many of whom felt targeted by the police." The editorial says of Mr. Safir that "Instead of empathizing with public fears, he relentlessly cited statistics showing that crime and brutality complaints had dropped during his tenure."

The perception that the crime reduction "came at a great cost to minority New Yorkers" is a myth propagated by partisan racial rabble-rousers like the Rev. Al Sharpton, abetted by the New York Times. In fact, the crime reduction helped minority New Yorkers more than anyone, since they are over-represented in the poor neighborhoods that were most victimized by crime before Mayor Giuliani and Mr. Safir and his predecessor as police commissioner, William Bratton, cleaned up the city. It's also a myth that Mr. Safir "engendered hostility." The hostility was engendered not by Mr. Safir but by those with a political or commercial interest in engendering such hostility -- namely, Rev. Sharpton and the Times. Finally, the criticism of Mr. Safir for failing to "empathize" with the public's alleged fears is ridiculous. If the fears are unfounded, as they almost entirely are, why should he have given them any credence, and why should he be faulted for having tried to invoke facts in an effort to dispel the unfounded fears?

None of this is to say that Mr. Safir or the New York Police Department is perfect. But they have compiled a remarkable record of crime reduction that has benefited all residents of this city, and Mr. Safir, on his departure, deserves to be lauded rather than chided.

The Times's approach to these matters is clear not only from the editorial but from two news stories in this morning's paper.

The first article quotes, in all apparent seriousness, Rev. Sharpton criticizing Mr. Giuliani and the new police commissioner for visiting a black church on Sunday. The article appears to treat Rev. Sharpton as a legitimate civil rights leader, without any reference to his record of inflaming racial discord in the Tawana Brawley case, the fire at Freddy's fashion mart in Harlem, and the aftermath of the Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn.

The second article, about a hearing in a federal fraud and bribery case against a former mayor of Newark, reports that the accused man "in 1970 became the first black to be elected mayor of a major Northeastern city." Why is the man's race is relevant in this story about a federal criminal charge? There is no indication in the article of why his skin color or culture would be at all germane to the story. But it is perfectly in line with the Times's approach of injecting racial issues into every matter, whether it is crime reduction or a federal trial. The metro editors might consult the excellent story in the paper's science section today that runs under the headline "Do Races Differ? Not Really, Genes Show."

Anonymous Russians: "More than 380,000 immigrants have come from the Soviet Union since it began collapsing 10 years ago," an article in the metro section of today's Times reports. Well, it's unclear whether that number applies to New York City, the New York metropolitan area, or all of America. Elsewhere, the article reports that there are "one million Russian speakers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut." Whichever number you believe, you would think that the Times could manage to find at least one or two such immigrants who would be willing to speak using their full names. Nope. The article lets the Russian-Americans, with the exception of two journalists, use only their first names.

Production Error: Sections of a dispatch in today's Times about Hillary Clinton's refusal to endorse Rep. Eliot Engel were so good that the Times printed them twice. This quote from Mr. Engel, for instance, appears twice in my New York edition: "Let's face it: Robert Ramirez has browbeaten the world and threatened the world and this is the kind of boss-laded politics he runs in the Bronx. Everyone is afraid of him."

This morning's New York Times continues to treat Al Gore's call for government-set price controls on medicine as an unremarkable development. You have to read down toward the bottom of a story in the national section to learn that Mr. Gore said the drug companies "do not support such plans because they fear that drug prices will come down. 'Well, they need to come down,' he said. 'They need more competition.'" The article reports that Mr. Gore "then switched targets from the drug companies to H.M.O.'s that he accuses of making financial decisions that usurp medical recommendations. 'Some bean counter behind a computer terminal who doesn't have a license to practice medicine and surely does not have a right to play god overrules the doctor because the H.M.O. or the insurance company doesn't want to shell out the money, even though you've been paying the monthly premium,' Mr. Gore said."

Doesn't anyone at the Times consider it newsworthy that Mr. Gore is calling for price controls on an industry that has been one of America's most powerful engines of innovation and economic growth, and in a country that has traditionally allowed free markets, not government regulators, to set prices? Doesn't anyone there think it might be worth calling some of the H.M.O.'s or drug companies, or at least their trade associations, for comment on Mr. Gore's charges? Doesn't anyone at the Times see any contradiction between Mr. Gore's claim that drug companies "need more competition" and his transformation of the price of medicine into a campaign issue? If Mr. Gore wants to make sure that the drug industry doesn't get any more competitive, one pretty effective way to do it would be to keep attacking the high prices, because no sane person would start a drug company if he knew that he wasn't going to be able to charge a fair market price for his product. Talk about bean counters behind computer terminals. Who is going to be deciding the price of medicine in a Gore administration?

Embarrassing Truths Department: This is from a news dispatch in this morning's New York Times about an unidentified woman who took off her shirt Saturday night in front of President Clinton: "Today, after Mr. Clinton finished a round of golf and Mrs. Clinton made a campaign appearance in Buffalo, family members met in Chappaqua, N.Y., where they had established residency to qualify for Mrs. Clinton's Senate bid." There you have it, straight from the New York Times: the reason the Clintons moved to Chappaqua was not because they liked it there or because they loved New York but "to qualify for Mrs. Clinton's Senate bid."

With his convention speech attacking "Big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the H.M.O.'s," and railing at the "big drug companies" that "run up record profits" while seniors "have to choose between food and medicine," Al Gore seems to have unleashed the class warriors who populate the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Today's salvo in the class war comes from Times columnist Paul Krugman, who backs Mr. Gore's argument that a tax cut would favor mainly the rich. He also tries to rebut the conservative argument that, as the Wall Street Journal put it in an editorial Thursday, "The political difficulty with all this Democratic class warfare rhetoric is that the intended targets are too busy moving up the ladder to pay much attention to the populist rant."

Here's what Mr. Krugman has to say:

"Last week the Wall Street Journal cited -- not for the first time -- two old studies purporting to show that people who are currently in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution are not only unlikely to stay there; after 10 or 15 years they are more likely to be in the top 20 percent than in the bottom. Never mind that both studies were ridiculed by serious experts for their obvious (and obviously intentional) procedural errors as soon as they came out. As Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago put it, those people who supposedly went from the bottom to the top were basically guys who worked part time in the college bookstore, then had real jobs by the time they were 30."

"The reality -- documented by a number of other studies that The Journal for some reason chose not to mention -- is that while most Americans will move up or down the income distribution over the course of a decade, most won't move very far. In fact, even in America your parents' social class, though it doesn't determine your own, affects it strongly. (Is this news to Mr. Bush?) If a tax plan won't help you much today, it probably won't help you much 10 years from now."

The economic historian Joseph Schumpeter compared income distribution in a society to a hotel in which some rooms are nicer than others and all the rooms are occupied. As Isabel Sawhill and Daniel McMurrer wrote in a 1996 Urban Institute study, to get a complete picture, we need to know how often individuals switch hotel rooms. The Krugman view is pretty grim: the poor are stuck in their crummy hotel rooms for a pretty long time. The Wall Street Journal sees more opportunity: the poor and working class individuals are "Movin' On Up," as the title of that Thursday editorial put it, and have plenty of chances to check into the ritzy rooms on the top floor of the hotel. (Not to mention that the growth effects of the tax cuts are constantly adding brand-new luxury rooms to the hotel.)

Krugman can quibble with the Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas studies cited by the Wall Street Journal. (Disclosure: the editor of Smartertimes.com is a part-time paid freelance contributor to a web site of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, opinionjournal.com.) But even honest liberals such as Ms. Sawhill and Mr. McMurrer, reviewing a number of recent studies, wrote in their December 1996 paper on "Economic Mobility in the United States": "The bottom line? It is clear that there is substantial mobility -- both short-term and long-term -- over an average life-cycle in the United States. The studies reviewed above suggest that approximately one-quarter to one-third of the population moves into a new income quintile in any given year. Given a longer time horizon, an even greater percentage of individuals switch income quintiles -- perhaps slightly less than one-half over a five-year period, and about 60 percent over a ten-year period."

The big technical complaint about the Treasury numbers that were among those cited by the Journal was that they only counted households that paid taxes over a ten-year period, which, as Ms. Sawhill and Mr. McMurrer put it, "introduced a bias toward the economically successful." But for the purpose for which Mr. Krugman is writing -- assessing the fairness of the Bush tax cut -- it seems pretty reasonable to try to gather some data from tax returns.

But the best rebuttal to Mr. Krugman comes not from the footnotes of detailed economic studies but from the personal experience of millions of Americans whose parents and grandparents arrived penniless on boats from Europe or planes from China and whose children and grandchildren have clawed their way -- by dint of hard work, education and luck -- into the upper reaches of the American economy. Of course this sometimes takes more than a decade; it can take a generation. But it happens.

In fact, if Mr. Krugman needs a lesson on economic mobility in America, he might check with the presidential candidate waging the class warfare, Al Gore. Mr. Gore wound up his acceptance speech by saying, "I also want to tell you just a little bit more about two of my greatest heroes, my father and my mother. They did give me a good life. But like so many in America, they started out with almost nothing. My father grew up in a small community named Possum Hollow in Middle Tennessee. When he was just 18, he went to work as a teacher in a one-room school. Then the Great Depression came along and taught him a lesson that couldn't be found in any classroom."

Gore went on: "My mother grew up in a poor farming community in Northwest Tennessee. Her family ran a small country store in Cold Corner, a store that went bust during the Great Depression. She worked her way through college. Then she got a room in Nashville at the YWCA and waited tables at an all-night coffee shop for 25-cent tips. She then went on to become the first woman in history to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School."

Al Gore -- the son of a coffee-shop waitress and a country schoolteacher -- went to prep school at St. Alban's and college at Harvard and now is the trustee of his dad's estate, which includes between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Occidental Petroleum stock. As Joe Lieberman would say, America is a great country. So why do Mr. Krugman and some Democrats paint a false picture of a nation in which the poor are stuck forever in crummy hotel rooms?

Arafat and the Arabs: The New York Times book review chooses to assign a review of Yossi Beilin's book to a noted anti-Zionist agitator, Avi Shlaim. Mr. Shlaim claims that the Oslo accord between Israel and the PLO "represented a dramatic reversal of Zionist strategy in the Middle East conflict. Zionist leaders, before and after 1948, sought to bypass the local Arabs and to reach an understanding with the rulers of the neighboring Arab states. Oslo marked a historic breakthrough because it was the first formal agreement between the two principal parties to the conflict: Israel and the P.L.O."

This is just flat-out false. The Israelis tried constantly to deal with the local Arabs. For example, in his article in the July-August 2000 issue of Commentary, Efraim Karsh details how, in 1948, the Jewish mayor of the city of Haifa pleaded with the official leadership of Haifa Arabs and went through truce terms point by point, "modifying a number of them to meet Arab objections." The negotiations broke down only after the Arabs took a recess "to contact their brothers in the Arab states." In other words, it was the local Arabs who sought to involve the neighboring Arab states, not the Jews. The same pattern is visible today, as Yasser Arafat tours Arab capitals in an effort to build support for his positions following the Camp David summit. Indeed, the Israeli objection to negotiating with the P.L.O. was for a long time precisely that, being based at Tunis, Tunisia and being headed by Mr. Arafat, an Egyptian, it did not represent the local Palestinian Arabs but was rather a group of outside agitators backed by the Soviet Union.

Mr. Shlaim also claims that Benjamin Netanyahu "spent his three years in power trying to subvert the Oslo accords." This is also false. Mr. Netanyahu if anything was a more fervent adherent to the Oslo accords than were his Labor Party predecessors, because he insisted that the Palestinian Arabs comply with the provisions of the accords with respect to such matters as disarming terrorists, refraining from incitement, and limiting the size of the Palestinian Arab "police force." Mr. Netanyahu also continued down the path of the Oslo accords by withdrawing Israeli troops from parts of Hebron and by signing the Wye agreement that committed Israel to further territorial withdrawals if the Palestinian Arabs met certain conditions.

Yolk's On Them: The women's fashion supplement to the Times magazine this morning contains a recipe for "Sally Bowles's prairie oyster hangover remedy: yoke of one egg in tomato juice with Worcestershire sauce." When it comes to eggs, it should be a "yolk," not a yoke.

The metro section of today's New York Times carries on its front page a classic example of the kind of limousine-liberal- style coverage that so often puts the newspaper at odds with the interests of law-abiding working-class people who live in the city. Under the headline "Lawyers Say Drug War's Tactics Draw Addicts Into Serious Crimes," the article focuses on complaints by Legal Aid lawyers that police are entrapping "impoverished addicts" into distributing drugs, then charging them with the more serious crime of distribution.

Smartertimes.com is against entrapment. But the Times might make a more credible case against the police's practices if it avoided some of the silliness in today's article.

To begin with, there are the references to "impoverished addicts" and to "lawyers for the indigent." "Impoverished" and "indigent" is the way the limousine liberals over at the Times say "poor." Part of the reason these addicts are poor is because they are spending their money on drugs. They seem to have enough money to support their drug habits. But the Times wants us to feel sorry for them.

The figure the Times most wants us to feel sorry for is a man called Steven Flowers, who is the main example used in today's article. The article tells us he has been "hooked on crack for 10 years," and that his encounter with police came when he was sitting on the stoop of his Harlem apartment house at 2 a.m.

We wonder how Mr. Flowers's law-abiding neighbors feel about having crack addicts hanging out on stoops in the neighborhood at 2 a.m., and whether they share the chagrin of the Times and the Legal Aid lawyers when the police try to put the addicts away for the longest possible period of time. We wonder this because there is no indication of it in the article, which contains quotes from the Legal Aid lawyers and Mr. Flowers but not a word from law-abiding citizens in the neighborhood. It's those folks, not Mr. Flowers, who are the real victims in this story. The neighborhoods that most Times reporters and editors and readers live in don't have crack addicts hanging out on the stoops at 2 a.m., which may be why the Times has so little sympathy for the measures that police are taking to correct the problem.

This morning's story contains some wonderful examples of those code words that reporters use to tell you just where they stand on a story -- "even" and "of course." The story tells us, for example, that "there were even a handful of cases in which people ran off with the $10 or $20 bills supplied by the undercover officers and were then arrested and charged with theft." The word "even" is a nudge from the reporter to the reader that says, "gee, can you believe this? Those police sure have crossed the line."

While the tales of the Legal Aid lawyers get the "even" treatment, the response of the police gets the "of course" treatment. The Times article says, "The police, of course, have a radically different view of the practice. 'If you go over to somebody and say, "I'm looking for drugs," and they say, "Hold on, I can get you some," then they're a dealer,' said Deputy Chief Thomas P. Fahey, a police spokesman. 'Arresting them is not an unacceptable practice.'" The "of course" is a nudge from the reporter to the reader that says, "don't pay much attention to this next sentence or two. It's just what you would expect the police to say."

A substantial section of the article is devoted to clients of methadone maintenance programs. The clients resell extra bottles of methadone to undercover police officers and are charged with crimes. The methadone programs are mainly funded by the federal and state government on the theory that methadone is better than heroin. But the very inclusion of the methadone examples in a story about how the drug war "ensnares addicts" serves to support Mayor Giuliani's contention that, rather than curing heroin addiction, methadone programs simply create methadone addicts. In an August 18, 1998 editorial, the Times wrote "Abstinence is a worthy goal, but medical experts say that methadone-to-abstinence does not work for many heroin addicts. They often need to take methadone for years at a time. Most scientists in the field consider methadone to be a medical treatment for heroin addiction, not a substitute dependency, as Mr. Giuliani insists." Well, if the methadone addicts aren't methadone addicts but just former heroin addicts accepting medical treatment, why is the Times including them in this story about how the police are preying on addicts?