The Times' lead editorial this morning attempts to defend Hillary Clinton's record on matters relating to Israel. With respect to Mrs. Clinton's 1998 call for a Palestinian state, the editorial says the remark "is now not far afield from current Israeli and American policies." In fact, it seems unfair to judge Mrs. Clinton's remark by today's negotiating positions; what matters is what the reaction was at the time. And at the time, even moderate American Jewish organizations that have been consistent supporters of the Oslo process of negotiation between Israel and the Arabs -- the American Jewish Committee, for example -- condemned Mrs. Clinton for interfering in a matter best left for negotiations between the parties. Mrs. Clinton herself has backed away from the 1998 remark in subsequent campaign-related appearances. The Times also defends Mrs. Clinton on her kissing of Suha Arafat after Mrs. Arafat had accused Israel of poisoning Arab women and children. The times says the meeting, "while awkward, was nonetheless handled in a way that did not disrupt sensitive negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders." But if not disrupting sensitive negotiations is the standard by which Mrs. Clinton's activities should be judged, then the Times out to condemn Mrs. Clinton's 1998 remark on Palestinian statehood, which was undeniably disruptive. In fact, the better standard of foreign policy performance is not failure to disrupt negotiations, but success in upholding American values. The Times trots out Prime Minister Barak as a defender of Mrs. Clinton's behavior in the Suha Arafat situation. But Mr. Barak's defense came only after the fact. At the time, Mr. Barak's office harshly condemned Mrs. Arafat's remarks while Mrs. Clinton was still debating with her coterie of dovish advisers about the political effects in New York of any post-kiss statement she would make.

Late Again: Two stories in the metro section of this morning's Times give you a sense of how common it is for the Times to be behind the other New York newspapers in coverage of local news. The "political memo" on the charge that Mrs. Clinton used an anti-Semitic slur points out that the Daily News and the New York Post had reported the story by Sunday morning. The Times waited until Monday to run a short inside story and until today to run two news stories and an editorial. Another story in this morning's Times, about a state investigation into the lobbying activities of Donald Trump, is a straight follow-up to an article that appeared in Monday's New York Post.

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Cambridge, Mass. this morning and is operating off the New England Final edition.

In a stunning contradiction, the lead editorial in this morning's New York Times first says that "the threshold question that needs to be asked is whether tax cuts of any kind are the best way to bring about economic growth," then in the next breath supports soaking the rich, writing that "progressivity is a time-honored principle often forgotten in the political debates." The editorial goes on to say that "since the beginning of this century, Americans have consistently embraced the principle that calls for the wealthy to pay proportionately larger shares of their income in taxes."

Anyone who knows any economics realizes this is silliness. Progressivity works directly in opposition to economic growth. The steeper the tax scale, the less likely it is that people will be willing to work for that next dollar. Now, we're perfectly willing to concede that the tax code exists for reasons other than encouraging economic growth. It expresses moral judgments, for example. But if the Times is going to set up growth as the "threshold" standard, then it's just inane to call in the next breath for progressivity.

The Times' justification is just as silly. Take the reference to "the beginning of this century." Which "this century" is the Times talking about? The one that began about 100 years ago or the one that began January 1? If the Times thinks it's still the 20th Century, then it ought to refund the money to all those advertisers who bought space last year in those special sections for the millennium. And if by "this century" it means the past six months, it undermines the historical consistency argument, because six months isn't a very long time.

The case for making policy for the future based on the principles embraced by the public 100 years ago is kind of sketchy, anyway -- just think of what would it do to the Times's editorial positions on school desegregation and on anti-tobacco lawsuits. But even if you accept historical consistency as the standard, it would dictate not only progressivity but a massive tax cut: taxes as a percentage of gross domestic product are now higher than they have ever been in America during peacetime. Of course, you wouldn't be able to glean that fact from the Times editorial.

Eli 'Yishair': The Times this morning continues its string of misspellings of the names of persons involved in Middle East politics and policy. In the past month, it has screwed up the names of Natan Sharansky, Daniel Kurtzer and Joseph "Yossi" Alpher, as smartertimes.com has pointed out. Today the man whose name is mangled is the leader of Israel's Shas Party, Eli Yishai. In an article in the international section, The Times renders his last name as "Yishair."

The New York Times today runs on its op-ed page an article full of errors and distortions that are aimed at achieving the division of the Israeli capital at Jerusalem. The piece is titled "No One People Owns Jerusalem," and while it presumably reflects only the opinion of its author, it is so far from the truth that one has to wonder why the Times decided to print it.

Let us count the flaws:

The Times article claims that Jerusalem "only became central to Judaism after its destruction by King Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C., the deportation of the Jews to Babylon and the subsequent building of the Second Temple after their return." This is just a flat-out lie. Before there was a Second Temple, there was a first Temple. It was in Jerusalem, and the Bible tells us that Jews from all over Israel made pilgrimages there three times a year. This was 3,000 years ago. In the Psalms, which are attributed to King David, the Psalmist vows, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." (The book "Myths and Facts," published by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is a source for some of these points.) In other words, the Jewish veneration of Jerusalem goes back 3000 years, much longer than the Muslim interest in the city, which is only about 1350 years old.

The Times article claims that in the Second Temple period, "the new cult of Jerusalem became exclusive, forbidding access to the temple not only to gentiles, but even to Israelites who had not been exiled." This makes the Jewish administration of the Second Temple seem somehow discriminatory or nefarious. The truth is, according to the Bible, access to the inner sanctum of the Holy of Holies was always limited to a small circle of priests, even when the children of Israel were carting the Ark of the Covenant around in a temporary Temple in the desert, before the First Temple was even built.

The Times article claims, "Israel began as a defiantly secular state." Yet as Yoram Hazony writes in his new book, "The Jewish State," "In all, the Jewish declaration of independence uses the term medina yehudit, 'the Jewish state' or otherwise refers to the restored political independence of 'the sovereign Jewish people' no fewer than nine times, and its meaning can be disputed by no honest interpreter." Hazony also points out that in 1948 -- the year the modern state of Israel "began" -- the official days of rest of the new state were declared by law to be "the Jewish Sabbath and the traditional festivals of the Jewish calendar." So too, the flag of the new state, Hazony writes, had a design that "includes representations of the star of David and the traditional Jewish prayer shawl, its azure and white coloration being a reference to the hue in the Jewish fringed garments of antiquity." The state seal was the menora, the candelabrum from the Temple in Jerusalem. So much for defiant secularism.

The Times article claims that Israel was made possible "by the inspired pragmatism of Zionist leaders, who accepted anything they were offered, even if it fell lamentably short of what was required, and did not allow themselves to be boxed in by ideology." This is another lie. The Zionist leaders didn't accept "anything they were offered." To take only the most obvious example, the British government offered them a chance to settle in Uganda rather than Palestine, and the Zionist leaders, starting with Theodor Herzl himself, after exploring the idea, rejected it.

The Times article claims "It is only since 1967 that Israel has claimed exclusive control of the whole city." This is another lie. As "Myths and Facts," puts it, "After the Arab states' rejection of UN Resolution 181 and, on December 11, 1948, UN Resolution 194, establishing the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared that Israel would no longer accept the internationalization of Jerusalem."

In addition to these outright untruths, the article distorts the facts by omitting any reference to what happened in Jerusalem the last time any part of it was under Arab rule. That was from 1948 to 1967, when the Old City was under Jordanian control. During that period, according to "Myths and Facts," Jordan built a road across the 2500-year old Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. "Hundreds of Jewish graves were destroyed," and the gravestones "were used by the engineer corps of the Jordanian Arab Legion as pavement and latrines in Army camps (inscriptions on the stones were still visible on the walls, pavements and latrine floors of Jordanian military camps when Israel liberated the city)." In addition, 58 Jerusalem synagogues were destroyed or ruined during this period, according to "Myths and Facts."

Last Word on Race: The interview with Vernon Jordan on page 15 of today's Times magazine sums up the newspaper's attitude toward race, and the American people's, more aptly than it probably intended to. The Times interviewer asks if there were many other blacks on the Fourth of July in Jackson Hole. Mr. Jordan replies: "When I go to Jackson Hole I'm not thinking race, I'm thinking relaxation."

Undeterred, the Times interviewer asks about whether there's a difference between playing golf with a white caddy or a black caddy. Mr. Jordan: "A caddy is a caddy. You know, I do not run my life thinking race on a day-to-day basis."

The Times interviewer still doesn't get it and continues to harangue Mr, Jordan on the race issue, asking if he ever talks about race while he is golfing with his friend President Clinton. Mr. Jordan: "You don't spend much time on the golf course talking about race."

Finally, the Times makes another desperate stab at getting Mr. Vernon to concede that, at bottom, he is as obsessed with the topic of race as the Times itself is. This time, it asks about its role at his workplace, the investment bank Lazard Freres. And again, Mr. Jordan refuses to buy into the Times' conception of race as this giant, ever-present but undiscussed factor in everyday American life. Mr. Jordan: "I don't walk into Lazard every day saying I'm going to be the only black fellow on my floor. I walk into Lazard every day saying I've got a job to do."

This morning's New York Times offers a wonderful example of the way that the newspaper treats news of crime. When the victim of a crime is a young white professional woman who lives in a wealthy area of Manhattan, the Times offers extensive coverage -- the news of a woman being hit over the head with a chunk of concrete near Park Avenue South made it onto the front page of the Times a few days back. When the victim of the crime is a poor black or Hispanic person in the Bronx, the Times barely pays attention. Today's paper, for instance, includes a report on the fact that four teenagers were shot and wounded yesterday afternoon in front of a Bronx high school. The article about the Bronx shooting is given scant space and poor placement, inside the metro section. The Times didn't even bother to have one of its own reporters write about the Bronx shooting, instead relying on the Associated Press wire service for its coverage.

Imagine if four students had been shot on the sidewalk outside Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, an elite public school (you have to do well on a test to get in) with a substantial white population. Or imagine it had happened on the Upper East Side outside the Dalton School, a private school with a fine reputation that is attended by the children of many of Manhattan's masters of the universe. It would be all over the front page of the Times, and the paper would dispatch probably a dozen of its own reporters to find out what happened.

There's an argument to be made that crime in good neighborhoods is more newsworthy than crime in bad neighborhoods because it is more unusual, more "new." There's probably some truth to that. But there's also some truth in the idea that by choosing not to pay much attention to this school shooting in the Bronx, while paying lots of attention to crimes against white professionals in rich neighborhoods, the Times is subtly signaling its readers and advertisers about who its newspaper is aimed at. And for all the acres of coverage in the Times about race as part of the interminable series on "How Race Is Lived in America," you'd have to look pretty hard to find a detailed explanation or defense of the fact that, yeah, the Times does pays less attention to crimes that involve poor minorities. The view here is that the Times, as a private company and one protected by the First Amendment, should be able to choose its audience by shaping its coverage in any racial, geographic or demographic direction it desires. But watch the way the Times editorials react when, say, a pizza delivery company or bank or insurance company tries to make the same sorts of marketing decisions. In those industries, such practices are roundly condemned by the Times as "redlining."

Blowing Smoke on Tobacco: Speaking of the Times' attitudes toward private industry, the newspaper's lead editorial today basically comes out in favor of using class action lawsuits to put companies out of business, even when the Congress or state legislatures are unwilling to declare the products illegal. The Times has taken this position before on the gun issue, ignoring the dangers of allowing courts and trial lawyers to usurp the legislative powers that are properly vested by the American system in the Congress and the state legislatures. In today's case, the matter is not guns but cigarettes, which the Times labels "a product that causes more than 400,000 deaths in America a year." This logic is just as flawed on tobacco as it is on guns. The cigarettes don't cause deaths; the smokers who choose to use them are causing their own deaths. Any serious person has known for years that cigarettes are bad for you, and millions of people have quit the habit with an eye toward improving their health. It's probably even an overstatement to say that the smokers are causing their own deaths; death is one of those unavoidable things in modern life. If it weren't caused by smoking it would be caused by old age or eating too many egg yolks or an illness attributable to some other factor. But class-action lawyers haven't yet been able to figure out how to make a buck by suing God for preventing their clients from living forever, so in the meantime, with the full encouragement of the Times, they are going after the deep pockets of the tobacco companies.

Real Estate: The endless onslaught of Times stories about real estate prices continues in today's metro section with a story about the run-up in prices at Cooperative Village on the Lower East Side. As we said yesterday about the story in yesterday's metro section about the summer vacation house rental market, there's plenty of room for this sort of stuff in the Sunday Real Estate section and the weekly "House & Home" section. News coverage of these matters helps encourage real estate companies to advertise in the Times, but at a certain point the quantity of coverage and the placement of it just become silly.

The New York Times today devotes more than a quarter page of prime space on page B3 of its New York editions, including a three-column-wide photograph, to the story of a billboard boat that was hired by an Internet company but then was cited by the City of New York for allegedly violating an ordinance banning such advertising schemes. The Internet company, DIRTPILE.com, faces a fine of probably $1,000, but the value of the publicity it receives today in the Times is at least $20,000, probably more. (Definitely more if you count the secondary effect of articles such as this one.) You can surely expect a spate of Internet companies to follow suit, violating laws and risking fines on the chance that the Times editors will make it worthwhile by, in exchange, contributing some free publicity to the web ventures. If the dot-com executives had shot a police officer in Philadelphia instead of just violating a New York zoning ordinance, they might have even made it onto the Times' front page.

Cheesy: The front of the Times metro section today features an interesting story about a potential move by food regulators to restrict the sale of certain cheeses because of supposed health risks. We're not quite sure what a story about a potential move against a food by federal regulators is doing in the metro section -- it seems like this story would be more at home in the weekly "Dining In, Dining Out" section that deals with food, or in the health section or the business section or even the national section. The story would be better if it had produced a single named victim or family member of a victim who died or got seriously ill as the result of eating unpasteurized-milk cheese. If the federal authorities were unable to produce such a person, it would seem even more obvious than it already does that this is one of these fake health scares that comes along regularly. If there were a bunch of cheese-bacteria illness victims out there with stories to tell, they would lend some human drama and perhaps credibility to the emerging cheese scare.

Real Estate: As if the Sunday Real Estate section and the weekly "House & Home" section don't provide enough space in the Times for coverage of the summer vacation house rental market, the Times metro section provides us with an extended update on that topic today on page B9. News coverage of these matters helps encourage real estate companies to advertise in the Times, but at a certain point the quantity of coverage and the placement of it just becomes silly.

In a desperate ploy to stop a full-scale repeal of the death tax, the New York Times leads its business section this morning with a story essentially endorsing a Democratic plan that would end the tax only for "small-business owners" and "farmers" with assets below $4 million per couple. The headline, unbelievably, is "Despite Benefits, Democrats' Estate Tax Plan Gets Little Notice."

Well, the reason the plan is getting little notice is that it doesn't have that much in the way of benefits, other than undermining genuine reform of the death tax. There's no "benefit" to the federal government creating a tax incentive for individual Americans to keep their wealth locked up in farms or family businesses rather than managing their capital for the highest return or otherwise as they see fit. Why, under the Democratic plan, should a law-firm partner who works 80-hour weeks and amasses stock-market savings before selling his share in the firm upon retirement have to pay the death tax, while a family farmer shouldn't? Why, under the Democratic plan, should a college professor who invests wisely in mutual funds and saves money have to pay the death tax, while a dry-cleaning shop operator whose assets are in his business shouldn't? Why, under the Democratic plan, should a farmer with $2 million in assets in a farm not have to pay the tax, while, under the same plan, a farmer who sold his farm a month before his death and put his assets in a bank account should have to pay the tax? It makes no sense at all. Rather than a benefit, this plan would impose a burden by distorting the decisions that farmers and business owners make. It's not as though money invested in banks or mutual funds or stocks is less productive than that invested in farms or directly in family businesses; that investment money finances the activities of other farms and businesses. Why should the government exempt one kind of investment from the death tax but not all kinds? There are no "benefits" to such micromanagement of the economy by Democrats or by any other government policymakers, no matter what the Times business section tells you.

Medicare "Cuts": A story in the metro section this morning about Hillary Clinton's Medicaid proposals repeats the false charge that in 1995, the Republican-led Congress tried to "cut" Medicare spending. The article refers to a 1995 bill, saying, "Further, the overall Medicaid budget, as well as that for Medicare, was reduced under the bill, in cuts the president cited when he vetoed it." This is just plain false. The Republican plan that Clinton vetoed didn't reduce the Medicare budget, it just reduced the growth rate from what had previously been projected. The Democrats also wanted to reduce the growth rate, just by a smaller amount. The Democrats demagogued this issue into a "Mediscare" campaign accusing the Republicans of wanting to cut your grandmother's heath care. Republicans tried to counterattack: At one point Newt Gingrich was walking around Capitol Hill wearing a lapel button that said something like "14 percent is not a cut," referring to the percent INCREASE in Medicare spending under the Republican plan. (Don't hold me to the exact percentage, but it was an increase.) If you want to define a reduction in the projected growth rate as a cut, then the Democrats wanted to cut Medicare, too. The story in this morning's Times is totally oblivious to all this.

"Alper" Male: Continuing its regular practice of spelling the names of Middle Eastern policy types incorrectly -- Natan "Sharanksy," Daniel "Kurzer" -- the Times this morning makes reference in a story in its international section to one "Yossi Alper." That is the way the New York Post spelled his name yesterday in the story the Times is following up on today. But while the person in question was the American Jewish Committee's representative in the Middle East, he was frequently quoted by the Times with his last name spelled "Alpher."

Tabzaple: Here's an interesting usage from the "Making Books" column on the front of today's Arts & Letters section: "Almost a beggarly sum, it turned out to be, compared with the record $7 million advance that was put on the tabzaple Wednesday by two publishers before John F. Welch Jr., chairman and chief executive of General Electric, for his chronicle of success." Any suggestions from smartertimes.com readers on the meaning of the word "tabzaple"? It's not in any of the dictionaries I checked.

Home Section Goes Foreign: Without a dateline to help us, we have to read down into the fourth paragraph of the lead story of today's House & Home section to discover that the place the Times is writing about is St. Petersburg, Russia, not St. Petersburg, Florida. The editors at the House & Home section seem to think that a mere reference to "St. Petersburg" is enough mentally to transport the reader to Russia, when in fact it about as likely to transport a reader to the Gulf Coast.

As if each Sunday's travel section and the regular "Sophisticated Traveler" special issues of the Times magazine weren't enough, this morning's New York Times drops on us a 12-page "Vacation" section that is filled with, well, pretty much the same stuff we'd find in a Sunday travel section or Sophisticated Traveler issue of the magazine. Are there any readers out there who really have the time or desire to digest this stuff on a weekday morning? Or is this just a shameless ploy by the Times to try to grab some extra travel advertising dollars in the middle of the summer?

Wrong Word: Catch this sentence from the lead story in this morning's Times, about the summit at Camp David between Prime Minister Barak, President Clinton and Yasser Arafat: "Before arriving in the United States early this morning, a senior Israeli official told reporters aboard Mr. Barak's plane that the prime minister was unruffled by the defection of three rightist parties and a no-confidence motion that he barely passed." If the no-confidence motion, had, in fact, barely passed, Mr. Barak would be out of a job. And it would be nonsensical for a sitting prime minister to try to pass a no-confidence motion. The word the writer was looking for is not "passed" but survived. Motions pass, politicians survive.

Extra "s": Catch this sentence from an op-ed piece in this morning's Times by an Israeli politician, Limor Livnat of the Likud Party: "Israel needs a unified Jerusalem and defensible borders far more than its needs more foreign money." Far more than "it" needs more foreign money, the article should say.

Shredding the Constitution: The Times works itself into a lather today over what to the newspaper is the frightening notion that Americans might actually contribute to a vigorous political debate by making donations to political parties. "Such an action would be another flagrant violation of the spirit of the election laws at a time when the public would has been disgusted by campaign spending and fund-raising excesses," the Times' lead editorial thunders. Such an action would suggest, the paper says, "that campaign leaders have learned no lessons over the past few years -- no lessons from the public demand for campaign reform, no lessons from the growing popular cynicism and revulsion over a corrupt political system."

In fact, the public "demand" for campaign "reform" isn't as great as the Times claims; if it were, the candidate who backed the cause most vigorously, Senator McCain, might have won a presidential nomination. Nor is the public "revulsion over a corrupt political system" as strong as the Times claims; if it were, voters might have chosen Senator Dole for president instead of President Clinton, who accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars that the Chinese communists illegally funneled into the Democratic Party. What the Times means by "campaign reform" is actually an effort to impose further restrictions on the constitutional right to free speech, restrictions that will only allow newspapers such as the Times more power to dominate the political debate in this country. While the Times agitates for new, stricter laws, the politicians and the Justice Department barely obey or enforce the laws that already exist. So there's little reason to believe that new laws would make much of a difference. Is that an indication of "growing popular cynicism"? No. The bigger these loopholes in the Nixon-era campaign finance laws become, the better, because the more money is spent on campaigns, the more vigorous the political debate, and the better for the democracy. As the losing presidential campaigns of Ross Perot and Steve Forbes have shown, money is no guarantee of victory in American politics. So it's silly for the Times to get all worked up any time there's a chance some more money might flow into American elections.

The New York Times waddles in this morning with an article about low-power FM radio licenses for religious broadcasters. It apparently thinks the story is important enough to place in the upper right-hand corner of the front page, the most prominent display spot in the paper. But this policy feud has been going on for months, and has already been covered thoroughly in other newspapers. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been covering the issue, for example. So has the Jewish weekly newspaper the Forward, which on the front page of its April 28 issue carried a story under the headline, "Chabad Radio Gets Tangled in Policy Spat; FCC, Congress Duel Over FM Bandwith; Feds Raid Crown Heights." It is an interesting story, but the Times is playing catch-up.

Did Bakaly Talk? The Justice Department is trying to nail a former spokesman for independent counsel Kenneth Starr on criminal charges of contempt of court. The case stems from the spokesman's allegedly obscuring the role the spokesman played in talking to reporters for the Times. The spokesman's name is Charles Bakaly. A dispatch about the case in the national section of this morning's Times sheds a few rays of additional light on whether Mr. Bakaly spoke to the Times about the story that sparked the dispute. In fact, today's article suggests the original dispatch in the Times may have misled readers. Here's the conflicting information:

Today's story reports, "In their brief, defense lawyers conceded that Mr. Bakaly had discussed the subject with a reporter for The Times, but had not discussed anything that was not already public knowledge."

But the original January 1999 story in the Times that sparked the dispute said Mr. Bakaly had "declined to discuss the matter."

Was the original January 1999 story incorrect when it said that Mr. Bakaly had declined to discuss the matter? And if so, why hasn't the Times run a correction? Probably what happened is a case of reporters stretching the truth a bit in an effort to protect their sources. The standard formulation in the case of someone like Mr. Bakaly, who helps a reporter on a background basis yet doesn't want to be quoted by name, but is too obvious and central a player to be left out of the story entirely, is something like: "Mr. Bakaly declined to discuss the matter for the record." That at least has the virtue of being true, though it does make it somewhat transparent that Mr. Bakaly was willing to discuss the matter on a background basis. Another possible formulation would have been: "Mr. Bakaly declined to discuss the matter beyond what is already public knowledge."

But if the Times told its readers in January 1999 that Mr. Bakaly "declined to discuss the matter," period, when in fact he did discuss the matter but didn't want to be quoted or to dispense any new information to them, it was being a little too coy for the taste of most editors we know.

A dispatch from Cairo in the international section of this morning's New York Times misspells the name of the American ambassador to Egypt. The Times calls him "Daniel Kurzer." In fact, as the State Department's web site makes clear, his name is "Daniel Kurtzer." He's pretty well known in Middle East policy circles, and certainly you'd think the foreign desk editors at the Times and its correspondents in Egypt would be able to spell his name correctly if they put some effort into it. We'll see if they run a correction.

Jewish "Church": Check out this gem from a story on the front of the Times metro section about efforts by a religious group in New Jersey to spend more money on electricity:

"Other church efforts have moved forward on their own tracks."

"The New Jersey region chapter on the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism has formed its own energy-buying consortium separate from Partners for Environmental Quality and will present two choices to its 60 members this fall: one with a cheaper traditional energy mix, and one with a higher proportion of cleaner-burning fuels like natural gas and renewable resources."

While the dictionary definition may leave some wiggle room here, we'd venture to say that most Conservative Jews who read that story will bristle at having their synagogue effort being described as a "church" effort. "Church" generally refers to something Christian; a better, more neutral phrase to introduce the section of the article about the synagogue effort would have been something like: "Efforts by other religious groups have moved forward on their own tracks."

Missile Defense Misadventure: The Times' lead editorial today calls for a delay in building a system for protecting America from enemy missile attack. The editorial says there is "no compelling reason for ordering construction other than the perception that doing so might shield Al Gore from Republican attack. Partisan political considerations should not drive such an important defense decision." But wait a minute. Why shouldn't defense decisions be motivated, in the broadest sense, by political considerations? This is a democracy, after all. If the voters want to be protected against enemy missile attacks, why shouldn't the elected politicians take that into account and move to deploy a shield? Under the Constitution, the Congress has the power to authorize and appropriate defense spending and to declare war, and the founders clearly intended that the Congress would be responsive to the popular will. There's no reason that missile defense, of all issues, should be above politics. If the Times thinks its arguments against deploying a missile defense are so strong, it should encourage Mr. Gore to attack George W. Bush for wanting to recklessly spend billions of taxpayer dollars on an unnecessary and unworkable Star Wars plan. That's what elections are for, to air out and decide big issues like this.

If the Times editorials are marketing opinions as hare-brained as its views on missile defense, it's almost enough to make a reader grateful that the paper devotes an entire editorial today to a tennis game in England. It's hard to see what the policy point or opinion is in the Wimbledon editorial that makes it worth running in the editorial column rather than in the sports section. But again, the Times can probably do less damage to the republic by musing on the sports results than it can by editorializing on serious topics, so we're probably better off.

The real test of whether anyone has been reading the New York Times' interminable series on "How Race Is Lived In America" will be whether anything happens to Lieutenant James Byrne of the New York Police Department. Lieutenant Byrne, who supervises a Harlem narcotics unit, is a minor character in today's installment of the series. And somewhere, after several thousands words exploring the subtleties of race relations among police officers, the Times article today reports that "Lieutenant Byrne, who oversees Sergeant Brogli's team, says the only answer is legalizing drugs. 'In my humble opinion, we're doing nothing up here,' he said after another long day of buy-and-busts."

Hello? You have a New York police lieutenant who is supposed to be keeping drugs off the streets of Harlem publicly saying that drugs should be legal and that the police aren't accomplishing anything? Probably not the best career move for Lieutenant Byrne. But, again, the Times is so obsessed with race relations that the story of a maverick police supervisor in Harlem is dealt with as an aside.

Also dealt with merely as an aside, buried in the bottom half of the story, is the article's statement: "It's supposedly common knowledge: black New Yorkers distrust the police. But on the streets where Sergeant Brogli works, the biggest supporters of the police are African-American. . . . At council meetings it is mainly black residents who attend to ask for more police enforcement, more drug arrests, who want more people jailed for loitering and trespassing." Aha. A Times reporter has finally stumbled onto one of the great truths of urban life. But one reason that the opposite of this truth is "common knowledge" is the acres of space the Times has devoted to editorials assailing the police for their tactics and to news articles about the Rev. Al Sharpton and other anti-police agitators and to polls purporting to show bad relations between blacks and police.

It's 11 a.m. on Sunday, July 9: One of the dullest and most cliched ways of beginning a news story is the old time-and-date trick. Today's installment of the race series begins with this ploy: "Friday, Feb. 25, at 5 p.m., there wasn't. . . " That usage at least spares us the usual "It's" introduction, as seen in the lead story in the Sunday business section, which begins "It was the evening of Monday, May 1. . ."

This Just In: There's a small news story on the front of the Metro section of New York editions that reports on a court hearing about desegregation in the Englewood, N.J. schools. The article discloses in its final sentence that the court hearing happened on May 9. Which raises the question: If the news of the hearing is so important that it is worthy of being displayed on the front of Sunday's metro section, why didn't the Times report it on May 10 rather than waiting nearly a month?

Screen Hype: The week in review section contains an article on "Screen Hype" that contains this gem: "Studios usually spend one and a half times the production budget of a movie on publicity, and with the average summer picture costing close $70,000,000, that's real money." Ignore the missing word "to" after the word "close." Ignore the style violation on the use of all numerals for what should be rendered as "$70 million." Think about this, and it's clear the numbers are way out of whack. This would mean that studios spend $105 million on newspaper, TV and billboard advertising and other "publicity" to market a movie it costs $70 million to make and that, if it's a big hit, does $150 million in gross domestic box office sales. A movie industry analyst tells smartertimes.com that the real costs for publicity are closer to 50 percent of production costs, and he says even that is an upper-end estimate.

The "public lives" profile of the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Sandra Feldman, that the Times offers up this morning falls into the classic trap of dwelling on the appearance of a powerful woman at the expense of substance. The piece begins with the phrase, "Resplendent in her brand-new heathery indigo pantsuit," and proceeds to a discussion of the union leader's newly blond hair. The article acknowledges, "Maybe Ms. Feldman is right, and it is a superficial -- even sexist -- detail hardly worth mentioning."

A Times metro columnist devoted an entire column a few month back to the ridiculousness of such attention to the appearance of public figures who happen to be women. The column pointed out that men hardly ever get that kind of treatment, and if they did, we'd realize how ridiculous it is. But that column appears to have been roundly ignored by the writer and editors responsible for today's profile of Ms. Feldman.

If the Times article had spent a little less space dwelling on Ms. Feldman's hair, pantsuit and supposed fondness for salsa dancing, it might have a little more space to explore the implications of the following sentence, which comes at the end of the profile: "The enemy, she says, is the growing legion of entrepreneurs eyeing the $3 billion educational industrial complex, and the Republicans who want to give parents public money for private-school tuition." This is apparently a Times paraphrase of something Ms. Feldman says, but it contains so many flawed assumptions that it's hard to know where to begin. To begin with, an imaginative union leader would see entrepreneurs eyeing the education industry as an opportunity, not an enemy. Even the head of Ms. Feldman's New York local affiliate union, Randi Weingarten, has been quoted as being open to the idea of contracting with private companies to run some public schools, so long as the private companies permit the organization of unions for teachers. This seems like a much more reasonable position than viewing such private firms as "the enemy"; in the long run, teachers' jobs will be more secure if they have union jobs in a successful privately run system than in the current, troubled government-run one. Then there is the Times-Feldman description of school vouchers as a plan to "give parents public money for private-school tuition." Wait a minute. It's not "public money"; money doesn't belong to the public, it belongs to individual taxpayers. And if a voucher plan allowed "private" schools to accept more poor students, they'd be less accurately called "private" schools and more accurately called "privately run schools that are open to the public." What the Times-Feldman camp now calls "public schools" would then be more accurately called "government-run schools."

So what the Times-Feldman terminology calls an attempt to "give parents public money for private school tuition" would in fact more accurately and fairly be called an attempt to "allow parents the choice of using their money to pay for a government-run school or for a privately run school that is open to the public." Again, an argument can be made that from the long-term perspective of the union, it's better to go along with a voucher plan and try to unionize the teachers in the privately run schools than it is to link the fate of the union to the troubled government-run school system. Alas, however, the Times doesn't have time or space this morning for these sorts of subtle distinctions. It is too busy paying attention to Ms. Feldman's pantsuit and her hair.

After Deadline: The big news of this morning is the failure of a test by the Pentagon of a missile defense system. Wire service stories this morning reporting the failure say the Pentagon disclosed the test results at about 1:10 a.m. eastern time. That's too late, apparently, to make the deadline for my "late edition" of the New York Times; all it contains is a story inside the paper reporting that "Pentagon planners monitored weather patterns" and that the test "is being watched around the world."

In case we didn't get the point from June 21 arts section dispatch about the death row musuem exhibit, and in case the July 2 national section dispatch about the visitation program for inmates at a Youngstown, Ohio prison wasn't enough, the Times today places on its front page yet another article sympathetically depicting criminals as family men. (Today's accused criminals have not yet been tried or convicted, so they are referred to in the story as "defendants.") Today's article, unlike the other two, makes at least a passing effort to take into account the possibility that crime victims have families, too. But it does so in a way that suggests a kind of interchangeable moral equivalence between the two: "They are the families of the accused and the victims, and they are all in some form of mourning. . . .A frantic wife or a grieving mother staring intently at a judge or jury can humanize a defendant or a murder victim." In fact, the text of the story is overwhelmingly devoted to accounts of the families of those accused of crimes, not of the families of crime victims. The headline, "In Teeming Courts, Finding Strength in Family Ties," suggests at the outset the line this story is going to take in interpreting the interaction between families and criminal justice proceedings. The story might have been about how criminals exact a toll on their families as well as on their victims. Instead, the headline's focus is on how families are useful, apparently to the accused criminals, by offering "strength."

Showing Off With a Long Word: A story in the national section about Reform Party presidential candidate John Hagelin, who is challenging Patrick Buchanan, contains the phrase "Mr. Buchanan has fashioned himself anti-establishmentarian." We think the word the reporter was looking for was "anti-establishment." Maybe the writer was reaching for that ten-dollar grade school word, "antidisestablishmentarianism." But the meaning of that term has to do with the establishment of a state church, not the "establishment" in the sense that this Times article is trying to evoke, namely Hagelin's college, which was Harvard.

Bad Placement on Amtrak Ad: A news story in the national section about Amtrak's new plan to give dissatisfied customers a free train ticket appears -- surprise -- directly opposite an ad from Amtrak touting its new customer satisfaction guarantee. Probably the ad and the story had nothing to do with one another, but the placement is the sort of thing that causes readers to wonder.

Going Postol: The Times today continues its campaign against missile defense, relying heavily on an MIT professor called Theodore Postol. There's a news story about a letter to President Clinton issued by Mr. Postol -- the third time in recent weeks the Times has fallen for a full-length news story about these letters to Mr. Clinton opposing missile defense, which are essentially publicity stunts. As if that's not enough, there's an article on the op-ed page written by Mr. Postol opposing a missile defense system. The news article and the op-ed piece both present Mr. Postol as a scientific expert testifying on the technical issues of the missile defense. What isn't disclosed is that Mr. Postol has his own political point of view with respect to relations with Russia that is far out of touch with the American mainstream. Many in Congress, for instance, consider Clinton administration official Strobe Talbott to have coddled the Russians by pushing for huge international aid packages to prop up the corrupt Russian regime even while it waged a cruel war in Chechnya and cracked down on freedom of the press. Mr. Postol, however, wrote in the March 2000 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that when it came to missile defense, "Talbott's heavy-handed approach to the Russians was another notch in a perfectly consistent record of Clinton administration actions that add up to a coherent pattern of hostility and deception toward Russia. This record has created throughout the Russian political system a deep distrust of and anger toward the United States."

Lost in Chelsea: In a listing in the Family Fare column in the weekend section, page E36 of New York editions, Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History is described as having a "new Chelsea home" and as being located in "Chelsea." The museum is at 15 West 16th Street, more commonly described as being in the Union Square neighborhood. The Encyclopedia of New York City entry on Chelsea says of the neighborhood that "The northern and eastern boundaries are difficult to define but correspond roughly to 30th Street and 6th Avenue." Judging by the street address, the museum is between 5th and 6th Avenues, too far east to be considered Chelsea.

Solomon Schechter: The obituary of Alan Fortunoff reports that the retail executive contributed to the "Salomon Schechter School of Manhattan." The correct spelling of the school, and of the Jewish scholar, is Solomon. Like the biblical king.

The New York Times today continues its campaign against missile defense, devoting space in its international section to an article reporting that 50 Nobel laureates have signed a letter to President Clinton urging him to reject a missile defense system. As we noted on June 29, when the Times reported on a group of 40 "American scholars on China and former diplomats" who had signed a letter asking Mr. Clinton to delay a decision on missile defense, a group letter like this is the sort of publicity stunt that often doesn't tell you very much about the merits of a particular issue. In the case of the Nobel laureates, however, the text of their letter shows the flaw in their logic. The Times quotes the laureates as dismissing the North Korean threat and saying that "Other dangerous states will arise. But what would such a state gain by attacking the United States except its own destruction?"

Aha. The Nobel laureates must have not been paying attention during the Clinton administration, when it became abundantly clear that dangerous states could attack America without even barely a slap on the wrist, never mind the threat of "destruction." Consider Iraq, whose Ramzi Yousef, as Laurie Mylroie has written in The National Interest, was a key figure in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Or consider Iran, which newspapers have reported was behind the 1996 bombing of the U.S. Air Force barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia. The Clinton administration has dealt with Iraq and Iran not by destroying them, but, in the case of Iraq, by refusing to implement the law requiring America to aid the democratic opposition to Saddam Hussein, and, in the case of Iran, by relaxing American sanctions on Iranian caviar, carpets and pistachios.

The Times article on the letter from the Nobel laureates doesn't include a quote from a single supporter of missile defense countering the arguments made in the letter. There is only a paraphrase of a comment from a Pentagon spokesman saying that the laureates had no access to secret information. That is beside the point.

There is one slight improvement in the Times' coverage of the missile defense issue today. Yesterday's smartertimes.com objected to a sentence in yesterday's Times reporting that "The Pentagon schedule to build a missile defense is entirely driven by the belief that North Korea will have a long-range missile by 2005." Today the phrase "entirely driven" has been discarded; today's story states that North Korea's missile program "is a main reason that the Pentagon wants to build its system." Fair enough.

Meanwhile, another Times story, on an upcoming test of the missile defense system, seems to be missing a word. The article says, "If the kill vehicle finds and destroys the warhead, the sky would 'with a big flash,' said a Pentagon briefer." Huh? The sky would fall with a big flash? The sky would be filled with a big flash?

Mother Jones Claims Scoop on Bio-Warfare: Mother Jones magazine sends smartertimes.com the following wire: "A front page story in today's New York Times, 'Fungus Considered as a Tool to Kill Coca in Colombia,' reports on how the U.S. is pressuring Colombia into field-testing a coca-killing herbicide that may pose serious threats to the environment and human health. That's old news to readers of the MoJo Wire, Mother Jones magazine's online sister publication, which broke the story ('Drug Control or Biowarfare?' by Sharon Stevenson and Jeremy Bigwood) on May 3, 2000."

The wire continues: "The MoJo Wire also reported critical details of the story that the Times didn't cover. While the Times acknowledges that environmentalists have raised concerns about the herbicide, known as fusarium oxysporum, it doesn't explain the scientific evidence underpinning those concerns; in fact, the experts quoted at length in the Times piece downplay the environmental risks, asserting that the main concern is whether fusarium will be effective against coca plants. The MoJo Wire article, however, includes links to several scientific research papers and US government studies showing that fusarium can attack plants besides coca, including food crops; and that it can pose a lethal danger to people and animals with weakened immune systems. The Times story also doesn't mention an amendment to the upcoming $1.3 billion Colombian aid package, added last March by Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-NY, which virtually forces Colombia to move toward deploying the herbicide. The amendment , also linked to from the MoJo Wire article, requires President Clinton to certify that the Colombian government 'has agreed to and is implementing a strategy to eliminate Colombia's total coca and opium poppy production' using, among other things, 'tested, environmentally safe mycoherbicides.' Fusarium oxysporum is the only mycoherbicide that has been considered for this use."

A front-page dispatch in this morning's New York Times reports, "The Pentagon schedule to build a missile defense is entirely driven by the belief that North Korea will have a long-range missile by 2005." The Times, and other opponents of national missile defense, would like to believe this, so that if North Korea becomes a peace-loving nation or suddenly stops pursuing efforts to build a long-range missile, national missile defense for America would be dead. But the Times' contention about the Pentagon's schedule is just not true. While the schedule may be substantially or even mostly driven by concerns about North Korea, it's not "entirely" driven by it. As the rest of the article makes clear, there are also concerns about missiles being launched from Iran, China or Russia. Certainly when President Reagan got started on the Star Wars program North Korea wasn't his primary concern. Supporters of national missile defense, including some at the Pentagon, say that no matter what happens in North Korea, America should have the capability to defend itself against incoming missiles.

Teacher Pay in California: A front-page story in the Times of June 26 had told us of the horrors of California's supposedly underfunded public school system; in recent years , the article said, the state's schools ranked last in the nation "in students per teacher, students per principal, students per librarian and students per guidance counselor." Moreover, the June 26 article reported, the problems in the public schools in California include "textbooks that refer to the Soviet Union in the present tense, crumbling toilets" and several classrooms with American flags so old that they still have only 48 stars. Today's Times, in its national section, has a chart showing teacher pay. California teachers have salaries that are the eighth-highest in the nation, an average of $46,326 a year. The national average, the chart says, is $40, 574. The Times story of June 26 from California had made a passing reference, toward the end of the story, to the fact that "teachers' salaries here have absorbed a significant share of spending increases over the last two decades, and have remained relatively high." But you only get the actual number and ranking in today's paper.

In a front page dispatch from Los Angeles, this morning's New York Times comes in with the news that "At some unknown moment between now and July 1, 2001, if demographers are right, California will become the first big state in which non-Hispanic whites are officially no longer a majority. Or, to put it another way, California will become by far the largest proving ground for what it may eventually be like to live in a United States in which no one racial or ethnic group predominates."

This is old news to readers of Commentary magazine. In a cover story in its November, 1999 issue, Commentary reported, "At some unknown date during the late 1980's, and with no attention paid whatsoever, whites became a minority in California. . . . As the first major state to face the political reality of a shrinking white minority, California has become the laboratory of America's ethnic future." The Times story doesn't mention the existence of the Commentary article, leading unsuspecting readers to think that they are actually getting some new news, when in fact what they are getting is news that, if they had been reading Commentary, they would have known about seven months ago.

Double Standard on Capital Punishment: Buried in the third-to-last paragraph of a story in the international section about whether the Palestine Liberation Organization will unilaterally declare statehood is the news that a Palestinian Arab man had been sentenced to death by hanging after "a summary trial early this morning." The crime the man allegedly committed happened on Saturday. Considering the acres of space in its editorials and news columns that the Times has devoted lately to the supposed injustices of the death penalty in Texas, you might expect this death sentence in the Palestinian Authority territory to get some more attention from the Times. After all, the Texas death penalty was carried out in a system with an independent judiciary that allows lengthy jury trials and extensive appeals and allows defendants , at least in theory, the right to counsel and the freedom from being convicted on the basis of self-incriminating statements. The Palestinian death sentence, on the other hand, was handed down in a "summary" early-morning trial just days after the arrest. Some might suggest that the reason for the Times' double standard on the death penalty is that the Texas governor, George W. Bush, is running for president as a Republican and the Times is hoping he will lose, while the PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, is trying to create a Palestinian Arab state with Jerusalem as its capital out of land now controlled by Israel, and the Times is hoping he will succeed. But we here at smartertimes.com would never make such an accusation of bias against the Times.

Double Standard on Immigration: Also in the international section, the Times prints a story about economic sanctions imposed by the European Union against Austria. The sanctions were triggered by the inclusion in Austria's governing coalition of Joerg Haider's Freedom Party. "The party opposes immigration, and some charge that it is racist and xenophobic.," the Times article says. Alongside the article about Austria is an article that runs under the headline "U.S Seeks China's Help in Slowing the Flood of Illegal Immigrants." That article reports a visit by President Clinton's commissioner of immigration and naturalization, Doris Meissner, to Beijing, in which the commissioner was "hoping to get a commitment for more help in stemming the huge flow of illegal Chinese immigrants into the United States." Ms. Meissner is quoted in the article as estimating that the American government "would send back 4,000 Chinese arriving illegally at American airports this year." But the Times dispatch from Beijing doesn't consider the possibility, or even quote anyone who considers the possibility, that it is racist or xenophobic or anti-immigrant or just plain shortsighted, un-American and morally wrong for America to turn away Chinese immigrants who come here seeking freedom and a better life. The editor of the Wall Street Journal comprehends this issue, to judge by his wonderful column in yesterday's Journal endorsing a five-word constitutional amendment, "There shall be open borders." The editors of the Times, however, do not, judging by their treatment of what, to smartertimes.com, looks like it has all the makings of a fabulous story: The Clinton administration dispatching an American government official to the Chinese Communist capital on the eve of the 4th of July to lecture the Communists on how they ought to crack down on their own people's freedom of movement -- while the same Clinton administration is busy lecturing Austria's Freedom Party about how it's anti-immigrant. Unbelievable. The Times story from Beijing seems attuned to none of these ironies, delivering the story instead in the official American government vocabulary of "smuggling" and the "illegal human trade."