At the Washington Post, David Bernstein has a further response to the Times Anthony Lerman anti-Zionist article that I commented about here over the weekend.

In the category of vile anti-Israel articles, Antony Lerman's "The End of Liberal Zionism" deserves some kind of award. He writes:

The decision of Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to launch a military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has cost the lives, to date, of 64 soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side, and nearly 2,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians.

No. It wasn't Mr. Netanyahu's decision — which in any event was a decision not made only by Mr. Netanyahu, but by Israel's security cabinet — to launch a military campaign that cost the Israeli lives. It was Hamas's decision to attack Israel from tunnels and with rockets.

He writes:

Today, the dominant Diaspora organizations, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as a raft of largely self-appointed community leaders, have swung to the right, making unquestioning solidarity with Israel the touchstone of Jewish identity.

Nonsense. Where's the evidence? These are organizations with tens of thousands of members. How does Mr. Lerman know that none of those members has a question, or that they don't see Jewish identity as related not only to Israel but also to the Torah and the Jewish religion and culture?

He writes:

The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe.

The Jewish state that welcomed immigrants from Ethiopia and Russia is "xenophobic and exclusionary"? "Colonization and purification of the tribe"? What does that even mean? Again, where is the evidence? As for Zionism as "a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism," he writes that as if it is an insult. Are the Jews the only ones who are to be denied nationalism? Would Mr. Lerman prefer that Jews ignore our religion, or fail to be inspired by it?

Then there is this:

Both liberal Zionism and the left accept the established historical record: Jews forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes to make way for the establishment of a Jewish state.

That is not "the established historical record." It is a lie. While there may have been some cases in which some Palestinian Arabs were expelled, in many cases they left by their own choice, disregarding the pleas of Jews to stay. If you doubt this, please read Efraim Karsh's article, "Were the Palestinians Expelled?" in the July 2000 issue of Commentary. Or read the "refugees" chapter in Mitchell Bard's "Myths and Facts."

The following paragraph appeared on the front page of Saturday's Times, in an article headlined, "Blood Industry Shrinks as Transfusions Decline":

Blood bank revenue is falling, and the decline may reach $1.5 billion a year this year from a high of $5 billion in 2008.

It's not clear, to this reader, at least, what the sentence means. Is the Times trying to tell us that blood bank revenue has declined to $1.5 billion this year from $5 billion in 2008? Or is the Times trying to tell us that blood bank revenue declined $5 billion in 2008 from 2007, and will decline $1.5 billion this year from the year before? Or is the Times trying to tell us that blood bank revenue this year will be $3.5 billion, down from $5 billion in 2008?

The real meaning the sentence conveys is that the better editors at the Times are off on their summer vacations this week, or if they are not, they weren't paying attention when this article moved. It's one thing to get this kind of confusing language in a brief article that runs inside the newspaper. But this was on page one.

A dispatch from Illinois about the Olmsted Locks and Dam on the Ohio River reports that it was "first authorized by Congress in 1988 at a cost of $775 million" and is "now scheduled to be completed in 2020 at a cost approaching $3 billion."

The U.S. government's consumer price index inflation calculator indicates that $775 million in 1988 dollars are about $1.56 billion in 2014 dollars. The calculator doesn't run to 2020, but by then even more of the story won't be typically scandalous government cost overruns, but the erosion of the value of the dollar.

In other articles, the Times sometimes tries to account for this by adjusting for inflation, as it attempted to do with some movie box office statistics in the Robin Williams obituary. But it's disappointingly inconsistent about when it does this and when it doesn't. In this case, the Times doesn't make any mention of inflation, and a reader may suspect it is because it makes the story about the dam cost overrun seem less newsworthy, or at least turn it into a story less about the dam and the Army Corps of Engineers and instead more about the Federal Reserve and its overseers in Congress.

A front-page news article in today's New York Times appears under the headline "Cities Rocked by Past Unrest Offer Lessons." It offers lessons for Ferguson, Mo. from "other cities that endured similar violence." It names "Cincinnati, Oakland, Los Angeles" and Miami and talks about responding to riots and restoring calm. Strangely — bizarrely, actually, the Times omits any mention of New York.

There was a race riot — a pogrom, actually — in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991, which you'd think a newspaper based in New York City might, you know, think about maybe mentioning in a news article about how to respond to an urban riot. The efforts since then to improve relations between the black and Jewish communities in Crown Heights might actually have some lessons for Ferguson.

Maybe Crown Heights was omitted on the grounds that it did not involve what the Times describes as "the fatal shooting of an unarmed back man by a police officer." But that description doesn't apply, either, to the case of Rodney King in Los Angeles. King was not shot by police and he survived the beating. His case is nevertheless included in the Times article. If the Times had been looking for a fatal shooting example, it might have included the case of Amadou Diallo, who was shot by New York City police in the Bronx in 1999. His death did not prompt a riot, but it did prompt organized protests that included mass arrests and civil disobedience. The Diallo shooting isn't included in the Times article, either.

It's not clear what accounts for the Times' neglect of the nation's largest city, the city that appears in the name of the newspaper, in this article. Maybe it has to do with internal bureaucratic divisions in which the national desk is not supposed to tread on the metro desk's turf. Whatever the reason, it strikes this reader as a glaring omission.

The "New York Times Store" is featuring "rarely seen" and "truly historic" photographs of a naked Marilyn Monroe for $3,000 and $1,500 (more if you want it framed). It's not clear how this fits with the Times Company's stated core mission of "creating, collecting, and distributing high-quality news and information." A front-of-the business section Times news article — "Risque Promotion Prompts Outcry From Land's End Customers" — this week went after Land's End for a marketing deal with GQ, which was featuring photographs of scantily clad women, but Land's End wasn't trying to sell the pictures for $3,000 or billing them as "truly historic."

Maureen Dowd's column today refers to Hillary Clinton's interview with "Jeffrey Goldberg, a hawk, of The Atlantic."

I guess by Ms. Dowd's standards a "hawk" is someone like Jeff, who wants to dismantle many of Israel's West Bank settlements and to ease U.S. sanctions on Castro's Cuba.

Reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creator Colin G. writes:

Josh Barro has a piece on auto thefts in which he says the "most important factor" in explaining the decline is the introduction of technology in the late 90s/early 2000s that makes it "essentially impossible to start a car without the ignition key."

That's fine, but how does that comport with the second chart included in the piece, which shows the most dramatic declines taking place from around 1990-97 before such technology became available?

In the midst of the front-page New York Times news article about the death of actor and comedian Robin Williams comes this:

At an age when most actors are slowing down, Mr. Williams was engaged with a half-dozen recent and planned projects. They ranged from stage work and low-budget films to an anticipated — though still distant — big-budget sequel to his biggest hit, "Mrs. Doubtfire," which took in about $728 million worldwide in 1993, after accounting for inflation.

Box Office Mojo lists the worldwide lifetime gross of Mrs. Doubtfire at $441,286,195 and says the movie was released November 24, 1993. Some of that $441 million was surely earned not "in 1993," as the Times article puts it, but in the calendar years that followed. If the Times is going to adjust for inflation, it may want to clue its readers in on what technique it is using to convert the lifetime gross of a movie earned worldwide into a number of current U.S. dollars. Such a technique isn't so simple, which is why Box Office Mojo just uses nominal, non-inflation-adjusted dollars.

I can understand the impulse to adjust for inflation to make it easier to compare box office totals across years. But I fear that doing so winds up making the numbers be more about inflation than about the earning power of the movies.

From the you-can't-make-it-up department: A post in the Fashion and Style section reports:

For many Muslim women around the world, the hijab — the scarf covering their hair — is not just a religious accouterment but also a symbol of their identity....As part of a planned article, we invite readers to share Instagram photographs of their hijab with us. Tag the photos with #nytfashion, and selected ones will be highlighted onnytimes.com/fashion this week.

I guess the Times figures that if it's losing Jewish readers over its Middle East coverage it might as well pick up some Muslims to make up for them. We're waiting for the equivalent feature on yarmulkes.

Dave Barry has a deft takedown of a New York Times essay about Miami.

From today's New York Times editorial, the latest in a series calling for the legalization of marijuana:

One important way to curb use is to tax marijuana heavily, following the post-Prohibition template of replacing criminalization with regulation and taxes....tax the drug based on its potency — which can be measured in various ways, including by the amount of the component THC in a batch — and increase the rate over time to keep up with inflation.

No wonder the Times favors marijuana legalization. It creates the opportunity to raise taxes, an opportunity that for the Times editorial writers trumps any other policy objective. To the sixteen other tax increases previously supported by the Times editorial column (one of the services we provide here is keeping track of them), now add a seventeenth: an inflation-indexed tax on marijuana potency.

In the business section of Saturday's Times was a "wealth matters" column on the topic of parents talking (or not talking) to children about an inheritance. It included this passage:

Like other areas of life in which there is strong data that should be dictating our behavior — like cigarette smoking, global warming and baseball statistics — people know what they should do but still struggle mightily to do it.

It's the second time in less than a month that a Times business section columnist, reporter, or editor has injected a global warming reference into a story that has nothing to do with the topic.

Obama for America 2012 campaign speechwriter turned New York Times Washington bureau reporting intern Theodore Schleifer has an article in the Times that runs under the headline "Religious Conservatives Embrace Pollution Fight." It includes this sentence:

Although many of the faith leaders came from traditionally progressive congregations, like black churches, synagogues and mainstream Protestant denominations, others were more conservative Christians who reflect a growing embrace of environmentalism by parts of the religious right.

That sentence could have used an editor. It's not clear initially whether the word "black" modifies just "churches," or also synagogues and mainstream Protestant denominations. The word that Mr. Schleifer was looking for wasn't "mainstream" but "mainline." And it's not even true that "black churches, synagogues, and mainstream [sic] Protestant denominations" are "traditionally progressive," whatever that even means. Orthodox synagogues may be "progressive" on some issues, like government anti-poverty spending, but conservative on others, such as opposition to gay marriage, support for defense spending, or support for school vouchers or government aid to religious schools. Black churches may be "progressive" on civil rights issues but less so when it comes to gay marriage or violence in the media. Even the term "progressive" here is problematic. If you are some radical environmentalist who opposes genetically modified food, opposes hydrofracking for natural gas, opposes nuclear energy, but wants to get energy from windmills like Europeans did back a couple of centuries ago, that makes you a "progressive"? It seems to me that is a "progressive" who opposes progress. It sounds like the Times is using "progressive" here as a euphemism for "liberal" or "politically left-wing." Maybe it polls better. But it doesn't help readers understanding of the issue, especially when it is used as sweepingly and loosely as it is in the Times passage quoted.

A Times dispatch from Kansas City, Mo., about an appearance there by President Obama reports:

The president was informal and relaxed, interacting with a crowd that was quick to respond, cheering and booing — a bit of a foil to a number of signs outside the theater before his speech protesting his policies on immigration, the conflict in Gaza and other issues.

That is a mess of a sentence for quite a few reasons. The part that says "his speech protesting his policies on immigration" is confusing and makes it sound like the president gave a speech protesting his own policies. The phrase "on immigration, the conflict in Gaza and other issues" modifies "signs", not "speech," and should be placed closer to the word it modifies. The signs weren't "protesting" anything — the people holding them were. If the Times reporter or editor thinks the protesters outside the presidential event are newsworthy enough to rate a mention, it would help readers to be more specific. Were the protesters saying his immigration policies are too lax or too strict? Is "the conflict in Gaza" the Times' phrase or the protesters'? If it is the Times' phrase, it is misleading, because the conflict, after all, is not just in Gaza, but in Gaza and in Israel, where Hamas terrorists are launching rockets at Israeli civilians and digging underground tunnels for the purpose of killing or kidnapping Israelis. And "and other issues" is so vague as to make the sentence end with a faint whimper.