Times columnist Michael Powell is moving to the sports section from the metro section. He explains: "I'm intrigued by how the themes that preoccupy me — poverty and inequity and moments of transcendence — play out in a new arena."

A Times op-ed by "contributing op-ed writer" Ali Jarbawi begins, "the murder of three settlers in the West Bank has given Israel the excuse it was waiting for to set a huge military operation in motion." Even though two of the three Israeli boys reportedly lived within the 1949 armistice lines that marked Israeli's pre-1967 borders, the Times refers to them as "settlers," a terms that is usually reserved for those who live in territory that Israel retook in 1967. Strange.

A front-page New York Times article reports on poverty amidst the oil boom in Texas, 50 years after Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. The Times article blames Republicans and the "philosophy of limited government" for the abject conditions of the state's poor:

despite the boom, Texas has some of the highest rates of poverty in the nation and ranks first in the percentage of residents without health insurance. Republican leaders have supported tapping the Rainy Day Fund for one-time investments in water and transportation infrastructure, but they have blocked attempts to use the fund for education and other services, arguing that it was designed to cover emergencies and not recurring expenses.

"Despite the bounty of the Eagle Ford, which is considerable and on the whole clearly positive, it is not a rising tide that lifts all boats," said Ray Perryman, a leading Texas economist and author based in Waco. He noted that Texas had long had a philosophy of limited government and an aversion to spending on social services, an attitude intensified by the current political environment.

"Texas is not a good place to be poor, and there is little political appetite for change," he said.

It sounds at least plausible, perhaps — until one remembers another recent Times deep reportorial dive into the topic of poverty, the story of Dasani, an 11-year-old who lived for three years with her parents and seven siblings in a single room of a fetid homeless shelter in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. New York City, unlike Texas, has no "aversion to spending on social services," and its politics are dominated by the Democratic Party, not the Republican one. But New York City, by the Times account, isn't a good place to be poor, either, which makes one wonder why the Times is trying to score political points against Republicans or the "philosophy of limited government" in today's Texas story.

The whole phrase "philosophy of limited government" is itself something of a puzzler. What. after all, is the alternative? Does the Times favor a government without limits? It's not entirely clear that Texas Republicanism, with its enthusiasm for capital punishment and for laws prohibiting abortion, is exactly explainable by the phrase "philosophy of limited government." Further, "limited government" isn't something unique to Texas. The Constitution, which enumerates certain powers for the federal government and, in the Bill of Rights, expressly limits those powers, is an example of the philosophy of limited government. It applies to the entire United States.

Finally, absent from the Times story is any recognition or discussion of the fact that compared to Mexico or the rest of Latin America or lots of rural Asia and Africa, Texas is a good place to be poor, or at least a better place to be poor. By third-world standards, America's poor are rich. That doesn't make the Times article about poverty in Texas any less sad or heart-tugging, but it does seem a little odd for the Times to run this whole article deploring the horrible conditions in Texas without mentioning that tens of thousands of people are taking severe risks to sneak into America, past fences and border guards, across deserts, for the chance to experience them.

Reviewing a new English translation of Jean Guehenno's "Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944," a professor at Yale, Alice Kaplan, asks, "Is there something about our own political climate that allows us finally to hear Guehenno's voice clearly?"

Professor Kaplan doesn't answer the question or even address it further, at all, in the review, leaving this reader, at least, puzzled about what in the world she is talking about. What, exactly, in modern American politics makes the story of France under Nazi occupation resonate? Who are the Nazis of today? Obama? The Tea Party? The Islamofascists? If a professor is going to make such an inflammatory suggestion, the least she can do is explain herself.

Federal campaign finance records show Professor Kaplan donated to President Obama's campaign in 2008 and again in 2012, and she also has written for the hard-left Nation. But a political aside in a book review ought to be comprehensible without forcing a reader to scramble for outside sources from which to draw inferences. The sentence stopped me cold in my tracks.

A Times article under the headline "Developer Reaches Deal To Finish 80-Story Tower" begins:

The developer Larry A. Silverstein plans to resume construction of a long-stalled 80-story building at the World Trade Center site immediately, under an agreement the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey approved on Wednesday.
If all goes according to plan, the building at the 16-acre site would join the Western Hemisphere's tallest tower, the 104-story 1 World Trade Center, which is nearing completion, and Mr. Silverstein's first tower, a 72-story office building at 4 World Trade Center.

It is not accurate to call 4 World Trade Center "Mr. Silverstein's first tower." Seven World Trade Center opened in May 2006, years before 4 World Trade Center.

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Walmart's response to a critical column in the New York Times was the topic of a post here earlier. Now the retailer has also shared a letter to the editor of the Times that the Times has declined to publish. Again, the Internet levels the playing field, so that Walmart doesn't need the Times to publish its letter to the editor; the retailer can just publish it on its own web site by itself.

A Times news article on the state of contract negotiations between the Long Island Rail Road and its employee unions goes on for more than 400 words without reporting how much money the workers make each year. From the article:

The unions have indeed called for 17 percent raises, but over six years, not seven. The authority's proposal also requires new employees, hired after the potential ratification, to contribute 4 percent of their salaries toward the cost of their health insurance. Current employees would be asked to contribute 2 percent. Under the expired agreement, employees did not contribute any of their salaries to health care.

All the talk of percentages isn't much help without knowing what the average salaries of the workers are, or what the starting salaries are, or what the salaries top out at for veteran employees. It's a pet peeve of mine in news coverage of labor negotiations — the reporters talk about the percentages without reporting the salaries. It makes it harder for readers to judge for themselves whether the union demands are reasonable.

Toward the end of a Times dispatch that runs under the headline "New York Leaders Reach Deal on Medical Marijuana" comes this:

"New York has finally done something significant for thousands of patients who are suffering and need relief now," said Gabriel Sayegh, the New York director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which lobbies for more liberal drug laws. But he added, "The decision about the mode of administration for any medication should be left up to doctors and their patients."

This is a fine example of disparity in the ways that the Times treats billionaire-funded public policy activity on the right versus on the left. When David and Charles Koch spend money on politics and policy, the organizations they fund are identified as such and the Times raises the specter of rich people buying policy influence. But when it is the George Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance, any mention of Mr. Soros or of the tens of millions of dollars he has spent over the years on advancing the cause of drug legalization is omitted.

Further to the earlier post here on the Times' nasty obituary of Fouad Ajami, Mike Doran notices that the Times even got the title of one of Ajami's books wrong. It was The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon, not, as the Times has it, "The Vanishing Imam." Minor point, perhaps, but confirms the lameness of the overall treatment. The only thing vanishing is whatever credibility the Times had left on this one, which was not much to begin with.

A Twitter account that appears to be created by Fouad Ajami's son Tarik commented, "crappy obit, and I'm a raving liberal."

I'm not one who thinks that an obituary needs to airbrush a person's faults, but this Times obit went beyond even-handed, all the way to hostile.

Update: For a corrective, see Michael Mandelbaum's article in The American Interest, particularly the final paragraph.

Walmart responds to a column by Timothy Egan on the Times op-ed page by posting to its Web site a red-inked, corrected version.

Pretty great the way the Internet lets Walmart respond in a much more detailed way than a letter to the editor of the Times would ever allow it to do.

The writer and professor Fouad Ajami gets a remarkably hostile obituary in today's New York Times. "Edward Said, the Palestinian cultural critic who died in 2003, accused him of having 'unmistakably racist prescriptions,'" the Times writes.

Three paragraphs of the review are devoted to quotes from the hard-left Nation. One, talking about a book by Ajami, says:

The scholar Andrew N. Rubin, writing in The Nation, said it "echoes the kind of anti-Arabism that both Washington and the pro-Israeli lobby have come to embrace."

The final passages of the obituary are also from the Nation:

In a profile in The Nation in 2003, Adam Shatz described Mr. Ajami's distinctive appearance, characterized by a "dramatic beard, stylish clothes and a charming, almost flirtatious manner."

He continued: "On television, he radiates above-the-frayness, speaking with the wry, jaded authority that men in power admire, especially in men who have risen from humble roots. Unlike the other Arabs, he appears to have no ax to grind. He is one of us; he is the good Arab."

If I wanted to read the Nation's obituary of Fouad Ajami, I would read the Nation. From the Times I want something more straight-up the middle, less biased toward the left. The idea that Ajami was "racist" or "anti-Arab" is so far from the truth that it doesn't deserve to be taken as seriously as the Times obit apparently takes it. It leaves readers with the egregiously false impression that Ajami was some sort of Klansman or Bull Connor type.

David Leonhardt's "Upshot" column is about two books — Sheryll Cashin's Place Not Race and The Century Foundation Press's The Future Of Affirmative Action — that consider what will happen after the end of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Without explaining why, Mr. Leonhardt ignores a third recent book about affirmative action in admissions, Cheating: An Insider's Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA, by Tim Groseclose, which suggests that some colleges will go on using race-based affirmative action even after it is outlawed and even while publicly denying that they are doing so. Mr. Groseclose's book documents how this happened at UCLA. It would have been good to include in this Times column.

Reuters takes a skeptical look at the executive compensation at the New York Times Company. It finds it to be high relative to peer companies:

As a percentage of revenue, Times Co's compensation is more generous than at six companies and less generous than at three. But as a percentage of free cash flow, it far outranks every company, in many cases by a long way....The study also looked at relative share price performance. While Times Co's stock price surged 86 percent in 2013, it is still more than 37 percent below where it was at the end of 2006, before the financial crisis hit. For that same period, the Standard & Poor's 500 is up about 36 percent.

A short news article posted to the Times web site on Monday reports that the newspaper's brand-new executive editor, Dean Baquet, "had a malignant tumor removed from his kidney on Saturday after "doctors discovered the tumor on Thursday."

The Times article leaves many questions unanswered, among them:

•In what hospital did the surgery take place?

•Will Mr. Baquet receive any follow-up treatment such as chemotherapy or radiation?

•What are the chances of a recurrence?

•Why did it take until Monday to disclose a tumor found on Thursday and a surgery that happened Saturday?

Times reporters who view these questions as an obnoxious invasion of privacy may want to refer to Joe Nocera's 2008 column taking to task Apple for being less than forthcoming about the health of its then-chief executive Steve Jobs. "There are no guarantees with cancer. We all know that," Mr. Nocera wrote, lecturing Jobs that he "needs to treat his shareholders with at least a modicum of respect. And telling them whether or not he is sick would be a good place to start."

I understand that Jobs was chief executive while Mr. Baquet is executive editor. But the Times is a public company in the business of providing news, and Mr. Baquet is the head of the news-producing part of the company. Just last month we were hearing that Mr. Baquet was such an essential player that the mere threat that he would leave for Bloomberg was enough for Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to dump Jill Abramson and install Mr. Baquet as executive editor. So, to the question raised by Mr. Nocera in his Jobs coverage as to whether Mr. Baquet's health issues are "material" for the purposes of the SEC, if the circumstances weren't so medically sober and serious there might actually be some humor in seeing the Times take the position that the executive editor's health is immaterial to the company's fortunes.

As it is, we here at Smarterimes wish Mr. Baquet a speedy recovery. Perhaps he will return to his editor's desk with a newly deepened perspective that he can apply the next time he is tasked with editing copy like Mr. Nocera's column about Jobs.