Toward the end of a Times article that appears under the headline "Oil's Financial Ties to Texas Legislators" comes this paragraph:

Oil and gas accounted for more than 8 percent of the state's gross domestic product in 2011, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, so it is not surprising that many lawmakers are in the industry. It is also nothing new. Many former governors, including George W. Bush, have been oilmen.

If something is both "not surprising" and "nothing new," one might reasonably wonder why it merits a Times news article at all. The article itself does not answer that potential objection, but one possibile answer is that, by ordinary Times news standards, the article would not merit publication at all. But because the article is supplied not by Times staff but rather by the Texas Tribune, a non-profit left-leaning news organization that has a deal to supply content to the Times (unlike any right-leaning non-profit news organizations of which I am aware), it makes it into the paper.

Maybe next time the Times can do its customers a favor and if an article is both "not surprising" and "nothing new," label it as such at the top of the article rather than at the bottom. That way the customers can use their valuable time reading something else instead.

"Gold, Long a Secure Investment, Loses Its Luster" is the headline on a dispatch in the Times business section. It reports, "concern that the loose monetary policy at Federal Reserve might set off inflation — a prospect that drove investors to gold — have so far proved to be unfounded."

Never mind the subject-verb agreement problem (it should be "concern...has" or "concerns...have"). What about the logic or accuracy of this statement, given that, later down in the article, the reporter concedes that "anyone who bought gold in 1999 and held on has done far better than the average stock market investor. Even after the recent decline, gold is still up 515 percent."

Up 515 percent compared to what, the reader might wonder?

Well, measured in dollars, the value of which is being eroded by the very inflation the Times is contorting itself in an effort to deny. Gold is up 515%, gasoline costs nearly $5 a gallon, private school tuition is $40,000 a year, the price of a weekday single copy of the New York Times at a newsstand in New York City has risen to $2.50 from the 60 cents that it cost in 1999, and the average premium for a family health insurance policy offered by an employer climbed to $13,300 in 2009 from $5,800 in 1999. President Obama yesterday risked the ire of his left-wing base by redefining the definition of inflation for Social Security (to "chained CPI") in an effort to save the nation from fiscal ruin (or at least to pose as willing to do so). In Mr. Obama's State of the Union address, he proposed increasing the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour from the $5.85 at which it stood in June 2007. And the Times is assuring us that concern about inflation is unfounded? Not just unfounded, but "proved to be unfounded"! When the guy at the newsstand tomorrow morning tries to charge me $2.50 for the newspaper, maybe I'll try to pay him 60 cents and explain that concern about inflation is "proved to be unfounded."

Politico's Dylan Byers pokes some holes in the upcoming New York Times magazine profile of Anthony Weiner and his hopes for a political comeback.

Reporting on the uproar over Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School giving an award to President Carter, an article makes reference to the president of Yeshiva, Richard Joel, as "Dr. Joel." President Carter, on the other hand, gets a mere, "Mr. Carter."

Richard Joel has a J.D. (from NYU), and some honorary doctorates, but the Times doesn't ordinarily refer to either lawyers or to those with honorary degrees with the "Dr." honorific.

A front-page Times news article on Leonard Lauder's donation of cubist art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art erroneously reports that Mr. Lauder has purchased or collected cubist works to the exclusion of anything else. The Times makes this inaccurate point twice:

In the New York art scene, which is heavily populated with big-time collectors, Mr. Lauder is a singular figure. While many of his peers have made splashy acquisitions, seduced by the latest trends, he has quietly and steadily built a museum-worthy collection with a single focus, on Cubism….

Mr. Lauder and his younger brother, Ronald S. Lauder, a founder of the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, are among the most influential collectors and supporters of art in New York. But while others buy widely, often in multiple periods and styles, Leonard Lauder stands out for his single-minded focus.

"Single-minded focus"?

A dispatch by Judith Dobrzynski in the New Yorker in 2012 reported that Leonard Lauder "collects sports postcards, fashion postcards, war postcards, advertising postcards, celebrity postcards, industrial postcards, and history postcards, mostly lithographs or vintage photographs, by known and unknown artists alike." The same report says that he donated 20,000 postcards by "early-twentieth century Japanese artists" to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and that his office in New York "brimmed with art by Richard Serra, Jeff Koons, Agnes Martin, Joseph Cornell, Beverly Pepper, and Claes Oldenburg."

It might be the Oldenberg "sculpture of a larger-than-life typewriter eraser" that the Times mentioned in a magazine article about Leonard Lauder in 1987 and that was still on display in his office 15 years later.

Anyway, this idea that Leonard Lauder has ignored the latest trends and has had a "single-minded focus" on cubism is inaccurate.

A Times editorial prescribes a solution to the corruption problem plaguing New York politics: "Of all the proposed reforms, the most critical is to open up elections so that voters have real choices. And that means creating a workable public financing system to encourage more candidates to come forward, much as New York City did almost 25 years ago....public financing is the linchpin of the entire reform effort."

Later in the editorial, the Times mentions that among those arrested in the latest wave was "City Councilman Daniel Halloran." Since Mr. Halloran was elected under the same New York City public financing system that the Times claims is a "critical...linchpin" to countering corruption, that sort of undermines the Times' argument that the solution to corruption is public financing. Granted the New York City Council is probably marginally less corrupt than Albany, but that probably has more to do with term limits (which the Times does not favor or even mention in this editorial, despite its claim that the "system" "desperately needs" an "infusion of fresh faces") and with the greater press and law enforcement scrutiny in New York City than with the campaign finance system.

A news article about the governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal reports, "surveys show a growing frustration with the annual deep cuts to higher education and health care." The article refers again to "routine deep budget cuts — made even deeper after routine midyear revenue shortfalls."

Maybe the Times could just tell us what the cuts were in percentage terms, or in absolute dollar terms, without characterizing them as "deep" or "even deeper"? That would allow readers to judge for themselves how deep the cuts are. But the Times prefers, it seems, to make that judgment on its own rather than allowing readers to think for themselves.

Smartertimes has a higher opinion of its readers, so here are the numbers. Governor Jindal took office in January 2008. In fiscal year 2006-2007 the actual state education spending was $6,758,000,000. In fiscal 2010-2011 the actual education spending was $7,017,800,000. The appropriated education spending for 2012-2013 was $7,384,900,000. These are not, in my view, "deep cuts."

The state budget numbers for human resources, which include health care, are a similar story. The actual figure for 2006-2007 was $7,281,000,000. The actual figure for 2010-2011 was $9,091,700,000, and the appropriated figure for 2012-2013 is $9,764,400,000. Again, not exactly "deep cuts."

This framing by the Times skews the policy debate over government spending. How is a governor supposed to exercise control over state spending when increases in spending are inaccurately described in the press as "deep cuts"?

In the midst of an article about subway advertising related to Middle East politics and American policy comes this:

Pamela Geller, the executive director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, said in an e-mail last month that the group had spent "well over" $100,000 on advertising in New York's transit system. She said in December that the group had spent about $70,000 on one purchase alone: ads placed beside each of the subway station's roughly 220 clocks.

Maybe the Times should skip the article on the Middle East-related advertising and instead report a story on why a subway station would need 220 clocks. No wonder they keep raising the fares. It's to pay for all those clocks! Maybe they mean the subway system's 220 clocks?

In the Sunday Styles section, Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn writes, "I promise, if Hillary Rodham Clinton ever runs for president, I will never write about her hair." In the sentence before, she says that commenting on the appearance of women politicians is akin to treating them "like an expensive piece of meat." The headline on her piece is "Everyone loses in this beauty contest."

Meanwhile, over in the Times Sunday Review section, Maureen Dowd has beaten Ms. Horyn to the punch. Ms. Dowd writes: "Hillary jokes that people regard her hair as totemic, and just so, her new haircut sends a signal of shimmering intention: she has ditched the skinned-back bun that gave her the air of a K.G.B. villainess in a Bond movie and has a sleek new layered cut that looks modern and glamorous."

I guess everyone loses in this beauty contest except for Maureen Dowd. But it's something for the Times to run both a column arguing that it's essentially sexist to write about Hillary Clinton's hair and a column about her hair.

Kevin Eltife, a Republican state senator in Texas who favors higher taxes, already got one glowing profile in the New York Times supplied by the tax-exempt Texas Tribune.

Today the Times carries a column by the executive editor of the Texas Tribune, Ross Ramsey, again singling out Mr. Eltife and other Republicans who want to raise taxes or tolls to fund highway spending. Mr. Ramsey acidly characterizes the Republicans who oppose tax increases as "professional revenue haters."

The easiest way for a Republican to get favorable press coverage in the Times is to come out for higher taxes. It's particularly ironic when the coverage is supplied by a tax-exempt nonprofit news organization.

"Obama Budget Reviving Offer of Compromise With Cuts," is the headline on a Times news article about President Obama's budget.

Mr. Obama proposes to keep increasing government spending, just by less than previously planned, and the Times frames it as "cuts."

The budget reportedly includes large tax increases in addition to the one that went into effect at the beginning in the year. Among the proposals listed in the Times article are an increase in the tobacco tax (which the Times does not mention Mr. Obama has already raised once, and which the Times also doesn't mention violates his pledge not to raise taxes on the non "rich.") Also, "a limit of $3 million on how much people can accumulate in tax-preferred savings accounts" and "limiting to 28 percent the deductions that individuals in higher tax brackets can claim." The Times frames this as an "Offer of Compromise," but others may not see it as much as a compromise, because the Republicans don't want to raise taxes more.

The Times article pretty much frames it the way the Obama administration wants it framed.

A front-page article about Senator Schumer makes mention of "Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, one of the Senate's most unyielding conservatives."

Maybe by New York Times standards Senator Coburn is "unyielding," but by Smartertimes standards, he's a bit of a squish.

His Wikipedia entry reports that he twice voted against funding the war in Iraq and described the war as a mistake. He's called for additional revenues to balance the budget — a euphemism for tax increases — and said of President Obama, "I love the man." He voted to end the filibuster of Senator Hagel's nomination to be defense secretary.

A front-page New York Times article about the group Gun Owners of America erroneously conflates the group and its allied political action committee, the Gun Owners of America, Inc. Political Victory Fund. It may be a fine distinction, but it is one worth preserving for legal reasons, as contributions directly to a candidate from a nonprofit group like Gun Owners of America (as opposed to from its political action committee) are considered not legal, even after the Citizens United decision that supposedly opened the floodgates.

So when the Times writes that Senator Ted Cruz "received donations from the group during his primary campaign" and that "its campaign contributions last year were $119,850," the organization the Times is talking about there is the Gun Owners of America Inc. Political Victory Fund, not Gun Owners of America. The article doesn't even mention the Political Victory Fund, referring only to Gun Owners of America.

A Times editorial about the Supreme Court and gay marriage revisits the arguments over the abortion case Roe v. Wade. Whatever one's view is of the gay marriage cases, the Times account of Roe is a peculiar one. The editorial says:

The real story, as explained by Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times reporter who now teaches at Yale Law School, and Reva Siegel, a professor there, is that political conflict over abortion was escalating before the Roe decision, and that state progress on decriminalization had reached a standstill in the face of opposition from the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1970, a measure legalizing abortion in New York cleared the State Assembly by just a single vote. Only a veto by the state's Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, blocked its partial repeal two years later. Had the Supreme Court waited for the states to move, women in a large portion of the country would still be denied the fundamental right to make their own childbearing decisions.

The claim that the court invited a backlash by getting too far ahead of public opinion does not hold. At the time of the ruling, a Gallup poll showed a substantial majority of Americans favored letting the abortion decision be made "solely by a woman and her physician," with more Republicans than Democrats in favor.

Got that? The Times editorial argues simultaneously that " Had the Supreme Court waited for the states to move, women in a large portion of the country would still be denied the fundamental right to make their own childbearing decisions" and that "At the time of the ruling, a Gallup poll showed a substantial majority of Americans favored letting the abortion decision be made "solely by a woman and her physician."

It may be true that in America the government can deny rights favored by substantial majorities of Americans, either through quirks of districting (perhaps the minorities that oppose abortion rights are concentrated in a few states) or of public choice theory (perhaps those who oppose abortion rights are more passionate about that issue, and thus more influential, than those who favor them). But the editorial would be more convincing if it explained that, because otherwise it sounds like it's arguing something somewhat contradictory, which is both that abortion rights had a strong popular majority at the time of the Roe decision and that without the Roe decision Americans would have been deprived of abortion rights for decades to come.

New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter writes today, "Last year the government spent almost $40 billion on Pell grants, more than twice as much as when President Obama came to office."

Someone should get word of this to Paul Krugman, who wrote on March 29 that America has "slashed the aid that used to make college affordable for children of less-affluent families."

Professor Krugman's credibility is at the level that not even the other left-leaning Times columnists find his account a reliable guide to reality.