A memo signed by four male Times editors reports on new assignments for six correspondents — John Burns, Steve Erlanger, Alissa Rubin, Rod Nordland, Jim Yardley, and Nick Kulish. The only one whose hair or clothing are mentioned are, you guessed it, the woman, Alissa Rubin. At least they didn't mention her beef stroganoff cooking abilities.

New York Times columnist Michael Powell takes a detour in the midst of a column about the debate over "speed cameras" near New York schools to launch into tirade against Orthodox Jews.

There's a long and sorry history of false accusations during Passover (which this is) of Jews killing children. Mr. Powell veers awfully close into that territory. He quotes the mayor blaming two state senators for the deaths of children in traffic, then writes that both senators have a lot of Jews in their districts:

Senator Felder, too, has no use for cameras. He represents a district dominated by Orthodox Jewish voters, and his priority this session was to persuade the city and state to foot the bill to bus any child past 4 p.m., which in effect means mostly children who attend yeshivas. Mr. Felder and Mr. Golden succeeded in pushing through this legislation, which will cost the city $5.6 million this year.

As the state senators are not unreasonable men, they even offered to bargain: they might allow speed cameras if Mr. Bloomberg agreed to foot the bill for this busing program.

The mayor said no. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said no. But when his state budget emerged from behind closed doors in Albany it included this new and costly busing program.

The Orthodox, who are adroit at pulling the levers of power, and their political allies claim all children could benefit. But that argument is evidence-starved. The state paid for a pilot program this year, and city school buses have picked up 1,000 children — from 29 yeshivas and one charter school.

If anything is "evidence-starved," it's Mr. Powell's claim that the Orthodox "are adroit at pulling the levers of power." School vouchers? The Orthodox want them, and New York doesn't have them. Gay marriage? The Orthodox oppose it, and New York has it.

If it were any other minority group that the city was offering to bus to school but not bring home from school, the Times and liberals like Mr. Powell would be up in arms. How are the students supposed to get home? Hitchhike? Already they are paying for their own tuition while their tax dollars are being used to subsidize government-run schools they do not use. The government does not pay even for their education in secular subjects such as math or reading and writing English. No, the yeshiva parents are supposed to pay taxes without complaining to a state whose spending on government schools is among the nation's highest, while also paying tuition. And when they ask merely for their children to get a bus ride home the same way that other students do, the Times responds with a column accusing them of being responsible for the deaths of elderly and child pedestrians? Come on.

I have no experience with the speed cameras that Mr. Powell and the mayor defend, but I have gotten a ticket or two from the "red light' cameras that the column does also defend, and I can attest that, at least on the West Side Highway, they are a total racket. As the American Automobile Association of New York has written, those particular red-light cameras are ticket mills based on a yellow-light time that is half the time recommended by traffic engineers. The only way to avoid running red lights on that road (and getting a camera-generated ticket) is to slam hard on the brakes the moment a yellow light appears, even if you are already halfway through the intersection, risking getting rear-ended by the car behind you. To further complicate the problem, during rush hour the city deploys traffic police to wave drivers manually through the red lights at crowded intersections, encouraging drivers to ignore the very red lights that they will be ticketed for running once the traffic clears up. The entire scheme has nothing to do with traffic safety; it's about generating revenue for the city. Maybe Mr. Powell should write a column about that.

The next thing you know the Times will be claiming the American Automobile Association of New York is being manipulated by Orthodox Jews who want pedestrians to be killed by cars. Come on. If there's any constituency in the city that's concerned about pedestrian safety, it's Orthodox Jews — for at least one day a week, the Sabbath, plus quite a few other holidays, they are religiously prohibited from riding in cars or on public transportation, and they have to walk. The idea that they are more blameworthy than other groups for pedestrian casualties in New York is just bizarre.

A Times editorial bemoans a 79-20 Senate vote to repeal the ObamaCare tax on medical devices.

The editorial says "the money is crucial to providing health coverage to the uninsured." Then it goes on to say that Senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats "say they would support an actual repeal of the tax if another tax could be found to replace it. That could save the tax, because Republicans aren't interested in raising another tax, and the Obama administration already has its eye on potential replacement taxes for other, more important purposes, like investments in education and infrastructure."

It sure sounds like the editorialists are saying that "investments in education and infrastructure" are "more important purposes" than "providing health coverage to the uninsured." If that is indeed their point of view, you'd think maybe they would have shared it with Times readers in the course of all those editorials during the debate over ObamaCare. They might have saved a lot of trouble.

The editorial makes an assertion about the motives of the 79 senators who voted to repeal the tax, asserting that they (including Ms. Warren and Senator Franken of Minnesota) have been bought by the medical device industry and its lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions: "as long as the industry is willing to open its checkbook, it will always find lawmakers willing to do its bidding."

There's no consideration of the possibility that the tax might actually prove counterproductive, making medical care more expensive instead of more affordable, or of the possibility that the senators might have been swayed by the merits of the issue rather than by money.

An front-page Times article about a London neighborhood in which many homes are owned by wealthy foreign buyers who live elsewhere for much of the year includes X sources. They are:

1. "Alistair Boscawen, a local real estate agent"
2. "A Belgravia resident from Columbia... [who] asked that her name not be used because, she said, she was scared of the Russians on the corner."
3. "Paul Dimoldenberg, leader of the Labour opposition in Westminster Council."
4. "The salesclerk at a Belgravia clothing boutique, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because she did not want to get in trouble."
5. Naomi Heaton, chief executive of London Central Portfolio
6. Yolande Barnes of Savills
7. "An American who lived for 20 years in a multimillion-dollar apartment in Belgrave Place and who did not want her name used for fear of alienating her old neighbors."

Seven sources, three of them anonymous.

This isn't an article about some National Security Agency wiretapping program. It's a feature about some wealthy London neighborhood. If some salesclerk or neighborhood resident doesn't want to be quoted by name, can't the reporter find one who will, or just leave the anonymous source out of the article?

The Times written policy on the use of anonymous sources states:

In routine interviewing – that is, most of the interviewing we do – anonymity must not be automatic or an assumed condition. In that kind of reporting, anonymity should not be offered to a source. Exceptions will occur in the reporting of highly sensitive stories, when it is we who have sought out a source who may face legal jeopardy or loss of livelihood for speaking with us…. We will not use anonymous sourcing when sources we can name are readily available…We do not grant anonymity to people who are engaged in speculation, unless the very act of speculating is newsworthy and can be clearly labeled for what it is.... Anonymity should not be invoked for a trivial comment.

This neighborhood profile doesn't seem to meet the test of being a "highly sensitive" story, nor do the three anonymous sources seem to face loss of livelihood or legal jeopardy. Named sources are readily available, and the comments in some of the cases are either speculative (but non-newsworthy, e.g., "I think they spend most of their time in Palm Beach,") or trivial, (e.g., "I was kind of excited when a Russian family moved in across the street.") So the article seems to violate the Times written policy on anonymous sources in multiple ways.

A "Khartoum Journal" article by Isma'il Kushkush reports on an archaeology dig in Sudan. The article claims, "At the height of its military power around 750 B.C., the ancient kingdom of Kush in northern Sudan ruled over Egypt and Palestine, inaugurating what historians call the rule of the 25th dynasty and the black pharaohs."

It's a bit of an anachronism, not to mention confusingly imprecise, to see the Times use the word "Palestine" to refer to the land of Israel in this period.

Paul Krugman's column today is about California. He writes:

I'm not suggesting everything in California is just fine. Unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains very high. California's longer-term economic growth has slowed, too, mainly because the state's limited supply of buildable land means high housing prices, bringing an era of rapid population growth to an end. (Did you know that metropolitan Los Angeles has a higher population density than metropolitan New York?) Last but not least, decades of political paralysis have degraded the state's once-superb public education system. So there are plenty of problems.

The point, however, is that these problems bear no resemblance to the death-by-liberalism story line the California-bashers keep peddling. California isn't a state in which liberals have run wild; it's a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.

Hmmm. Why is it that California, the third-largest state by land area, has a "limited supply of buildable land"? Could it be that that same "liberal majority" that Professor Krugman insists is "hamstrung" has imposed so many environmental and other restrictions on builders? Thomas Sowell relates the story of a San Mateo, Calif., housing development whose approval was contingent on the builders turning over to local authorities 12 acres for a park, contributing $350,000 for public art, and selling about 15% of the homes below their market value. Between the California Coastal Commission and ordinances that protect ridge lines and live oaks, buildable land is limited. One may debate the merits of these policies. I'm not saying they should all be repealed and all of California should be paved over and turned into high-rise apartment buildings. But it's just out of touch for Professor Krugman to claim, as he does, that liberal policies have nothing to do with high housing prices in California.

Likewise, the cities of Santa Monica and San Francisco, California both suffer from the effects of rent control laws that limit rent increases. Intended to make housing more affordable, these laws wind up making it more expensive overall, in part by encouraging people to stay in rental apartments that are larger than they would otherwise pay for. As recently as his 2007 book Conscience of a Liberal, Professor Krugman conceded that Milton Friedman had "considerable justification" for describing rent control as "evil." Yet when it comes to "high housing prices" in California, Professor Krugman apparently doesn't find the left-wing policy of rent control worthy of mention, because it undermines his tale of a liberal majority "hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority."

The Saturday New York Times has a column by Charles M. Blow about the supposed lack of diversity in the Republican Party. He writes:The question must be asked:

Why do so many insensitive comments come from these Republicans?

One reason may well be their proximity problem.

Too many House Republican districts are isolated in naturally homogeneous areas or gerrymandered ghettos, so elected officials there rarely hear — or see — the great and growing diversity of this country and the infusion of energy and ideas and art with which it enriches us.

Mr. Blow may have a point about homogenous districts, but his column makes no mention of one cause of such districts, which is that similarly homogenous districts were created to provide same electoral bases for urban minority candidates with the strong support of the Democratic Party.

He goes on:

With the exception of a few districts, a map of the areas in this country with the fewest minorities looks strikingly similar to a map of the areas from which Congressional Republicans hail.

Yet in fact those maps don't look particularly similar at all. New England, for example, has few minorities according to the map, but also sends few Republicans to Congress. Parts of Alaska have lots of minorities (probably Native Americans), but are represented by Republicans.

He writes, "although this is the most diverse Congress in history, not one of the blacks or Asians in the House is a Republican…The Republican Party has a severe minority problem." The column focuses on the House, but it doesn't mention the Senate. Maybe that's because there the Republicans have twice as many Hispanics (Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) as do the Democrats (Bob Menendez). Or maybe it is because in the Senate the Republicans have exactly as many blacks (Tim Scott) as do the Democrats (Mo Cowan). Maybe it's the Democrats who have a "severe minority problem."

David Stockman has an article in the Sunday Times with a provocative and not entirely wrong analysis of America's problems followed by a strange suggestion for a solution. He writes:

All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.

It seems to me that the Constitution has created, in America, one of the most free and successful countries the world has ever known, and that shredding it as Mr. Stockman proposes is a reckless remedy. Some of our most successful presidents, such as Washington and Lincoln, were re-elected. The re-election can provide an incentive for presidents to do the right thing. Had President Clinton not been facing re-election, for example, it's unlikely that he would have signed welfare reform, which was one of his greatest accomplishments. The problem in Washington now isn't that politicians have too much accountability to the people through too frequent elections or too much worry about re-election; it's that they have not enough accountability. How would Mr. Stockman enforce his proposal "strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks)"? If a person who might eventually run for office is caught publicly criticizing an incumbent politician, or criticizing the government, does that count as campaigning? What is the punishment? Limiting the length of campaigns might only further empower those non-campaign organizations that have large lists of members and that operate permanently in a way that Mr. Stockman seems to find unhelpful, such as the AFL-CIO or Americans for Tax Reform. And while revolving-door lobbyists are a problem, Mr. Stockman's cure would shred the First Amendment's rights of petition and of speech. As he frames it, it sounds like anyone who was drafted and served in Vietnam, or who worked on a summer crew during college maintaining trails for the National Park Service, would be prevented from 20 or 30 years later petitioning Congress on some entirely unrelated issue, such as appropriations to fight AIDS in Africa.

What he's proposing is "sweeping," for sure, but it isn't constitutional "surgery," it's constitutional arson.

Paul Krugman writes in his Times column:

You don't have to be a civil engineer to realize that America needs more and better infrastructure, but the latest "report card" from the American Society of Civil Engineers — with its tally of deficient dams, bridges, and more, and its overall grade of D+ — still makes startling and depressing reading. And right now — with vast numbers of unemployed construction workers and vast amounts of cash sitting idle — would be a great time to rebuild our infrastructure. Yet public investment has actually plunged since the slump began.

Or what about investing in our young? We're cutting back there, too, having laid off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and slashed the aid that used to make college affordable for children of less-affluent families.

Yet as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has written elsewhere (including here in the New York Times), not all infrastructure investment makes sense. In the 1980s, Detroit used federal aid to build a futuristic People Mover, which, as Professor Glaeser puts it, "now glides quietly over essentially empty streets" in a failed city. The civil engineers aren't exactly a neutral party — more construction spending means more work and money for them. And why is it that with all those traffic slowdowns alongside orange "This Project Funded by the Recovery Act" signs, the infrastructure is still supposedly in such bad shape?

As for the supposed teacher layoffs, the graph of local government education employees to which Professor Krugman links shows an enormous climb, from about 2 million in 1960 to about 8 million in 2010, followed by a tiny dip. Did the population of American schoolchildren quadruple during this period? Did educational quality quadruple? Did test scores quadruple? The graph doesn't show any layoffs. The decline in employment in the past year or two may have been the result of voluntary retirements, or of layoffs of local government education employees other than teachers — for example, bureaucrats. And as E.J. McMahon writes, "relative to pupil enrollment, local school employment remains higher than it was in 2000, the peak of the nation's last sustained economic expansion. (Specifically, as of July 2000, there were 130 local government education employees per 1,000 pupils enrolled in the fall of 2000. As of July 2012, local government education employment came to 132 workers per 1,000 pupils in projected fall enrollment.)"

As for the supposed slashing of "the aid that used to make college affordable for children of less-affluent families," the real problem in college affordability isn't the result of any cutbacks in aid. In fact, under President Obama spending on Pell Grants reportedly more than doubled, to $40 billion in 2012 from $16 billion in 2008. If anything is making college less affordable, it isn't reductions in aid, but rather the soaring salaries and benefits for professors like Mr. Krugman and his colleagues at Princeton and other elite universities, who, like Mr. Krugman, often busy themselves with outside work (writing for the New York Times) in addition to their jobs educating students at the colleges. On top of that comes the cost of hiring university employees to comply with the ever-growing list of regulations (mandated mental health and contraceptive services, environmental and disabilities) that Professor Krugman's allies on the left heap upon the colleges.

Comparing two front-page articles in today's New York Times shows the paper applies a double standard when it comes to evaluating costs that might be passed along to consumers.

In one article, about deaths of honeybees, the Times reports, "Bee shortages pushed the cost to farmers of renting bees to $200 per hive at times, 20 percent above normal. That, too, may translate into higher prices for food." In this article, an increase in the cost to a producer of an input (renting a beehive) gets passed along to consumers in the form of "higher prices for food." The article doesn't assume that the cost just comes out of the farmer's (presumably vast) profits, nor does it consider that in the overall cost of operating a farm, including such things as labor, equipment, fertilizer, water, energy, and farmland, the cost of renting a beehive is a relatively small piece of the picture.

In the second article, about a deal reached in the New York City Council to require businesses in the city with at least 15 employees to provide full-time workers with at least five paid sick days a year, there's no mention or consideration at all of the possibility that the cost of this benefit would "translate into higher prices" for the customers of the businesses subject to the new law.

In other words, cost increases imposed by the allegedly devastating effects of corporate-produced pesticides on the bee population "translate into higher prices for food," yet cost increases on restaurants or retailers imposed by New York City Council Members under the sway of what even the Times calls "a raw display of political muscle by a coalition of labor unions and liberal activists" magically have no such effect.

The phrase "No Regrets" in a Times headline is usually code for "The Opinion of the Times Editors Is That The Person Claiming They Have No Regrets Darned Well Should Have Some Regrets." A classic example is "Tony Blair on Iraq: 'No Regrets.'"

The latest target of this practice is (surprise!) a Republican candidate for mayor of New York, Joseph Lhota, who gets the treatment today on page one of the Times in a headline that reads, "For Mayoral Hopeful Who Lost Fight to Remove Art, No Regrets." The article discusses Mr. Lhota's effort during the Giuliani administration to prevent a Brooklyn Museum exhibit of a dung-smeared, pornography-decorated image of Mary. The article draws an unfavorable comparison between Mr. Lhota and Mayor Bloomberg:

Now, as Mr. Lhota promotes himself as a moderate Republican candidate for mayor of New York with urban sensibilities that the national party lacks, his handling of the episode stands out as a deeply discordant moment, raising questions about how he would operate in a diverse city whose current mayor champions unpleasant speech from every quarter.

The claim that Mayor Bloomberg "champions unpleasant speech from every quarter" is inaccurate. This is the same mayor who sent police forcibly to clear the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters out of a plaza in Lower Manhattan, the same one who is trying to prevent retail stores from displaying tobacco products in what the stores argue is a restriction of their commercial speech rights (the ban applies to the display, not the sale, so how exactly is it different from Mr. Lhota's effort to prevent the display of the artwork at the Brooklyn museum?).

A summary on the Times Web site of the article about Mr. Lhota describes the Brooklyn Museum conflict as "one episode in a continuing battle over free speech." The article itself gives a less one-sided description than the summary, describing it as a "showdown over free speech, respect for religion, and public financing of the arts."

In the middle of a three-star New York Times review of the dining room at the Modern (which, truth be told, is one of your editor's favorite restaurants in that part of Midtown Manhattan) comes this strange passage:

you also notice just how many women there are in the front of the house, along with others who don't look like men of European descent. It is a pleasure to see this kind of diversity at the higher altitudes of New York dining, where it is still not the rule.

What a pleasure it is to be waited on at a restaurant by someone who doesn't look like a man of European descent?

Of all the possible criteria by which to judge a restaurant, the skin color of the waitstaff never before really struck me as big determining factor.

Imagine the conversation in the home of some Times reader:

"Honey, where should we go for dinner tonight?"

"How about the Modern? The waitstaff there are so pleasantly swarthy."

If there's racial or sex discrimination in hiring waitstaff at Manhattan restaurants, the Times should do a reported article on it. I'm against such discrimination. But offering critical praise of a restaurant for having non-male, non-European-descent-appearing waiters seems sort of like its own form of racial or sex discrimination. And what does a man "of European descent" look like, anyway. How do you tell someone who looks like a man of European descent from someone who looks like a man of American descent? What about those of us whose families started out in the Middle East and then went to Europe and then came to America? What about deeply tanned Southern Europeans, or blacks who are citizens of Great Britain or of France? Turks?

Do Times critics really want to get into the game of awarding stars to restaurants based on the "pleasure" customers may derive from the racial composition or apparent national origin of the waitstaff?

In my view the more important qualities in a restaurant are how the food tastes and whether the people who work there are efficient and personable. It's not entirely surprising to see the restaurant review column dabbling in racial politics—one recent Times restaurant critic became the national news editor—but it's disappointing.

Paul Krugman has a column declaring that "Right now, the bad old days when it wasn't that easy to move lots of money across borders are looking pretty good."

"Unrestricted movement of capital is looking more and more like a failed experiment," he writes, warning of how foreign money can feed a bubble and then lead to a "nasty hangover" after the bubble bursts.

Professor Krugman may want to be a little more aware of his own situation; according to the latest proxy statement from the New York Times Company, 17% of that firm's outstanding Class A stock is owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu, and an additional 7.8% is owned by Contrarius Investment Management Limited, which is based in Jersey in the Channel Islands.

Failed experiment, indeed.

The Times Business section features a long article about a health insurance company that has opened a health clinic staffed by "two full-time doctors and eight 'health coaches,' who serve as liaisons between patient and doctor." The insurance company says this approach "will save money."

If this were a publicly traded for-profit company doing this, you might expect some highly skeptical treatment from the Times. What's the training of these "health coaches"? Has there been any research on quality of care or outcomes that compares patients who communicate directly with doctors versus those who deal with "health coaches"?

Yet this clinic is run by The Freelancers Union, a darling of foundation funders and the press alike, so instead of hostile or even skeptical press coverage, the article is pretty much a valentine.

Imagine if the New York Times Company tried to get 80% of the care now delivered to its employees by doctors to be delivered by "health coaches" with far less professional training. The employees would probably be livid.

I'm not saying there's no room in the health-care delivery system for nurses or other non-M.D. professionals. Some patients may prefer such care if it comes with a lower price tag attached, or even if it comes at the same price tag but with less arrogance that you can sometimes get from a medical doctor. This particular Times article is an overview of The Freelancers Union, not an in-depth look at the use of "health coaches" to substitute for medical doctors. But even with all those caveats, that passage of the article could use some more skepticism.

The New York Times Magazine has an article blaming "inequality" for what it says is a lack of progress in improving life expectancy in America. As the article puts it, "But life expectancy measures only gains that refer to a whole population, and in the United States, rising inequality has become a drag on this most basic measure of human progress."

It's not clear what "rising inequality" the author of the article is talking about. Certainly women and racial minorities are more equal before the law in America today than they have been in most of the country's history. As usual, the Times doesn't bother to link to any academic research on the subject. It mentions one assistant professor, Justin Denney of Rice University, and says "he told me that other studies have shown that wealthy, well-educated smokers outlive poorer, less-educated smokers, even if you control for the amount of tobacco consumed."

I looked up one of Professor Denney's articles on "Socioeconomic Disparities in Health Behaviors." The link is here (the Times typically doesn't give such links, preferring to tell readers what to think instead of letting readers think for themselves). You'd be much better off reading the Denney article than reading the article in the Times, because the Denney article gets into all kinds of subtleties that the Times article ignores. For example, it explores the possibility that rather than the inequality causing the health disparities, the health disparities may cause the inequality, or some underlying problem may cause both the inequality and the health disparity. It observes that some unhealthy behaviors, like tobacco consumption, cost considerable money. And it reports that high-status groups once had higher rates of tobacco use, cocaine use, and cholesterol.