An otherwise wonderful piece about a new exhibit at the Tenement Museum by one of the writers whose bylines I most look forward to in the Times, Edward Rothstein (really!), is marred by the following passage:

There may always be some resentments of newcomers. But the passionate contemporary debates are not about immigration but about how to deal with large-scale violations of immigration law that dwarf earlier examples. As for legal immigration, since 2000 both the number of immigrants admitted to the United States and the number naturalized are stunningly greater than during any other period. The country is not wary of immigrants; it is welcoming them at an astonishing rate.

I agree that America welcomes immigrants (as it should). But Mr. Rothstein needs to look no farther than the op-ed page of his own newspaper to find passionate contemporary debates not about illegal immigration but about legal immigration policy; today's Times features an anti-immigration screed fretting about a bill that the Times op-ed contributor warns would "flood the job market with indentured foreign workers," and "damage the employment prospects of hundreds of thousands of skilled Americans."

What's more, Mr. Rothstein's statistics arguing that America in the past ten years is at some kind of "stunningly high" peak of immigration are highly misleading. In fact census data show that the number of foreign-born Americans peaked in 1890 at 14.8%; the levels in 1910 of 14.7% and 1870 of 14.4% are all higher than the 13% that was the level in 2010. In other words, while the absolute numbers of immigrants in the past decade have been high, the overall population of America is much greater than it was in the past, so as a percentage, the immigration levels aren't particularly high. Mr. Rothstein might have also pointed out that the number of immigrants deported from the United States are also at record highs, (as Robert Morgenthau has written), but that undermines his claim that the country is not wary of immigrants.

Even on an annual nominal basis, not as a percentage basis, the number of immigrants we are letting in nowadays isn't particularly impressive, at least not enough to justify Mr. Rothstein's self-congratulation about how welcoming America is. The statistics he links to in his article report that America welcomed 1.266 million new legal residents in 2006, the recent high point. That's lower than the 1.8 million who arrived in 1991 and lower than the 1.285 million who came in 1907. There are a lot more who would like to come but who were turned away or are languishing on waiting lists, which is something the Times and its critic may want to consider the next time they characterize this country as so welcoming rather than wary when it comes to immigration.

So let's get this straight: The fact that there are anonymous donors to groups opposing Senator Chuck Hagel's nomination as secretary of defense is such an outrage, by the Times' lights, that it merits not only a front-page Sunday news article with a headline about "secret donors" but also a snide blog post about "anonymously financed" groups. Yet when it comes to Mr. Hagel himself receiving money from organizations and companies that have secret donors or funding sources — perhaps even foreign governments — the Times does't even run a word about it in the newspaper, even when 26 senators from Mr. Hagel's own Republican Party write a letter expressing concern about the matter, and when, the Washington Free Beacon's Adam Kredo reports, concerns about that issue have delayed a Senate committee vote on Mr. Hagel's confirmation, and may generate a "hold" on the nomination by senators that could block the nomination indefinitely.

In other words, by the Times' double standard, it's newsworthy when secret donors fund advertising against an Obama nominee, but not when they fund the actual nominee. It looks more and more like what the Times has a problem with isn't secret donors, but conservative Republicans. Or that the Times just wants Mr. Hagel confirmed, and is going to do everything possible to smear his opponents while giving Mr. Hagel himself a free ride.

A Times editorial cheers the Post Office's plan to eliminate Saturday delivery, calling the decision wise because the public is "increasingly reliant on Internet communication." The editorial calls the move "a no-brainer in modern life" (a phrase that means even someone without a brain would favor it, not that only someone without a brain would favor it). And the editorial suggests approvingly that it's an example of government being run like a private business.

But wait — the Post Office's private competitor, Federal Express, provides Saturday delivery (for an extra fee). And if eliminating Saturday delivery in the age of Internet communication is so wise, what are the implications of that for the future of print delivery of the Saturday New York Times? The Times company hasn't yet eliminated that and replaced it with an electronic edition.

The Times has a new effort this morning in the comedy of errors that has characterized its attempt to cover the Boy Scouts of America (for earlier coverage, see here). Today's article, about a decision by the Scouts to delay a decision on gay participation, carries the following online correction: "Correction: February 6, 2013 An earlier version of this article misstated the color of the uniform worn by Boy Scouts. It is tan, not green."

This correction is inaccurate and itself needs a correction. As the photo that runs with the article clearly shows, the Boy Scout uniform consists of a tan shirt and green (or olive-green) pants or shorts. The correction misstates the color of the uniform. I don't think this is a case of ideological bias by the Times against the Boy Scouts because of their policies on gays or atheists. In other words, they aren't sitting around thinking, "Those Boy Scouts won't let in gays, so let's show them by misstating the color of their uniforms." I do think it's a case of Times incompetence, made possible in part by the cultural distance between the Times newsroom and the Boy Scouts. If more Times editors and reporters had been Boy Scouts or had children who are, they might know what color the uniform is.

The Times' ignorance about Brooklyn geography is one of the things that has exasperated me about the paper going back to when I first started writing Smartertimes nearly 13 years ago (examples from then are here, here, and here).

The latest example is a headline over an article in today's paper: "Vote This Week May Close a North Brooklyn Hospital."

The article is about Long Island College Hospital, which is in what the Times consistently describes as "the gentrifying Cobble Hill neighborhood."

Anyone familiar with Brooklyn knows that "North Brooklyn" is Williamsburg and Greenpoint, while "South Brooklyn" includes Cobble Hill. One could consult the book The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn, or even Wikipedia, for confirmation.

Is it too much to ask for some editor at the Times who saw this headline to understand this? Or do they all live on the Upper West Side or in Montclair, New Jersey? Whatever the reason, readers who live in Brooklyn and who are therefore interested in whether the hospital will close will recognize that the Times got the headline wrong (and also, for that matter, that Cobble Hill isn't "gentrifying," it's gentrified.

Smartertimes observed the other day, in writing about the Times coverage of the Boy Scouts, that "there are some topics that are so culturally foreign to the Times newsroom that the paper is almost bound to err in covering them."

Orthodox Judaism is right up there with the Boy Scouts on that list of topics. The latest example comes in an article about an eruv in Westhampton Beach. An eruv is a ritual boundary that permits carrying on the sabbath within its limits. The Times article, early on, describes 68-year-old Eugene Milanaik as "stashing a backpack filled with his Sabbath essentials — two prayer books, a prayer shawl, and phylacteries — in a plastic bin at the Hampton Synagogue, so he would not need to carry them on the Sabbath."

Any Orthodox or even reasonably observant Conservative Jew reading this article stops right there and throws down the paper in a combination of disgust and exasperation. Phylacteries — a fancy word for what most Jews who wear them call tefillin — are black leather boxes attached to black leather straps, with little biblical texts inside the boxes that are strapped to the arm and head of a Jew during morning prayer. But they aren't used on the Sabbath, just on the weekdays. Phylacteries aren't "Sabbath essentials" for Jews any more than pork chops are. Maybe Mr. Milanaik was planning to use the phylacteries on Sunday morning. Or maybe he had something else in his backpack that the Times reporter mistakenly identified as phylacteries. But, again, as in the case of whether Boy Scouts have "chapters," this is the sort of reference that an editor or reporter unfamiliar with the topic, whether it is tefillin or Boy Scouts, could easily screw up, but that one familiar with them would be unlikely to screw up.

"A Million Jobs at Stake" is the headline on a Times editorial that opposes cuts in government spending and proposes tax increases as an alternative. The editorial says:

the coming job losses could be sharply reduced if half or more of the spending cuts were replaced by revenue increases, as President Obama and Congressional Democrats have demanded. That would lower the amount of spending pulled out of the economy to bring down the deficit, replacing the cuts with taxes from the rich or companies with high cash reserves that are less likely to spend it.

The money could be raised by eliminating tax loopholes for energy companies, hedge fund managers and other high-end recipients of federal largess, but Republicans won't even consider the idea…. Americans are about to find out what happens when an entire political party demands deficit reduction at all costs, because those costs will be enormous.

Got that? The Times claims that a $41 billion tax increase in 2013 (on top of the tax increase that was already put through, which amounts to more than $1 trillion over 10 years if you include the expiration of the payroll tax break) would "lower the amount of spending pulled out of the economy to bring down the deficit."

This makes no sense, notwithstanding the Times claim that the money would come "from the rich or companies with high cash reserves that are less likely to spend it." Does the Times consider the rich and companies with high cash reserves to be somehow not part of the economy, while the government is part of the economy?

If the Times is really against "deficit reduction at all costs," the editorialists should favor keeping both government spending and taxation at current levels. But the editorial seems to support deficit reduction; it just wants to pursue that goal via tax increases rather than spending reductions, or, at least, by a formula that includes more in the way of tax increases, and less in the way of spending reductions. The Times' argument (to the extent there is one) is that the government will "spend" the money but the rich or companies with high cash reserves won't spend it, and that the result of the government spending will be more jobs. But there's not a lot of evidence for that theory, or, if there is, it's certainly not cited by the Times in the editorial. Plenty of rich individuals use their money by investing it in ways that create jobs, and companies do, too. The higher taxes on energy companies that the Times recommends could mean fewer energy-industry jobs. The basic Times assumption is that politicians in Washington will spend money more wisely than will the individuals who have the money now, whose taxes the Times wants to raise. It's nice to see the Times weighing in against the defense cuts, I suppose, but it's not a particularly strong case.

Paul Krugman's column, under the headline "Friends of Fraud," faults Republicans for trying to rein in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau established by the Dodd-Frank banking regulation law. Writes Professor Krugman:

There was, however, one piece of the reform that was a shining example of how to do it right: the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a stand-alone agency with its own funding, charged with protecting consumers against financial fraud and abuse.

What Republicans are demanding, basically, is that the protection bureau lose its independence…. they also want to take away its guaranteed funding, opening it to interest-group pressure.

Imagine how Professor Krugman, or congressional Democrats, would react if Republicans tried to make the Air Force, including nuclear-armed bombers and missiles, into an "independent" agency with "guaranteed funding" to make it immune to pressure from interest groups, including, say, the peace or disarmament lobby. They'd probably, with good reason, object, pointing out that, under the Constitution, America doesn't have government agencies that are independent, stand-alone, or that have guaranteed funding. Instead our government is accountable to elected representatives, as part of the executive branch (subsidiary to the president), and funded by the Congress, whose members are elected by the people. Another word for what Professor Krugman describes as "interest-group pressure" is democracy.

The Heritage Foundation calls the CFPB: "perhaps the least accountable entity in the federal government. Formally part of the Federal Reserve, it is outside the Executive Branch, leaving it beyond presidential supervision. It is funded through revenues from the Federal Reserve, meaning it is outside the power of congressional appropriators. At the same time, however, the Federal Reserve itself is barred from interfering with the activities of the CFPB. This structure defies all concepts of accountability and oversight, as well as the constitutional principles of separation of powers."

George Will calls it, "Untethered from all three branches of government, unlike anything created since 1789… By creating a CFPB that floats above the Constitution's tripartite design of government, Congress did not merely degrade itself, it injured all Americans."

Whether a court will strike down this scheme as unconstitutional is an open question, but if members of Congress want to use what leverage they have to revise it, they should be cheered rather than insulted. If anyone here is a "Friend of Fraud," it's not the Republicans trying to reverse this mistake, but Professor Krugman, for setting up an unaccountable, self-funding agency is an invitation to fraud if there ever was one.

The Sunday Times carries a long front-page article about a young man, Richard Fee, who committed suicide.

The article claims: "Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers."

But the article contains no evidence or proof of this claim that "growing numbers of teenagers and young adults" have faked symptoms. It's a claim that would be hard to prove, because you'd have to rely on someone self-reporting that they lied, and anyone who admits that they lied is someone whose testimony might well be considered not 100% reliable.

The article goes on to blame Fee's doctor and the drug manufacturer for his suicide. Fee himself, and his parents, don't get blamed or scrutinized much at all.

It all seems an oversimplification, or a search for a convenient scapegoat.

Surely there's room for critical reporting on psychiatry and psychoactive drugs. And there are some caveats down toward the very end of the article about how mental health "experts" "cautioned that Richard Fee's experience is instructive less in its ending than its evolution."

Still, the overall gist of the article ends up as "don't let your kid's doctor prescribe him drugs for A.D.H.D., he'll end up committing suicide."

That's unsupported by the data overall. The article reports that "prescriptions to young adults for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder more than doubled in four years," from 2007 to 2011. What the article does not point out is that the suicide rate over the same period didn't increase by anything approaching that level (it went from 11.5 per 100,000 in 2007 to 12.4 in 2010, the most recent year available, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention). An earlier Times article attributed that rise in the suicide rate not to increased treatment for A.D.H.D. but rather to the economic downturn.

A report in the Times about new nutrition rules issued by the Department of Agriculture for snacks in schools is flawed in at least two respects.

First, the online version of the Times article contains no hyperllink to the actual rules. That's just lame. Reports on the same topic by National Public Radio (here) and the Washington Post (here) both carried links to the rules. In 2013, with the Internet in existence, readers who want to learn more about a topic should be able to click and access a primary source document rather than relying on a reporter's summary.

In the case of New York Times readers, access to the primary document would be particularly useful, because the summary provided by the Times reporter is inaccurate. The Times article claims inaccurately that the new guidelines "set minimum requirements for calories and fats allowed." In fact they set maximums, not minimums, for both calories and fats.

David Brooks has a column on immigration. As a grandson of an immigrant myself, I'm in essentially full agreement with him that immigration is a source of strength for America and should be encouraged. A passage in the article, however, is suspect. He writes:

Immigrants, both legal and illegal, do not drain the federal budget. It's true that states and localities have to spend money to educate them when they are children, but, over the course of their lives, they pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.

This is the same David Brooks who was telling us in another column published exactly a month ago that "The average Medicare couple pays $109,000 into the program and gets $343,000 in benefits out, according to the Urban Institute. This is $234,000 in free money."

It seems to me to be difficult verging on impossible for Mr. Brooks to hold both these beliefs simultaneously with any semblance of logical consistency. In one column he claims that immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. In the other column he claims that the "average Medicare couple" gets $243,000 more in benefits than they pay in taxes. At least with the Medicare "free money" claim Mr. Brooks cites the source, the Urban Institute. That's more than can be said for his claim in the immigration column, which is unattributed.

If the immigration column claim is accurate, it may be in part because so many immigrants to America are illegal and do work paid "under the table" or "off the books" on which no Medicare tax is collected. They also don't receive Medicare benefits. An immigration reform along the lines advocated by Mr. Brooks might change matters so that immigrants become more like the budget-draining "average Medicare couple" that Mr. Brooks wrote about in the earlier column. That, in turn, would undermine the "immigrants … do not drain the federal budget" argument for immigration.

If the difference in government-benefit consumption between immigrants and non-immigrants is as dramatic as Mr. Brooks would have us believe, and if the difference isn't simply a result of illegal immigrants not getting Social Security or Medicare benefits, it would make for a good follow up column. Maybe we could cure the entitlement problem and the federal deficit just by having natural-born Americans consume government benefits at the more moderate levels of immigrants rather than at the "$234,000 in free money" levels described by Mr. Brooks (though, as I wrote earlier, the "$234,000 in free money" claim has its own problems).

A front-page New York Times article reports on "disappointing data" showing "surprisingly weak numbers" for GDP growth in the United States for the fourth quarter of 2012.

This is one of those areas where the Times is willing not only to tell you what the news is — but how you are supposed to feel about it, surprised and disappointed. Presumably there are at least a few people out there who were not surprised by the GDP number. And maybe there are people out there who are invested countercyclically who are rooting for slow growth.

The opinion and framing slips into the article even beyond the adjectives and adverbs, however. The article begins, "The federal government helped bring the economic recovery to a virtual halt late last year as cuts in military spending and other factors overwhelmed the Federal Reserve's expanded campaign to stimulate growth."

That assumes that what the Federal Reserve has been doing has been expansionary. But that's an opinion, not a fact. There are economists out there who disagree, like David Malpass, a former Reagan administration Treasury official, who wrote earlier this week to Encima Global clients: "We think Fed policy is contractionary because the Fed is manipulating the price of credit, causing a departure from market-based capital allocation. The result is a credit rationing process that channels credit to the government and bigger corporations at the expense of small business job creators and the weak formation of new businesses."

John Taylor, a Stanford University economics professor and former Treasury official, had an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this week making a somewhat similar argument. It ran under the headline "John Taylor: Fed Policy Is a Drag on the Economy."

I'm not saying Mr. Malpass and Mr. Taylor are necessarily correct. But it's a disputed issue, and the Times news article would give a more complete picture if it acknowledged the dispute rather than just ignoring it by taking the Fed's side.

In assessing the fiscal (as opposed to the monetary) sources of the negative growth, the Times article dwells on spending cuts and payroll tax increases. From the Times:

Disappointing data released Wednesday underscore how tighter fiscal policy may continue to weigh on growth in the future as government spending, which increased steadily in recent decades and expanded hugely during the recession, plays a diminished role in the United States economy.

Significant federal spending cuts are scheduled to take effect March 1, and most Americans are also now paying higher payroll taxes with the expiration of a temporary cut in early January.

…Alan Krueger, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a blog post that "a likely explanation" for the plunge in military spending was concern among contractors about the automatic spending cuts, which were set to take effect on Jan. 1 but were rescheduled for March 1. The decline in federal spending follows an earlier drop in state and local spending, which fell by 3.4 percent in 2011 and 1.3 percent in 2012.

The compromise between President Obama and Congress earlier this month allowed a temporary cut in Social Security taxes to expire, which is also expected to crimp growth in the first quarter. The change will cost a worker earning $50,000 a year an extra $1,000 annually.

To read the Times, it's as if the only tax that went up was the payroll tax. Not a word about how the Fourth Quarter of 2012 saw the re-election of President Obama and the post-election announcement by the president that he wanted a $1.6 trillion tax increase on the incomes of Americans making more than $250,000 a year. In other words, American businesses and investors spent a lot of the Fourth Quarter of 2012 expecting a big marginal tax increase. Maybe that had something to do with the lack of growth?

There are some topics that are so culturally foreign to the Times newsroom that the paper is almost bound to err in covering them.

Such is the case with the Boy Scouts of America. The Times started this round with a page one article by Kirk Johnson published January 29 describing a new policy by which, "Local chapters would be able to decide whether to admit gay scouts."

The problem with this formulation is that the Red Cross has chapters. Books have chapters. The Boy Scouts have councils, units (such as Scout Troops, or Cub Scout Packs), and chartered organizations, but the Boy Scouts do not have chapters.

A follow-up article, also by Mr. Johnson, in January 30 editions of the Times, repeats the error, referring to a troop leader who "wrote to Boy Scout headquarters and to his local scouting chapter."

The follow-up article is similarly confused about the new policy and how it would be implemented. At one point, it suggests that the policy will be set by councils, which are regional groups that could include hundreds of troops and packs sponsored by hundreds of different churches and synagogues. At another point, the article suggests that the policies on gays will be set by individual troops or by the individual chartered organizations, often churches, that sponsor troops or packs.

A Times editorial condemns the new policy for stopping short of what the Times wants the scouts to do, which is not merely to give councils or troops or chartered organizations the option of accepting gay leaders or scouts, but forcing them to accept them. The editorial also repeats the bizarre and unclear reference to "the idea of allowing local chapters to continue to exclude gay scouts and troop leaders." Since there are no "chapters" in Boy Scouts, what does the Times editorial mean by "chapters"? Is it talking about councils? Or about individual troops, packs, and their chartering organizations?

Neither the two news articles nor the editorial get into some closely related issues. If the Boy Scouts are to accept gays as a matter of nondiscriminatory principle, shouldn't they also have to accept girls, who are not now allowed into either Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts as youth participants? Or how about atheists, whose participation and promotion within scouting is barred by the Scout Oath (On my honor I will do my best To do my duty to God and my country… ) and the Scout Law (A Scout is…reverent.)?

I spent a lot of time in scouting, eventually earning the Eagle rank, and I enjoyed it greatly and learned a lot. It's a great program, which in my view means both that the more people who can benefit from it, the better, and that the people who run it should beware screwing it up in an effort to please a bunch of New York Times reporters and editors (and others of similarly left-wing views) who are so far removed from the institution that they can't even bother themselves to get the terminology right.

A news article about staff reductions at the Times says they were "accomplished primarily through voluntary buyouts" and reports that a memo from the paper's executive editor, Jill Abramson, "indicated that layoffs were kept to a minimum." So how many layoffs, if any, were there? The Times article doesn't say.

It's hard to imagine that if the article had been about staff reductions at some other news organization or publicly traded company or civic institution in New York, the Times would have let executives get away with vague happy talk about how the layoffs were "kept to a minimum." Instead the paper would almost certainly have pressed hard for a specific number indicating how many layoffs there were, and, if the company refused to give a number, the Times would have reported that refusal.

If the Times is going to run news articles about its own personnel dealings, they should meet the same standards of accuracy and specific detail that the paper applies to its coverage of other companies. That may be unrealistic, but anything less is a double standard.

Paul Krugman's column says:

I think it's important to understand the extent to which leading Republicans live in an intellectual bubble. They get their news from Fox and other captive media, they get their policy analysis from billionaire-financed right-wing think tanks, and they're often blissfully unaware both of contrary evidence and of how their positions sound to outsiders.

So when Mr. Romney made his infamous "47 percent" remarks, he wasn't, in his own mind, saying anything outrageous or even controversial. He was just repeating a view that has become increasingly dominant inside the right-wing bubble, namely that a large and ever-growing proportion of Americans won't take responsibility for their own lives and are mooching off the hard-working wealthy. Rising unemployment claims demonstrate laziness, not lack of jobs; rising disability claims represent malingering, not the real health problems of an aging work force.

Sorry, Professor Krugman. The idea that rising disability claims represent something other than "the real health problems of an aging work force" is not an idea confined to the right-wing intellectual bubble. The idea has been put forth in recent months by a professor of economics at MIT, David Autor, in a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research; by a Bloomberg View editorial, and by a USA Today editorial. Oh, and also in the New York Times, in a column by President Obama's former budget director, Peter Orszag. Mr. Orszag cited a paper from the Center for American Progress and the Hamilton Project, two left-of-center think tanks. Mr. Orszag wrote:

The spike in disability insurance applications (and awards) does not reflect a less healthy population. The fraction of working-age adults who report a disability, about one in 10, has remained roughly constant for the past 20 years. (Indeed, it would be surprising if the number of workers with disabilities had risen by 50 percent over the past four years.) Rather, the weak labor market has driven more people to apply for disability benefits that they qualify for but wouldn't need if they could find work.

Mr. Orszag recommended, "the disability insurance program itself must be reformed."

The notion that this is all just the product of some Fox News or "billionaire-financed right-wing think tanks"-produced "intellectual bubble" is just flat-out wrong. It suggests that Professor Krugman himself is living in a left-wing intellectual bubble. It suggests that Professor Krugman himself is guilty of what he accused Republicans of, being "blissfully unaware both of contrary evidence and of how their positions sound to outsiders."