A story in the metro section of today's Times reports in detail on a hearing at which a New Jersey government panel approved an increase in natural gas rates. The article also looks at the situation in New York and Connecticut. "After the three-member regulatory board voted unanimously today to approve the increases, all the parties seemed pleased," the Times reports about the New Jersey meeting. The article reports that "Although the natural gas industry has been deregulated for commercial customers in Connecticut, rates for residential gas service are still controlled by the state." It would be great if the Times would go interview some experts who think that maybe residential gas prices shouldn't be set by the state and who think that the introduction of free-market competition in this area would actually lead to a decline in prices for consumers. Instead, the Times seems to take it for granted that energy costs should be set by a government bureaucracy.
"Perhaps": As we've noted before, the appearance of the word "perhaps" in a news story is a sure sign for readers to beware what comes next. Take this reference in the metro section of today's Times to a former mayor of New York, Edward Koch: "Mr. Koch, perhaps Mrs. Clinton's most prominent Jewish supporter." Yeah, well, perhaps. Like, perhaps after Joe Lieberman and Elie Wiesel and Edgar Bronfman and Steven Spielberg and Ehud Barak.
Deep Pessimism: A story in the international section of today's Times about reaction among American Jews to the recent violence in the Middle East runs under the headline "Among U.S. Jews, a Deep Pessimism Takes Hold." If, as now seems clear, the "peace process" is really a process by which Yasser Arafat is extracting concessions from Israel by violence while at the same time building a corrupt and dictatorial regime to subjugate his fellow Arabs, shouldn't the Times -- and American Jews -- be optimistic that it is all breaking down now before even more concessions are made and Mr. Arafat is even more powerful?
The Times and Cars: Today's Times includes a 34-page special section on cars. Who has time to wade through this on a weekday morning, we have no idea. Funny how, even with 34 pages backed by all those ads for Lincoln and BMW, there's no room for reprinting those two September 25 editorials, the one that called for keeping Governors Island "blissfully free of private automobiles" and the one that said of a new West Side football stadium, "to avoid traffic congestion and air pollution, the project has to be served primarily by mass transit rather than automobiles." And it's funny how these stand-alone 34-page special sections on weekdays always seem to be about some ad-friendly topic, rather than about, say, child poverty in the Bronx.