From a Times magazine interview with Charlie Sykes:

I'm assuming you're not surprised by Trump's inability to condemn the white-supremacist march. I'm shocked but not surprised. Denouncing Nazis is the easiest thing in the world: All it requires is a modicum of historical perspective and a working moral compass. Instead, we got this Dumpster fire.

Here is the White House transcript of the president's August 14 statement:

As I said on Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.

And as I have said many times before: No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God. We must love each other, show affection for each other, and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry, and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.

Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. We are equal under the law. And we are equal under our Constitution. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.

One might fault Trump for being slow to issue such a full and explicit condemnation, or for claiming at times that there were fine people among the marchers on both sides. But to write about Trump's "inability to condemn" a march that he actually did condemn, without providing that level of context on what actually happened, seems to me to risk misleading Times readers about what the president actually did or didn't do.

Is the New York Times' obsession with Louise Linton, the wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin:

a) just another example of the paper's anti-Trump bias?

or

b) totally nonpartisan — the same coverage that the paper would apply to any rich or famous person found to be behaving badly or displaying a sense of entitlement?

Well, here is a fine double-blind experiment. The same week that Linton Instagrammed in a way that the Times deemed less humble and demure than circumstances warranted, Matthew "Max" Kennedy and his daughter Caroline Kennedy were reportedly arrested on Cape Cod at 1:30 a.m. after noise complaints about a party.

The Times has devoted not just one, not just two, not just three, but at least four separate articles to the Linton situation, including at least three pieces that appeared in the print newspaper.

The Kennedy situation, meanwhile, hasn't hit the print Times at all. The Times has dealt with it by running two brief Associated Press dispatches on its website. Other newspapers — including the New York Daily News (here) and the Boston Globe ("Arrests on Cape Cod show Kennedy Family's Worst Traits") have given the Kennedy story extensive coverage. But the Times has more or less taken a pass.

Now, the Times could make some kind of argument that a government plane was involved in the Linton story. But the Kennedy story involves the treatment of police, who are also government officials. Anyway, I wasn't on Cape Cod and don't know firsthand what happened, but if the situation is anything close to how it was portrayed by the police, with .... well, Howie Carr has a pretty typical treatment in the Boston Herald — the Times treatment here seems to point pretty strongly to "a."

Do you like L.L. Bean canvas tote bags or shopping at Ikea? The New York Times has nothing but scorn for you, at least to judge by two articles in Wednesday's paper.

On page three of the front section, the Times serves up this fashion advice to a reader who asked: "Can you recommend a stylish but very durable bag that can put up with the wear and tear that I place upon it?"

The Times's Isabel Wilkinson replies:

if you do opt for canvas, stick with black — like these from Herschel or Everlane — which doesn't appear as dirty as a khaki color, and looks slightly more professional than an L.L. Bean tote.

An L.L. Bean tote is now unprofessional, according to the Times?

Meanwhile, in the Food section, restaurant critic Pete Wells writes in his review of a new restaurant in the old Four Seasons space:

As a strict constructionist about the architecture of this space, I can't write about it without registering the loss of the lovely, understated modernist stemware, bowls and other pieces designed specifically for these rooms by Garth and Ada Louise Huxtable. Eating here without them is like visiting a Frank Lloyd Wright house furnished by Ikea.

What's he got against Ikea?

If I were L.L. Bean or Ikea and spending lots of advertising dollars on the New York Times, I'd be annoyed. As a Times reader who shops at both Ikea and L.L. Bean, I also feel annoyed at having my taste insulted by the newspaper to which I subscribe.

When an immigrant-lawyer-actress who is married to a cabinet member of the Trump administration Instagrammed about some upscale brands, the Times attacked her for her "expensive wardrobe" and for being "bluntly unapologetic about her luxurious lifestyle." The Times made these attacks in not just one, not just two, but three articles that contended she was being condescending. I guess when it comes to appearing to look down one's nose at common folk, the New York Times holds Louise Linton to a different standard than it holds its own fashion writer and restaurant critic.

"Why women had better sex under socialism" — actual headline over a story in Sunday's New York Times.

What are the politics of Silicon Valley? The New York Times can't seem to give a straight answer.

An article in the Sunday Review section reports, or claims:

The rise of Google and the other giant businesses of Silicon Valley have been driven by a libertarian culture that paid only lip service to notions of diversity...Viewers of the comedy series "Silicon Valley" note that uber-libertarianism and uber-geek machismo go hand in hand.

Elsewhere in the same day's newspaper, the front page of the Times Sunday Styles section reports on what it calls "overwhelmingly liberal Silicon Valley, where supporters of President Trump are nearly nonexistent and few think populism would improve their lives."

So which is it? "Liberal"? Or "libertarian"? Do the Times journalists even understand that there is a difference between these two things? Have they suddenly started using the word "liberal" in the classical, European, 18th century sense? There may be some overlap between contemporary American liberals and libertarians — both take a live-and-let-live attitude when it comes to social issues — but the Times doesn't really get into that at all. Instead, the newspaper just runs two different stories on the same day offering conflicting accounts of Silicon Valley politics, and giving readers no guidance about which account is more accurate.

Back in the days when the Wall Street Journal had a conservative op-ed page and a liberal news section, people used to joke about getting "two papers for the price of one." In the case of the Times, it seems less of a Wall Street Journal style bargain or great deal, and more a situation where the paper's own credibility is eroded by running two articles that can't both be true simultaneously, or at the very least are "in tension with one another."

A news article in the Times reports on the landscape for woman law firm partners:

A second case, filed in May against Proskauer Rose and brought by a female partner in its Washington office, is seeking $50 million for "substantial gender disparities" in the firm's compensation practices.

The plaintiff, who asked not to be named in order to protect her personal information, argued that even though she was a partner, the firm had "excluded" her from client matters and refused to allow her "to pitch or to participate in any employment litigation matter for firm clients, rebuffed her efforts to assume a greater leadership role at the firm, tolerated and facilitated an environment where she was targeted for harassment and humiliation by firm leadership, demeaned and belittled by her peers and clients and refused to rectify pay disparities."

Proskauer rejected the claims as "groundless" and accused her of seeking "to squeeze a massive payout from our firm in exchange for her rapid departure and an agreement not to weaponize her blatantly inaccurate charges."

The Times doesn't explain why it agreed to honor this civil plaintiff's request not to be named. It does name Proskauer Rose, creating an unlevel playing field in which one side in the dispute is named, while the other side gets to make allegations from behind a screen of anonymity. Other news organizations have identified the plaintiff by name. It would help to explain that the lawyer is suing as a "Jane Doe," but the Times doesn't even share that information with readers.

The Times also doesn't disclose whether its own labor lawyer, Bernard Plum of Proskauer Rose, who is a member of the firm's executive committee and "former co-chair of the Labor & Employment Law Department," is involved in the situation, which reportedly involves the head of the firm's Washington, D.C. labor and employment practice. Mr. Plum's law firm bio states that "Bernie has, for many years, served as chief spokesperson for numerous employers, including the New York Times."

Most of my New York Times criticism on Israel and Jewish topics has moved over to the Algemeiner. The two latest pieces are "Nine Flaws With New York Times 'Israel's War on George Soros' Article" and "New York Times Showers Compliments on Iranian Foreign Minister." Please click on the hyperlinks to the headlines and check them out if you are interested in those topics.

A New York Times editorial headlined "Avoiding War With Iran" includes this passage:

Most Americans are aware of Iran's crimes against this country, including the 52 Americans taken hostage in 1979; the 241 Marines killed in the 1983 bombing of their barracks in Lebanon; and the 1996 bombing of the Air Force quarters in Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps less known are events that still anger Iranians — like the 1953 coup aided by the C.I.A. that ousted Iran's democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, and America's intelligence support for Iraq in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

It's as if the editorial writers are totally unaware of the Weekly Standard article "The Myths of 1953," by a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ray Takeyh, reporting on newly declassified documents indicating that, as he puts it:

In August 1953, the Iranians reclaimed their nation and ousted a premier who had generated too many crises that he could not resolve. The institution of the monarchy was still held in esteem by a large swath of the public. And the shah commanded the support of all the relevant classes, such as the military and the clergy. Mossadeq's unpopularity and penchant toward arbitrary rule had left him isolated and vulnerable to a popular revolt. America might have been involved in the first coup attempt that failed, but it was largely a bystander in the more consequential second one.

That article was picked up by Mosaic, but apparently the Times editorial writers don't read that publication, either.

Takeyh predicted in his Weekly Standard piece: "It is unlikely that the professoriate and the American left will abandon their myths about 1953. They are too invested in their narrative and too obsessed with defending the Islamic Republic to defer to history's judgment." It looks like he sure got that part of it right, at least so far as the New York Times is concerned.

A New York Times editorial about arrests for marijuana smoking in public expresses regret that "the state missed an opportunity to fix this problem five years ago when a bill that would have made public display of marijuana an offense similar to a traffic violation — rather than a crime — died in the Legislature."

The newspaper's proposed solution? "The city needs to do more to minimize arrests. District attorneys can take the lead by refusing to prosecute most, if not all, of these cases."

I understand the idea of prosecutorial discretion, which at least as I understand it is basically that, given the broad universe of possible crimes to pursue, prosecutors have some latitude to decide how and where to focus the finite and limited resources of their offices.

But the idea that district attorneys can, at their own initiative, just refuse to enforce a law that the legislature itself has refused to repeal or reform seems so misguided as to be fundamentally dangerous. In any system that is democratic and involves the rule of law, the people who make the laws need to be those elected to do so — the lawmakers. Law enforcement officials can't just unilaterally decide for themselves that they are going to cease enforcement of some laws. I mean, they could, but there's something fundamentally undemocratic about that.

I can understand and sympathize with the Times' concern that the laws are not being enforced in a racially impartial way — the headline of the story is "Smoking Marijuana While Black." But it doesn't seem to have occurred to the Times that one reason the legislature hasn't repealed the law — despite the huge amount of money that George Soros has invested in drug legalization, an amount of money that, on many other issues, would have the Times up in arms about the sinister disproportionate influence of billionaires subverting the political process — is that the public may not want it repealed. In fact, they may want it enforced.

In New York City, after all, you can't legally smoke a tobacco cigarette in a bar, a restaurant, a movie theater, a subway train or platform, a public park, or on a beach. Maybe people don't want other people smoking marijuana everywhere, either. Maybe people figure a lot of the people smoking marijuana in public are teenagers who would be better off doing their homework or getting a job instead. Maybe people have small children and want to be able to walk them to school or to the playground without having to brave clouds of marijuana smoke or crowds of marijuana smokers. Maybe some people just don't like the smell of the stuff. Maybe people think it's one step on the slippery slope to a deadly opoid overdose.

There are plenty of opposing arguments in favor of legalization, too. But the place for these arguments, under the Constitution of New York, is the legislature. The prosecutors can't just nullify a law on the request of the New York Times editorial writers. That isn't how it works — and for good reason. Conceivably there are some situations where a law is so morally repugnant or unconscionable that a prosecutor could refuse to enforce it; say, segregation laws in the Jim Crow-era South. But the Times doesn't make a clear case that this law falls into that category. It's almost enough to make one wonder what exactly it is they are smoking over at the Times editorial board.

The New York Times has an editorial arguing that banks should be prohibited from forcing customers to handle disputes in arbitration rather than in court:

In recent decades, banks and other corporations have increasingly required customers to agree in advance to individually arbitrate any conflicts that arise over products and services, rather than sue in court. Arbitration, however, has turned out to stack the deck; corporations choose the arbitrators and set the rules of evidence. As a result, individuals usually abandon the effort rather than pursue their grievances.

The failure of arbitration to redress wrongdoing is especially stark in financial disputes. A series of articles by The Times in 2015 found that from 2010 to 2014, only 505 consumers — out of tens of millions whose financial contracts have mandatory-arbitration clauses — went to arbitration over disputes of $2,500 or less. The lack of recourse is an invitation for banks to chisel small amounts from potentially millions of customers.

It's hypocritical of the Times to take this position, because the money-making "Times Journeys" tours led by the newspaper's journalists to places like Iran and Cuba, and heavily advertised throughout the newspaper, require participants to agree to terms and conditions that include this arbitration clause:

Arbitration and Waiver of Trial by Jury: You agree to present any claims against us within ninety (90) days after the Tour ends and to file any suit within one (1) year of the incident, and you acknowledge that this expressly limits the applicable statute of limitations to one (1) year. In lieu of litigation and jury trials, each of which is expressly waived, any dispute concerning, relating or referring to this Participation Agreement, the brochure, or any other literature concerning your trip or the Tour shall be resolved exclusively by binding arbitration in New York City, New York, according to the then existing commercial rules of the American Arbitration Association. Such proceeding will be governed by the substantive law of the State of New York. The arbitrator(s) and not any federal, state, or local court or agency shall have exclusive authority to resolve any dispute relating to the interpretation, applicability, enforceability, conscionability, or formation of this Participant Agreement, including but not limited to any claim that all or any part of this Participant Agreement is void or voidable.

If the Times genuinely believes these arbitration clauses are so unjust that they merit a Sunday editorial denouncing them, maybe the newspaper could start improving things by altering its own contracts so as to not impose the clauses on its own customers. Or is there one standard for banks, and another standard for the Times itself? It's almost like what the Times really dislikes isn't arbitration clauses, but the financial services industry.

The New York Times has a pattern (see here, here, and here for previous examples) of publishing news articles describing things as "largely unregulated" or "lightly regulated." Often that's inaccurate and just a way for the Times to insert its editorial opinion advocating for increased regulation. The latest example of this comes on today's front page, in an article about companies trying to make money by guiding NFL players through a head-injury settlement process:

The cottage industry of companies and law firms, going by names such as N.F.L. Case Consulting, Concussion Case Management and Legacy Pro Sports and looking to help people file settlement claims, is largely unregulated, even if their pitches are for services that are usually unnecessary.

The Times claims that these firms are "largely unregulated." Yet later in the article, it reports:

In February, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, sued a New Jersey-based financial company, RD Legal Funding L.L.C., accusing it of deceiving retired N.F.L. players and "luring them into costly advances on settlement payouts with lies about the terms of the deals."

So it turns out that far from being "largely unregulated," this industry is in fact subject to regulation at both the federal level — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the Times got the name of the agency incorrect, rendering it inaccurately as "Finance' rather than "Financial") — and at the state level, by the attorney general. In addition, lawyers are regulated by states, bar associations, and courts, and can be sanctioned or disbarred for misconduct. In fact, lawyers and even apparently sketchy contingency-fee fly-by-night class-action "consultants" are both subject to more heavy regulation than is the largely unregulated industry of journalism, where reporters and editors can pull nonsense like this without any chance of being punished by a government agency for it — in fact, with explicit First Amendment guarantees against any such consequences.

No sooner had the Iraqi Army liberated Mosul from the clutches of the Islamic State terrorists than American journalists were rushing to find a way to rain on the parade.

"It is far too soon to celebrate," wrote the New Yorker's Robin Wright, who is a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

"The government's costly victory in Mosul and the questions hanging over its aftermath feel more like the next chapter in the long story of Iraq's unraveling," Tim Arango wrote in a front-page New York Times news article, leaving unspecified whose feelings, exactly, other than his own, were being described.

Realism in the face of what looks like progress in Iraq is surely warranted, as experience shows. But the journalistic caution itself runs the risk of missing what is potentially a landmark victory, not only in the war against ISIS, but in the struggle —perhaps even more important in the long run — to restore the faith of the American people in the project of advancing democracy and freedom abroad.

That endeavor, alas, has lately seemed to be discredited among both Republicans and Democrats, with the largest degree of blame resting on what seemed like a failure in Iraq. Images of carnage and American combat casualties overtook those of initial successes such as the capture of Saddam Hussein and the inked thumbprints of the voters who participated in the first post-Saddam election. The American public concluded it hadn't been worth the trouble.

In 2016, the Republican president candidate, Donald Trump, called the war in Iraq "a big fat mistake," and the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, said her vote as a senator to authorize the war also had been a mistake. President Obama had been elected in 2008 in part because he opposed the war.

The victory in Mosul has the potential to rewrite the narrative in a more positive way. It's right up there with the capture of Saddam and the ecstasy of the postwar Iraqi election in terms of achievements that are really formidable. Consider that an independent, democratically elected, mostly Arab government took the lead in a militarily decisive, and successful, campaign against an evil terrorist organization. When has that ever happened before?

Now, one might argue, as many do, that without the Iraq War or the ouster of Saddam, the campaign against ISIS would never have even been necessary, because the group wouldn't have emerged to fill the power vacuum created in post-Saddam Iraq after the withdrawal of American troops. That ignores that the Islamic State also holds territory in Syria, where America more or less acquiesced in allowing the regnant dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to keep power.

The Mosul win demonstrates that America can fight terrorists abroad with military strategies that stop short of a full-scale, Iraq War-style ground invasion. American air support, training, equipment, and the involvement of special forces helped make victory possible. But so did the George W. Bush-era policy of creating a free and democratic, moderate and pluralistic Iraq that Iraqis themselves would be willing to fight fiercely to the death to defend.

If those Iraqi troops had not won victory in Mosul after months of what has been described as some of the most difficult door-to-door, house-to-house combat since Stalingrad, the battle against ISIS would have to have been fought somewhere else — perhaps in Europe or even in America, where the group has already inspired deadly attacks.

Clinton and Trump, and Americans in general, are right to be wary of overseas adventures. They can be costly in terms of lives and dollars. But they sometimes bring rewards as well. The victory in Mosul is one. It deserves to be celebrated. And it deserves to be remembered as an example of what is possible when America chooses to advance its ideals and interests abroad rather than retreat.

Thomas Friedman's latest column, which appeared in the New York Times under the headline "Israel to American Jews: You Just Don't Matter," has at least 14 flaws. I enumerate and explain in my latest piece for the Algemeiner. Please check it out here.

It's one thing for the Times to get an architect's first name wrong, as it did in a July 4 dispatch reporting on the building activities of developer Sheldon Solow. Yet when the Times's own former architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work at the Times, publicly calls the paper out on Twitter: "The day after @nytimes writes about new Apple hq w/o mentioning its architect it calls Richard Meier 'Thomas Meier'" — it's another thing for the newspaper not to correct the apparent mistake, either online or in print. It's as if they're indifferent to getting it right, or as if the paper's copy editor layoffs and "work slowdown" are having severe effects.

Jane Brody's "Personal Health" column appears under the headline "What I Wish I'd Known About My Knees." It reports on arthroscopic surgery and steroid injections for knee troubles. The column reports: "Many of the procedures people undergo to counter chronic knee pain in the hopes of avoiding a knee replacement have limited or no evidence to support them. Some enrich the pockets of medical practitioners while rarely benefiting patients for more than a few months."

Left entirely unexplored in the column, alas, is the question of whether Medicare and Medicaid cover these treatments. If Congressional Republicans or President Trump proposed to reduce such spending, doubtless Democrats would accuse them of mean-spiritedly trying to deprive poor and elderly people of necessary medical care (an accusation that Mitt Romney also foolishly made against President Obama back in 2012). Actually, one needn't even speculate: one might just consult Paul Krugman's recent column: "Republicans start from a sort of baseline of cruelty toward the less fortunate, of hostility toward anything that protects families against catastrophe."

Anyway, the Times column is a fine reminder that more spending on medical care doesn't necessarily translate into improved health. It would be great if the newspaper incorporated more of that perspective into the debate over health care policy and spending in Washington, rather than confining it to the "personal health" column.