Don Luskin, chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC and publisher of The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, picked the paper's double standards on unions, which are vital institutions -- for other businesses. For the New York Times itself? Not so much:

The argument against unions -- that they unduly burden employers with unreasonable demands -- is one that corporate America makes in good times and bad....The real issue is whether enhanced unionizing would worsen the recession, and there is no evidence that it would. There is a strong argument that the slack labor market of a recession actually makes unions all the more important. -- Editorial from Dec. 29, 2008

vs.

The New York Times News Service will lay off at least 25 editorial employees next year and will move the editing of the service to a Florida newspaper owned by The New York Times Company....The plan for the news service calls for The Gainesville Sun, whose newsroom is not unionized and has lower salaries, to take over editing and page design. -- Richard Perez-Pena, Nov. 13, 2009.

Luskin said this double standard “expresses the fundamental hypocrisy of the Times as an elite institution that tries to establish its institutional legitimacy by attacking elite institutions.”

For all the worst quotes from 2009, visit Times Watch.

Here’s a new one. The mayor of Pittsburgh, Luke Ravenstahl, wants to tax college students to support retired city employees.

It would be a graduated (ahem) tax, punishing the best and the brightest the most because that fits with class warfare:

The tax, which would take effect as early as July, would range from about $20 a year for students at cheaper schools like the Community College of Allegheny County to just over $400 for students at the city’s priciest university, Carnegie Mellon.

Hello, Pittsburgh? You might want to re-run your projections with the Laffer Curve in mind.

The new acceptances at Carnegie Mellon score well in math and are highly likely to say “yes” to Hopkins or MIT or CalTech. But what do you care about retaining vitality at one of the world’s greatest universities when you’ve got to make good on the excessive, unfunded promises made by previous Democratic mayors to the unionized city workers? OH, right, you can’t say no to the unions ‘cause they own you.

Politically, Mr. Ravenstahl risks few votes in leaning on universities for revenue because college students rarely vote in local elections. And many of the constituencies that supported Mr. Ravenstahl’s re-election in November have been vocally supportive of his tax plan.

“This is a turning point for us,” said Joe King, president of the Pittsburgh firefighters’ union. He said that after Miami-Dade County in Florida, Allegheny County has the second largest number of seniors of any county in the United States and that in his union alone he has 900 retirees and 450 surviving spouses whose pensions need to be financed.

“Without the tax, the fate of those pensions could be in trouble,” he said. “We are not asking young people to carry more than their due. We’re just asking them to pay for what they use.”

Hey, let’s see that You Tube video on public employee unions again:

In a recently published article, Ginsberg et al (2009) develop a simple model forecasting physician visits due to influenza-like illness using only the related query fraction on total queries as recorded by the Google search engine data, available weekly with a short delay.

Following the popularity of the internet as a means for searching for jobs (Stevenson, 2008), this approach has recently been extended to unemployment forecasting. In particular, the Google Index – the incidence of Google job-search related queries over total queries – proved to have predictive power in forecasting unemployment in Germany and Israel (see Askitas and Zimmermann 2009 and Suhoy 2009). Choi and Varian (2009) use the Google Index to predict the initial unemployment claims in the US.