WASHINGTON, DC - William F. Buckley, Jr. once remarked that he got ideas for his newspaper column simply by opening to any page of the New York Times, where an outrage was sure to be found. This proved to be no hyperbole on Monday of this week, when the Times carried an outrage on seemingly every page.

Item One on the hit parade was a front-page story under the headline, “Strict Limits on Welfare Benefits Discourage Marriage, Studies Say.” One of the reasons for the welfare reforms of the past decade was that the pre-reform welfare system encouraged family breakup, contributing significantly to single-mother households and all the social pathologies associated with such households. And President Bush’s new round of welfare reform proposals is intended to strengthen marriage. But if this headline is to be believed, welfare reform has been socially counterproductive.

A close reading of the story shows something more complicated. According to the researchers, one reason many women moving out of poverty are not getting married is that they are becoming more self-reliant and “less willing to settle for the wrong man.” If true, this represents a triumph of welfare reform that true feminists should celebrate, because it means that fewer women are willing to let low-life men wreck their lives. In the fullness of time this will have the effect of making more low-income men shape up and be more responsible.

Item Two is a story from page 11 with the headline, “Study Shows Building Prisons Did Not Prevent Repeat Crimes.” According to new research, about two-thirds of all criminals are rearrested again within three years of being released from prison, which is slightly higher than the recidivism rate 20 years ago, before our prison population began to grow. Once again, the reader might conclude from this headline that it is futile to fight crime with more prisons. Of course, one way to prevent recidivism is to keep criminals in prison, which is the whole point of longer sentences and more prison cells. While the authors of the study may be correct that more prisons per se may not deter crime, keeping more career criminals locked up for longer sentences has contributed significantly to the decline in the crime rate over the last decade. A criminal behind bars is deterred quite effectively.

But the prize for the day goes to the front-page story entitled “U.S. Sees Problems in Climate Change.” The Bush Administration has submitted a new report to the U.N. that concludes that climate change may bring a number of harmful changes to the U.S. over the next century. The report is represented as a “major shift” in the administration’s view of climate change, yet the article also comments that “it does not propose any major shift in the administration’s policy on greenhouse gases.”

It is hard to condense more misinformation in one sentence than this. In fact, the Bush report endorses the view that “adaptation” to climate change is much preferable to a policy of carbon suppression, which is doomed to be a costly failure. The party line on global warming refuses to contemplate adaptation, and the media follow in lock-step. It’s almost enough to make you want to recycle your newspaper.

Steven Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of The Age of Reagan--The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980. He can be reached via email at shayward@pacificresearch.org.