Today, the New York Times is unveiling what it very much wants us all to believe is a terrific new service. Times Select on the paper's website allows us, in the words of the venerable newspaper, to "get more from The New York Times.... Get content that isn't available anywhere else online." Or, more accurately, pay for content that just yesterday was free.

In all fairness, Times Select does make accessing archived material easier, offering an alternative to the pay-per-article system the site has long relied on. But the core of the service, putting the op-ed page under subscription lock and key, is a confused step back into the mid '90s, when no one was certain how the Internet would make money and AOL launched its bizarro world crusade to put the web in a saleable box, complete with proprietary keywords instead of URLs; it tears a page from the playbook of the original video rental stores that charged a membership fee and, with very few exceptions, did not live to see the Clinton presidency.

Now, on the front page of the newspaper's website, below the four stories given up-to-the-minute-headline status, the four stories given thumbnail-picture-with-caption status are Times Select exclusives. And, again, just so we're all on the same page, these great new exclusives were inclusive for the past decade. Along with op-ed content, some analysis, metro, and sports writing has been locked away. Just keep an eye out for the cute little orange T and you'll know you've found a hot Times Select feature that is no longer available without payment or home subscription.

Aside from the insulting attempt to market this backpedaling as a great new service, the introduction in 2005 of online partial-pay content reeks of a luddite mistake. The Times is joining the movie studios and record labels in railing against that damn Internet, evil network that will pull apart their multi-million dollar castles. It all looks like a lot of breath and lawyer's fees wasted while the media of the world could be figuring out how to make this thing work to their advantage.

I hate to advocate more advertising, but if the Times is hard up for money, the Internet offers lots of room for innovation on that front. Newspapers have always made the bulk of their money through advertising, but instead of brainstorming, the Times is settling for the cash up front.

Some forums have made links out of their advertiser's keywords. Someone's post mentions shoes, so that word gets linked to a sneaker website. Clever, not too obtrusive, entirely optional. Google's prevalent and discreet content-based ads, both within Gmail and many independent websites, also take advantage of the Internet as a distinct and interactive advertising medium.

The Times is eschewing this forward-thinking approach for a subscription service when it ought to be figuring out how to make its website more free of obstacle's, not less. If the print media scion is feeling the pinch of two decades of declining newspaper sales it ought to give new, greater life to its website, not saddle it with an awkward half-way fee. Why not try to make nytimes.com a more popular destination, a useful and informative home page, and increase ad revenues?

The Internet, after all, abhors delays and barriers. It is, by nature, instantaneous and direct. Lots of clicking and logins and frustrated attempts to read Frank Rich columns are not user-friendly. ESPN.com has long tried to go this route and the Boston Herald similarly protects its columnists but it's not the way the Internet works best. To switch to this model now, and then try to sell it as something new and exciting, is a surprisingly regressive action for such a prominent publication.

At the start of the Katrina news cycle, a friend emailed me with his most recent effort to annoy me out of my post-September 11th fit of common sense. This time he sent me an article from the Daily News, written by modern day Hedda Hoppers, George Rush and Joanna Molloy, about Condoleezza Rice's vacation in the city that never sleeps. He titled the email "Let Them Eat Cake," revealing perhaps more than he wanted to about his hopes for the eventual fates of current administration officials. I'm willing to assume that his unfortunate allusion to the notion that the good doctor deserves to be Berged (as in Nick), so to speak, was unconscious. No such defense, though, for his tacit approval of the behavior of the courageous New Yorkers who apparently hounded Condi out of town.

Reportedly, some in an audience at a performance of Spamalot! suddenly got confused and thought they were in the bleachers at a Sox-Yanks game, booing one of the most, if not the most accomplished African-American woman in history. And then there was the brouhaha at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue, where she was in the process of buying "several thousand dollars worth of shoes," according to that pinnacle of journalistic reliability, gawker.com. A fellow shopper is said to have shouted, "How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!" A fellow shopper, I might add, who was also apparently shopping for shoes while thousands were dying and homeless -- and whose criticism, if taken at all seriously, would imply that our Secretary of State should never shop for shoes and would, as a consequence, meet with, say, Jacque or Gerhard looking more like Shoeless Joe than one would think acceptable in this day and age. If carried to its logical ends, in fact, this admonishment implies that we should all go barefoot until global, or at least national, suffering has been eradicated altogether.

But who's thinking about such failures of coherent thought when there are Bush officials to attack? Certainly, none of this seems to have occurred to our smug, roving reporters, who, as gossip columnists, probably shouldn't be expected to do or know any better. But what of my otherwise sane and wonderfully generous friend, who can't seem to get past the fact that he now lives in a country where people at the top pray more than he thinks is healthy? Why was he so quick to hop on the "off with their heads" bandwagon and so myopic about who are the real villains of this story? Had he not fallen through the looking glass, he might well have asked the obvious. Why was the headline "As South Drowns, Rice Soaks in NY," rather than "Python Fans Pluck Boo Birds" or "Outraged Shoe Store Patrons Force Condi-Heckler to Shop at Payless"? Why, that is, have the pre-adolescent, spitball-throwing assailants not been taken to task by the quasi-journalists, my friend, or observers of these incidents who themselves, by the available account, appear to have been in a New York state of mind.

The article goes so far as to jump to the defense of the rogue shopper whose "right of free speech" was supposedly abridged when the store owners gave her the heave-ho. No doubt Rush and Molloy saw this as yet another indication that we now live under the thumb of an increasingly repressive regime that threatens to create a world where -- God help us all -- people are not free to, without consequence, boo and shout hypocritically at state officials who have forty IQ points on them and accomplish more in a week than they will in their lifetimes. Who, really, are the Neanderthals here? And what are we to make of a populous that apparently condones the blurting out of emotional drivel, whenever and at whomever, like garbage thrown from the window of a passing car? Even the esteemed authors of the article acknowledge that the Secretary's "responsibilities are usually international." Usually? How about pretty much exclusively? From Wikipedia:

"Most of the original domestic functions of the Department of State have been transferred to other agencies. Those that remain in the Department are: storage and use of the Great Seal, performance of protocol functions for the White House, drafting of certain Presidential proclamations, formally accepting notice of the president's resignation, and replies to public inquiries."

Apparently one of the domestic functions that were "transferred to other agencies" was that of staying indoors and out of sight as long as people are dying and homeless, as well as that of getting into a rowboat to pull people from the toxic muck. Maybe, though, the Great Seal is not what I'm thinking and is well suited to fetch Sean Penn from the bottom every time he forgets to replace the plug in his boat while wearing a bullet proof vest rather than a life jacket. But back to the domestic responsibilities of the Secretary of State, there is, I suppose, the matter of replying to public inquiries, one of which might possibly be, "How dare you show your face in public without having rid the world of all suffering and injustice?" As for the President's resignation, Condi surely George a call before she took off just to make sure this wasn't on the immediate agenda. To which, we now know, he must have responded that he was planning to stick it out for at least a week or two, as deeply disappointing as that might be to those NYC residents who, after laughing so hard at his bungling incompetence that Chardonnay comes out their noses, now feign outrage that he failed to head off the storm of the century.

At any rate, our reviled antagonist might then have hopped into her first class seat or, worse yet, her Mercedes, and flown/driven roughshod over the backs and rights of the common folk so that she could spend ill-gotten, corporatist-derived gains doing her best imitation of Imelda Marcos. Exercising her first amendment right to express herself by buying shoes, in fact, just like the ill-mannered nut case with bad boundaries and an apparent impulse control disorder who decided to ream her out. How dare she shop while people are dying, indeed. How dare such ignorant, self-congratulatory snobs berate a woman who represents the epitome of the Reverend King's dream? And how could they have forgotten that this was once their dream, too?

For the answer, we need only look to the words of one Mike Franklin, who stopped looting long enough to impart this gem to an AP reporter (courtesy David Warren): "People who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society." There you have it. If you can claim victim status, you get to do what you want. We can only hope Mr. Franklin followed his statement with a Pythonesque wink,wink, nudge, nudge. But probably not. This is a sentiment echoed by no less of a socio-economic authority than Celine Dion, who said, in what is barely, if at all, a paraphrase, "So they take twenty pair of jeans [Twenty, Celine?! ] or a teevee. So what? They've never touched those things before in their lives [voice wobbly with sympathy]. Let them touch those things."

Right. "Let them touch jeans," "Let them eat cake," whatever. Poor Celine. At least, to her credit, she's put her money where her mouth is, and it's unfair to expect her to realize what she's saying. But no such pass for the Manhattan practitioners of uncivil disobedience. Those who have systematically debilitated the underclass, enshrining them as victims and thereby ensuring their own status as perpetual saviors, can't possibly be expected to see the equivalence between the lawlessness that has erupted in New Orleans and their own disrespect for authority, disregard for human dignity, and abandonment of the values upon which this country was founded.

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