Scandale's colossal waste of space

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Tough shit, football fans. The greedy Jets and Giants team owners didn't spring for a retractable roof at the new stadium in East Rutherford, but The Record continues to make excuses for them.

Editor Francis Scandale is in heat again and engaging in his peculiar male-bonding ritual with the other male editors: news meetings filled with ass-slapping, high-fiving and jock-strap waving ahead of the Super Bowl.

Today, on the front page -- and on a full inside page (A-6) -- The Record of Woodland Park allows jock-itching, fuzzy thinking Staff Writer John Brennan to make an inane comparison between the Giants' and Jets' New Meadowlands Stadium and the Arlington, Texas, venue where the game will be played Sunday. 

I fear this will be only the first of this week's front-page stories catering to a minority of sports fans. The only benefit the majority of readers gain from this colossal waste of space is to remind them none of their tax dollars were spent in the Meadowlands. They've just wasted another 50 cents on the paper.

The lead Page 1 story by Staff Writer Jeff Pillets doesn't answer the obvious question: Did Governor Christie know the Port Authority had just paid $95.5 million to lease land in Manhattan for the Hudson River rail tunnels before he canceled the project, ostensibly because of potential cost overruns? 

I'm waiting for Pillets to get to the bottom of Christie's real motivation: pleasing his wife, who complained she'd have to walk too far to connect to the subway.

Local yokels  

News from Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood and other important communities is missing today in head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section. 

In contrast to photos of fender-benders and non-fatal rollover accidents that she used to run as filler on L-1 and L-3, the death of a 22-year-old Paterson woman in a DWI collision early Sunday is relegated to L-6 today.