Growing waistline defines Christie in 2012

Green Acres. (Wikipedia)

Readers will be forgiven if today's Page 1 political column -- "2012 was breakout year for defining Christie" -- reads like a news story, and not the campaign ad it is.

Columnist Charles Stile's logo and photo are below the fold, as Editor Marty Gottlieb intended, so what essentially is another boring opinion piece appears to be a lot more substantial.

Stile and Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin are two of the adoring journalist-dogs barking for scraps from one of Governor Christie's gargantuan meals.

You won't find anything negative in Stile's column, nor does the Woodland Park daily hesitate to use Christie's response to the death and destruction of Sandy to promote his bid for a second term.

Open question

Also on A-1, the editors don't bother getting anything from Christie on what he might do now that a popular Green Acres program to preserve open space is running out of cash.

God, forbid, Christie would lash out with more of the  anti-tax venom that has forced him to cut a bunch of programs that benefit the middle class.

The story was poorly edited, mentioning in each of the first three paragraphs Green Acres is running out of money:

"A popular state-run program ... is about to go broke" and "Green Acres has dedicated the last of the $400 million" and "with the fund about to be drained dry."  

Holiday from news

In Local, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, continue to take a holiday from municipal news.

If the photos in the section appear unusally large, such as the one on L-3 today, it's a strategy the layout editors use to fill the space of local-news stories Sykes and Sforza didn't bother gathering from Hackensack and other towns.  
  

See previous post on more Road Warrior traffic falsehoods