Cliche-filled column rehashes 10-day old domestic dispute

Meridia Metro Hackensack at 94 State St. as it looked on Aug. 6. The completion date for the 222-unit building -- called the "first significant residential project ... downtown" -- has been pushed back several months to May 2015.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Is there anything new in Mike Kelly's front-page column today rehashing a 10-day-old domestic violence incident in Saddle Brook?

This is vintage Kelly, The Record's appointed sage, eager to report the lessons he sees in routine police news (A-1).

"Sometimes small local disputes can touch on deep, divisive national debates," Kelly says in the third paragraph.

He must think we're morons. 

Home arsenal

Police found nearly 200 guns and more than 100,000 rounds of ammunition in the home of Robert and Eileen Lintner.

OK. The old guy is off his rocker, but he certainly doesn't look like a revolutionary or terrorist or guns-right advocate, and his wife didn't use a gun; she allegedly stabbed him in the neck with a knife.

Word pushing

Once you start the fourth paragraph, the rest of Kelly's long-and-winding column is just recapping all the details of what amounts to old news.

It's just a rewrite. What's the point, Editor Martin Gottlieb? Slow news day? We get it. But a colossal waste of space.

Would you have stood for Kelly's cliche-ridden introduction at The Times? 

"When they sped to a quiet neighborhood of well-trimmed lawns ...."

Page 1 is boring

What a crappy front page.

Below Kelly is a golf column from Tara Sullivan in Sports.

The first paragraph is filled with puzzling detail: 

"A perilously setting sun," dueling golfers and "a battle rife with drama and thick with tension."

The A-1 story on Paterson Police Director Jerry Speziale makes one passing reference to his nearly nine years as Passaic County sheriff (deep on A-6).

But there is no mention of all of the controversy he generated in that job -- reported in detail by The Record's old Passaic County Bureau.

Lynne Hurwitz of Hackensack at a May 20 meeting of the City Council. Her husband Howard is executive director of the Northwest Bergen County Utilities Authority.

Hag of Hackensack

Kelly's Page 1 column on Saturday focused on Lynne Hurwitz, chairwoman of the Democratic Party in Hackensack.

The columnist calls her "the key strategist behind the Zisa family political machine, which ruled the city for three decades until its slate of candidates was defeated last year."

In other words, she is the "Hag of Hackensack."

Now, Kelly quotes the grandmother in her mid-70s as saying she is back in the Bergen County political game.