Christie would go to war with Russia in skies over Syria

Two images from the Aug. 6 GOP debate are said to show Sen. Paul Rand's eyeroll, right, as Governor Christie delivered "a saccharine line about how 'the hugs I remember are the hugs that I gave to the families who lost their people on September 11th,'" The Nation.com reported.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

The first successful terrorist attack in the United States in 14 years was enough for The Record and other news media, along with Governor Christie, to strike fear into the hearts of Americans.

And Christie claimed at Tuesday's GOP debate he would shoot down Russian planes if they violated a no-fly zone he would unilaterally impose over Syria, according to The Record (A-6).

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky countered:

"If you're in favor of World War III, you have your candidate," Paul said, putting the threat in the same category as Christie's poor judgment in the George Washington Bridge lane-closure scandal (A-6).

Still, Record Columnist Charles Stile ignored much of that, eager to report in his very first, slanted paragraph that Christie "stood apart from the rest of his rivals as the lone candidate who had hunted down terrorists" (A-1).

Broken record

In his desperate bid for the White House, Christie reacted to the November terrorist attacks in Paris by talking about his experience as U.S. attorney for New Jersey after 9/11.

After the San Bernardino attack early this month -- the first successful act of terrorism since 9/11 -- he hasn't mentioned anything else, especially not how his mean-spirited budgets have struck terror into the hearts of New Jersey's middle class.

Keep Syrians out

The Record's otherwise upbeat coverage today also is the first time since Christie vowed in November to bar all Syrian refugees, even widows and orphans, from New Jersey that he is reported saying he would bar all Syrians from the rest of the country, too.

That echoes Donald Trump's wanting to bar all Muslims from crossing our borders.

Stile and The Record's editorial page haven't denounced Christie as a hate-monger or a bigot or someone who sounds exactly like all of the maniacs who have persecuted Jews throughout history. 

Instead, the paper's local editors reluctantly assign reporters to interview Syrians and other Muslims in Passaic County to show how peace-loving they are, as a front-page story by Staff Writer Hannan Adely declared on Tuesday.

Cantor murder

The guilty verdicts in the slaying of Robert Cantor of Teaneck matter most, but The Record's coverage of the love-triangle case has been filled with flawed headlines and other sloppy work, as readers can see again today (A-1).

The big, black headline is almost as bad as the one that ran on the day the jury got the case:

"Execution or puzzle?"

Today, the A-1 headline basically says a "killer" was found guilty of "murder."

"Love-triangle killer

guilty of murder"

But there is a bigger problem that was missed by six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton, aka "The Queen of Errors."

Photos on both A-1 and A-6 claim to show Cantor's relatives "reacting" or "listening" to the verdicts.

But the one on the continuation page (A-6) shows a son-in-law standing next to the victim's widow and sister instead of seated apart from them, next to Cantor's daughter (A-1).

Did the judge allow the son-in-law to stand up during the reading of the verdicts or was the second photo posed after the verdicts were read?  

Local news

In Teaneck, officials rezoned land next to railroad tracks to allow AvalonBay to seek approval for a 248-unit apartment development (L-1).

In effect, the Township Council is saying that ratables are more important than the safety of tenants.

They would be living near what The Record calls "volatile" oil trains in a building prone to the same kind of quick-spreading fire that destroyed AvalonBay's Edgewater complex in January.

And people who buy shares in AvalonBay, a real-estate investment trust, will be laughing all the way to the bank with a reported 14% return.

The Local front today carries two Passaic County stories that are of little interest to Bergen County readers (L-1).

Meanwhile, the Hackensack news embargo continues.

Editor's note: After publication, this post was edited to eliminate dated material from The Nation.com, and to correct the photo caption. The images are from the GOP debate on Aug. 6, not the one held in Las Vegas on Tuesday night.

Reporters display abysmal ignorance of their N.J. beats

The window of a Syrian wedding store in South Paterson, a bustling district of Christian- and Muslim-owned businesses along Main Street in Paterson that draws shoppers from hundreds of miles around, below.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Nine long days after Governor Christie blasted President Obama's plan to accept Syrian refugees -- even orphans -- The Record's newsroom finally moved into action.

An assignment editor in Woodland Park shook the sleep out of her eyes on Tuesday, and told a reporter to interview merchants who have been prospering for decades in the next town -- Syrians who condemn ISIS (A-1).

"Syrians are business people. They have nothing to do with bombs," Paterson bakery owner Mohamed Souda, a Syrian immigrant, told Staff Writer Hannan Adely.

"Whoever goes against refugees, those people are absolutely wrong."

Why did it take so long after Christie's hate mongering for an editor to assign Adely to this important story?

South Paterson

Gathering reaction in South Paterson, an economic bedrock of Silk City for many decades, should have been the first story the editors assigned after the Paris attacks and the backlash from Christie and other mean-spirited Republicans.

Of course, local assignment editors like Deirdre Sykes, Dan Sforza and Tim Nostrand have been at their jobs for decades, and their ignorance, laziness and general incompetence define news gathering at The Record.

And what can you say for reporters like Adely who know their beat, yet wait for a moron like Sforza to tell them what story to report and write.

All of them work under the direction of Editor Martin Gottlieb, an arrogant Manhattanite whose international credentials should have disqualified him from the job of running the newsroom of a local daily paper.

Syrian Jews

Even today's story on South Paterson and Syrians in New Jersey is deeply flawed, because their is no mention of the thousands of Syrian Jews who live in the state and who are united with Christians and Muslim by their love of Syrian food.

This Syrian Jew has shopped for decades at Fattal's, Nouri's and other stores in South Paterson, and I have met many of the law-abiding Syrian Christians and Muslims who run bakeries, restaurants and other businesses there.

Another building was under construction on Main Street in Paterson's South Paterson Commercial District in September.

Traffic bottlenecks

Staff Writer John Cichowski has been boring readers to tears with the Road Warrior column he's been writing for more than 12 years, not to mention the hundreds, if not thousands, of errors he has made.

Could today's so-called commuting column be the first to actually acknowledge that North Jersey has some of the worst traffic bottlenecks in America, including the Lincoln Tunnel (L-1)?

Cichowski's head must have been stuck up his enormous asshole for all the years North Jersey drivers have been mired in daily traffic nightmares, whether at the Hudson River crossings or on narrow, antiquated local streets.

A transportation reporter like Cichowski shouldn't need a survey on traffic bottlenecks to tell him there is not enough mass transit in Christie's New Jersey to take drivers off of the road.

And the hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity, waste of gasoline and aggravated air pollution isn't news to his readers.

The only "debate" over raising the gasoline tax to finance road and bridge repairs, and improve mass transit -- the way it has been done for decades -- is the one Cichowski and other burned-out reporters and editors  manufacturer to get people to read their trashy, irresponsible journalism.

In our unusually diverse state, Christie demonizes Syrians

Guajillo Mexican Restaurant at 10 Sussex St. in Hackensack has served its last taco.

Guajillo is another business on or near Main Street that couldn't wait for the renaissance officials are predicting after tenants move into new downtown apartments.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

I've met a lot of nice Syrians in Paterson in the past 30 years, but judging from the front page of The Record, today would not be a good day to be one.

Governor Christie -- whom the editors have elevated to world leader from his usual role as incompetent state executive -- is going after Syrians in the wake of the Paris massacre (A-1).

Many readers are getting sick and tired of the expected also-ran in the GOP presidential nominating contest taking pot shots at President Obama that seem racially inspired.

Silk City

And Paterson seems to be on Christie's shit list, if you include all the work he has done to fight crime in Camden instead of Silk City, and his comments on barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States.

Even though reporter Hannan Adely has written extensively about Muslims in North Jersey, she makes no attempt today to explain to readers that most of the Syrians in Paterson are Christian, not Muslim, and many have lived there for generations.

They work in county government and in just about every other job, including lawyers, teachers, police officers and firefighters, and in South Paterson, Syrian immigrants, both Christian and Muslim, run bakeries, restaurants and other food businesses.

Syrians have helped make New Jersey one of the most diverse states in the nation, despite the GOP moron who is running roughshod over more progressive leaders in Trenton.

Local news

The editors of Local ignore Hackensack for yet another day, and the thin section contains two major elements from Passaic County, and stories about bears and oysters (L-1 and L-3). 

A story on the Local front speaks volumes about home-rule governments, which seem to foster no-show jobs and outrageous salaries for police chiefs, high school principals and others.

Palisades Park Mayor James Rotundo has resigned as the $35,000-a-year "supervisor of school custodians," a position he has held for more than two years (L-1).

The story identifies Rotundo as "full-time ... assistant  executive director of the Northwest Bergen County Utilities Authority," but his name is not included in the agency's 2015 budget.