It could be payback time at the Supreme Court

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The Turnpike Authority wants to privatize toll collections, but not cut tolls.

New Jersey's beleaguered middle class is seeing a glimmer of hope the state's high court will shove a millionaires tax down Governor Christie's big, fat mouth.

The Record reported on Page 1 today that Christie sent a former attorney general to cop a plea before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, hoping to squirm out of having to restore more than $1 billion cut from the public schools.

Christie's mouthpiece told the justices: We're broke. Give us a break from having to meet the constitutional mandate of a "thorough-and-efficient" education.

But Associate Justice Barry Albin was skeptical, Staff Writer Leslie Brody reported, noting that last year, Christie did not reinstate a tax surcharge on the wealthiest residents that raised about $1 billion -- money that could have been used to aid schools.

As residents await the ruling, they can only hope it's payback time at the high court, which lost its only African-American justice last year after the conservative Republican bully refused to grant him tenure.

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Is the New Jersey Turnpike Authority's attempt to get rid of the toll collectors union (A-1) getting better coverage than Christie's assault on the far larger public employees union? 

Wrong headline

The headline on the lead Page 1 story -- "Roommate faces 10 years" -- is far more appropriate for a story reporting he was convicted and faces 10 years at sentencing than for an indictment story.

Isn't it likely Dharun Ravi will plea-bargain the bias charge in the suicide of a Ridgewood teen and get a short jail term and community service, if that?

In head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section, the only Hackensack news is a school health fair to combat childhood obesity, and the arrest of a suspect in a store holdup,

A health fair to combat adult obesity is long overdue in the Woodland Park newsroom.

Editors continue to soil their clothes

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Water will fill the void left by destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Today's Page 1 story about a driver and driver's aide who forgot about a 4-year-old trapped on a school bus reminds me of how Publisher Stephen A. Borg took over in mid-2006 and forgot all about the editors trapped in the newsroom.

And like the boy, who urinated in his pants, Editors Francis Scandale, Deirdre Sykes, Barbara Jaeger, Liz Houlton, Tim Nostrand and others repeatedly soil their clothes in a journalistic sense with crappy reporting and writing -- leaving many readers howling in disbelief. 

Pipe dreams

The main element today likely is the first time a story about plumbing (for the 9/11 memorial waterfalls) has been splashed all over the front page of The Record of Woodland Park.

But you have to plow through all the reporting on nuts, bolts and pipes, and gee-whiz statistics before you learn -- deep into the text on the continuation page (A-6) -- that Staff Writer Shawn Boburg buried the human, emotional story of how one plumber's mother died in the Twin Towers on 9/11. 

The story also is silent on why hundreds of solar panels weren't incorporated into the design to drastically cut the estimated $1.7 million annual cost of electricity to move all that water. Or why plumbers charge so much.

Who is Boburg's clueless assignment editor?

Let's make a deal

Governor Christie is gambling that even legal bills of $3 million to $4 million would be justified, if he can get the Feds to accept half or a third of the $271 million debt left from the Hudson River rial tunnels he stopped dead in their tracks (A-1).

New Jersey lawmakers now are following the example of their counterparts in Wisconsin -- they're refusing to act on Christie's legislative initiatives -- pissing off the Republican bully (A-4). 

Baseball justice

A letter to the editor from Howard Shaw of Rutherford asks if Judge Donald Venezia was wearing a Mets or Yankee shirt under his robes when he gave Dwight Gooden a get-out-of-jail card for DUI driving with his 5-year-old in the back seat (A-10). 

Should Venezia be censured by the Supreme Court? Did the reporter who covered the April 15 hearing ask prosecutors if they could appeal the ruling?

Shell-shocked readers

You know the Local news report is in trouble, when Sykes has to put on her front page a story about a Northvale man who found a bazooka shell in his garage. 

Road Warrior John Cichowski writes another column from the comfort of his computer chair -- an AAA report on the cost of driving a car (L-1). 

Chick has asked Sykes for a cot and small refrigerator to make his long office stays more comfortable.

In place of municipal news, readers get a lot of police news and court stories throughout Local today.

Dishonest reporting

In a Better Living story on pitching your book idea in Ridgewood that ran Tuesday, Staff Writer Mike Kerwick fails to tell readers you have to buy a copy of "The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published" in order to qualify.

According to Bookends, only 20 people who buy the book will be able to pitch their ideas in person to the authors and a "major" publisher. That information also was missing from the story.

Life is easy for Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill, whose entire job seems to be publishing a single recipe on Wednesdays (F-1), plus writing a few items for the Second Helpings blog and tweeting her brains out.

The Star-Ledger 3, The Record A Big Fat 0

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The Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal.

"I should never have listened to them! I should never have listened to them!" Editor Francis Scandale wailed as he pounded his desk in the Woodland Park newsroom, recalling 9/11 and the night he blew winning a Pulitzer Prize for The Record.

"Now, Frank, there's always next year," head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes -- Mother of All Editors -- said soothingly as she tried to comfort the boss.

Scandale was reacting to Monday's news that The Star-Ledger of Newark won its third Pulitzer Prize since January 2001, when he took over at The Record (A-7). 

'Pull It, Sir'

Instead of winning journalism's biggest prize for The Record, Scandale has become "Pull It, Sir," in the colorful vernacular of Jerry DeMarco, former Breaking News editor.

About eight months after Scandale arrived in Hackensack, he faced the biggest story of his career -- the 9/11 attack on America, which was visible from the newsroom -- and blew it big time when he put a potentially Pulitzer Prize-winning photo on a back page.

Of course, I can only guess at the reasoning of Pulitzer board members. but why give a prize to a photo even the newspaper didn't think worthy of the front page?

Unique image

Photographer Thomas E. Franklin's image of firefighters defiantly raising the American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center would have advanced the story and made The Record's front page unique among the world's newspapers.

Bowing to pressure from the business side -- he was told it would be "too expensive" to re-make A-1 -- Scandale slunk away with his tail between his legs, marking the first of his many failures in the job.

And it was a job he probably got because he had helped The Denver Post win a Pulitzer for its coverage of the Columbine massacre in 1999.

In 2008, The Record's coverage of the EnCap golf-resort project was a finalist in the local news category of the Pulitzer competition -- in other words, an also-ran. 

Today's paper

Oh no. A verklempt Scandale allowed Staff Writer Deena Yellin to hijack the front page today for a another story and big photo about those crazy Orthodox Jews and their obscure rituals (and she's one of them). 

This reminds me of how Scandale always assigned two Castro-hating Cuban exiles to write about Cuba for The Record.

Does even 1 out of every 1,000 Jews burn bread and other chametz before Passover? And the photo of a rabbi in a fire helmet doesn't even show any bread being burned. Can Scandale get any more desperate than this?

Readers shouldn't hold their collective breath for Yellin stories on Orthodox Jews who are trying to take over municipal councils and school boards in Englewood and Teaneck, so they can cut the taxes they pay for public schools their kids don't use. 

Screwing the middle class

Despite an A-3 story on protests over big companies not paying taxes on billions of profits, the clueless Business staff fails to come up with a story on how they do it.

Also on A-3, Governor Christie is so busy trying to find new ways of destroying the middle-class way of life in New Jersey, he didn't pay his taxes on time.

Arrogant judge

Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin deserves rare praise for an A-10 editorial calling a non-custodial sentence for former baseball player Dwight Gooden "absurd" and criticizing Superior Court Judge Donald Venezia for ignoring the "public's interest."

Two Ridgewood stories appear in Sykes' Local section today, but none from Hackensack. Still, Sykes has to use another one of those gee-whiz, non-fatal accident photos to fill space (L-6).

Rubbing salt in wounds

With gasoline heading for $4 a gallon amid record unemployment and housing foreclosures, doesn't Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung's lavish meal at a restaurant in far off Red Bank sound a lot like fiddling while Rome burns (Better Living front)?

Forcing readers to do the math

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The Passaic River canyon, foreground, and the city of Paterson.

Would it kill Editor Francis Scandale to assign a story that draws together all the proposed state budget-cutting proposals and possible sources of revenue -- so readers don't have to keep a pad and pencil by their side and do the match as information appears in dribs and drabs?

In The Record of Woodland Park today, an A-3 story from The Star-Ledger provides Governor Christie's "most detailed explanation" to date of how he would cut public employees' health benefits. The plan would save $870 million a year by 2014, Treasury officials say.

Busting myths

On Sunday, also on A-3, The Star-Ledger reported New Jersey gained about $1 billion a year from 2004 to 2007 from higher taxes on residents making more than $500,000 a year -- and lost only $16.4 million in tax revenue from those who left the state in the same three years.

Why isn't The Record staff doing these stories? Does Scandale fear readers would see instantly how Christie is waging a war financed by the Borgs and other wealthy residents against public workers and other segments of the middle class?

Shafting commuters

Page 1 today is filled with a lot of what-ifs, but the lead story raises the possibility the state could lose federal funding of the proposed Amtrak tunnel under the Hudson River. 

If that happens, Christie will have railroaded commuters by pulling the plug on an earlier tunnel project and thumbing his nose at billions in federal funds -- while steering hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to a high-powered law firm to fight the Feds' demand for repayment of other money.

Broken city

Has Paterson always been mismanaged? The layoffs of 392 municipal workers, including 125 police officers, "officially" takes effect today, but the story is buried on Page L-8 in head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section.

Is Christie going to ride to the rescue of the Silk City at the head of a posse of state police? Don't hold your breath. The governor is no friend of blacks, as he showed by dismissing the state Supreme Court's only African-American justice.

And, of course, Sykes and the other editors have never shown any affection for blacks or Hispanics -- inside or outside of the newsroom.

Out of gas

In Sunday's Travel section, a lone Asian woman broke the all-white color barrier of the T-3 photo feature called "The Record on The Road." What a diverse readership.

Travel Editor Jill Schensul's T-1 cover story on the rising cost of travel contains this gem: "With the price of gas reaching record-breaking proportions ...."