Just another rich Republican

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More bad news from Governor Christie is back on the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today. This governor is another Republican who takes from the working and middle classes and gives tax breaks to wealthy people like the Borgs, owners of North Jersey Media Group.

Now, Christie wants to divert $158 million from the state Clean Energy Program to help with a $2.2 billion deficit in Trenton, Staff Writer Scott Fallon reports. Dozen of environmental programs could be scaled down, including a rebate program for solar panels, the story says.

Two corrections appear on A-2 today, but neither addresses the two errors assignment and copy editors overlooked in Staff Writer Giovanna Fabiano's L-1 story yesterday on the Leonia police chief. The suspect was William David Jones, not "Davie," and the victim was a 21-year-old woman, not "girl," according to a 1995 story in The Record.

If you doubt court, crime and accident news is being pedaled as local news by the lazy, incompetent assignment desk under Deirdre Sykes, take a look at L-3 today -- all but a few lines are devoted to those stories. Elsewhere in Local, there is a one paragraph story about Teaneck and a brief identifying a 34-year-old Hackensack woman killed in an auto accident in Ringwood.

Was she someone's wife, mother, daughter? Let's hope the family buys a death notice, because the police reporter cares not. Yet there is another long story today about the Paterson teen who was gunned down early Saturday.

Christie cuts become clearer

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With The Record of Woodland Park, readers have to become detectives, searching the paper for clues to the biggest stories of the day. With most other dailies, you'd find those stories on the front page.

But the lazy, incompetent editors become bored with important stories -- such as the state's budget crisis and Governor Christie's drastic cuts in aid -- so the issues bounce onto and off of Page 1 with regularity.

On the front of Local yesterday, the acting education commissioner said state school aid to municipalities wouldn't be cut as much as previously announced. But today, two stories -- one on A-8 and the other on the Local front -- reveal how Christie's cuts will affect nearly 12,000 legal immigrants and more than 1,000 low-income students in Bergen and Passaic counties.

The legal immigrants would lose state health insurance under the NJ FamilyCare program, and the students are enrolled in an after-school enrichment program in Englewood -- one of more than 100 in the state that may have to close.

You might remember Christie has refused to renew the so-called millionaire's tax on people like the wealthy Malcolm A. Borg and his son, mansion-loving Publisher Stephen A. Borg, of North Jersey Media Group. He also plans to cut taxes for the prosperous owners of small businesses. And although he won't even raise the low gasoline tax a couple of cents, he didn't hesitate to slash subsidies to NJ Transit, forcing the agency to propose a 25% fare hike and service cuts for rail and bus riders, some of whom can't afford cars.

So if you hunt around the paper and remember what you read in days and weeks past, you can see a pattern emerging here. Of course, editors at good newspapers do that work for you, but at The Record, Frank Scandale, Frank Burgos, Deirdre Sykes, Tim Nostrand and Alfred P. Doblin and their good-for-nothing subordinates couldn't care less about readers.

For example, look at Doblin's silly column on the editorial page today, where he compares the ruinously expensive home rule system to "a very big cow." Well, big cows produce big turds. So does Doblin.

Free hot air today

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Road Warrior Columnist John Cichowski needs to get off his duff and take a first-hand look at the problems of commuters -- both drivers and mass-transit users.

Instead, he spends hour after hour in the office poring over e-mails he gets from readers of The Record of Woodland Park and often takes his lead from them, because he has to turn out three columns a week and is desperate for material.

Today, on the front of Local, his column is hung on a single e-mail, and he enlists the aid of other readers to answer her question: Where can a driver find free air to keep tires inflated properly. But he doesn't go far enough and completely ignores a related issue: Gas stations that don't hit you with a surcharge for using a credit card.

Properly inflated tires improve gas mileage, but if you pay 5 cents to 10 cents more per gallon for using a credit card, the savings are canceled. I use the Shell station in Teaneck he lists as having free air, but do so because it charges the same for cash or credit, especially important for drivers like me who hold a cash-rebate card (I get 5% back on gasoline purchases).

John, you'd be a much better, more relevant columnist if you come down from Garret Mountain and rub shoulders with many of the commuters you have long ignored -- the rail and bus riders who often are ill-served by NJ Transit. You need to pay more attention to them, especially at a time when they are facing 25% fare hikes and service cuts. Now, your columns seem frivolous.

The Page 1 story on the jobless problems of returning veterans is told in the pictures -- all of the vets featured appear to be minorities, but Staff Writer Harvy Lipman doesn't discuss whether they are having a harder time than other vets finding work.


Yet, the other A-1 story is about a shortage of black donors for lifesaving stem cell or bone marrow transplants. 


I noticed a number of typos today, starting on A-1. The level of news copy editing continues to decline.

In the other sections, the best I found was Virginia Rohan's interview in Better Living with the flamboyant ex-Patersonian who scripts the Oscar show, especially his memories of Silk City in the 1950s and his anecdote about the city of Garfield after the Kennedy assassination.

Did anyone bother reading wind bags Mike Kelly and Bill Ervolino today?

Time to call Christie's bluff?

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In the last paragraph of today's Page 1 story on NJ Transit fare hikes, Staff Writer Tom Davis quotes Governor Christie as calling the agency "a political patronage mill." Well, if that's true and if that's part of Christie's justification for cutting state transit aid, why hasn't Davis given us any details?

Instead, Davis cobbled together an elaborate but ultimately inaccurate front-page story yesterday in The Record of Woodland Park alleging that since NJ Transit receives government assistance, it is taking taxpayers for a ride

Today, this ink-stained wretch reports a proposed 25 percent fare hike and service cuts drew outrage from mass-transit advocates who fear bus and rail service will become unaffordable and "force people to choose their cars over trains and buses."

Hey, Tom, what about the thousands of poor schmucks who have no choice but to ride crappy local NJ Transit buses, because they can't even afford cars? Do you even know they exist?

And when is the former Hackensack daily going to ask the governor about promised property tax cuts? When is Christie going to be asked for details on reigning in the grossly inefficient home-rule system? He loves to issue executive orders, so why not order consolidation of school districts and such municipal agencies as police and fire?  

How is cutting school, municipal, mass-transit and environmental aid going to help the middle class?

Yesterday's Hacknsack Chronicle led with a story on city schools, where the hiring of minority teachers lags behind the percentage of Africa-American and Hispanic students. A second story, on Page 2, contained the Hackensack schools superintendent's reaction to state aid cuts.

Neither of these stories appeared in The Record, which has virtually ignored Hackensack schools in the past few years, while running numerous stories about schools in other North Jersey towns, as part of Publisher Stephen A. Borg's "every day" education coverage (suspended during the summers).

It's a good thing the Hackensack Chronicle is another publication of the Borgs' all-seeing, all-knowing North Jersey Media Group, and is delivered with The Record on Fridays, apparently in recognition the daily has abandoned the city where it prospered for 110 years -- both physically and editorially.