Courts say Governor Christie is wrong for N.J.

An NJ Transit rail car in 1980 or 2013? This was one of the cars on the 4:31 local to Trenton from Manhattan on Friday afternoon.

By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

Page 1 of The Record today and Friday reports court rulings on affordable housing and gay marriage that reject Governor Christie's mean-spirited policies.

Now, voters can add those major issues to all of the other areas Christie has been wrong on:

Mass transit, hiking the minimum wage,  women's health, school breakfasts for low-income children, etc. etc .

Today, we received our mail-in ballots for the Nov. 5 election, and we will gladly be marking them to vote for Democrat Barbara Buono for governor and a constitutional amendment to raise the state's minimum wage to $8.25 an hour.

Is Christie "Mr. Clean," as today's A-3 headline suggests?

What about the many assistant U.S. attorneys or cronies he named to jobs in his administration or at the Port Authority, which continues to soak drivers with exorbitant tolls and refuses to expand public transit -- all with Christie's approval?

On Friday's A-3, environmentalists note Christie's voodoo budget balancing included $850 million taken from clean-energy programs. What a guy.

On Friday's A-6, The Record reports a proposed $174,000 death benefit for the widow of Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, the eighth-richest member of Congress at the time of his death in June.

But a reader knew about the tax-free benefit three days earlier, according to a letter to the editor published on Friday's A-20. Maybe he should be hired as a reporter.

Staff Writer John Cichowski continues to commit major errors in the Road Warrior column, even as he avoids addressing major commuting problems.

One glaring example in Friday's column on the Local front is his reporting that "roughly 200 people" are killed each years by drivers who are backing up vehicles.

In fact, the number of adults and children killed is closer to 292 annually, according to a concerned reader who created a Facebook page for Road Warrior Bloopers.

The only Thursday events worth reporting at the Bergen County Courthouse, one of the state's busiest, was the appearance of Newark Archbishop John J. Myers, and testimony in the titanic legal battle over the $800 million Hudson News inheritance (L-1 and L-5).

In Friday's Better Living, doesn't that huge hunk of presumably low-quality pork chop -- filled with harmful additives and burned to a crisp -- look appetizing (BL-20)?

It's another lukewarm restaurant review from Staff Writer Elisa Ung, who describes herself and a friend at Due in Ridgewood as "a pack of hungry lions."

So hungry that Ung managed to sample three desserts on top of all that artery clogging pork, beef and bacon.

Who wants to go to a restaurant that refunds only a fraction of the outrageous $23 charged for a chicken dish Ung describes as "so dry I could barely swallow the first bite; everything else stayed on the plate"?