Christie is at the root of all of those traffic jams

Rush-hour traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel entrance in New Jersey.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor

The Record has been reporting on The Traffic Jam That Ate Democratic Fort Lee for three months now, but hasn't seemed to notice how Governor Christie's inaction has worsened traffic everywhere in the region.

Today's paper brings a lot of belly aching about the early September gridlock orchestrated by Christie's Trenton aides and Port Authority cronies at the George Washington Bridge (A-1 and L-1).

The befuddled Road Warrior even foams at the mouth about gridlock during a 1971 strike in New York City (L-1).

How can he remember what happened more than 40 years ago, but contradict a column he wrote a few weeks or a few months ago?

Anti-mass transit

Christie's every policy since he took office in January 2010 appears to have worsened traffic and done nothing to improve mass transit.

Killing the Hudson River rail tunnels was bad enough, but then Christie grabbed a couple of billion in leftover tunnel money to repair roads.

The GOP bully put at least three of his cronies in high-paying jobs at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, rubber stamped much higher tolls and ignored the need to expand the PATH commuter rail network and express bus service into Manhattan.

Kelly fails again

Columnist Mike Kelly is wildly inconsistent and his purple prose cries out for editing, as today's piece on the "view from Fort Lee" demonstrates (A-1).

Is "gaze" in the first paragraph the 50th or 51st time he has used that verb in a lead since he started writing columns more than 20 years ago?

The second paragraph merely shuffles around words with little effect, such as "the steep spires of the George Washington Bridge pushed into a weighty curtain of low-hanging clouds."

Since when are clouds "weighty," and what does the description have to do with his report?

That kind of writing has readers gazing at the shit-eating grin in his column photo.

Local front

Staff Writer John Cichowski's rambling Road Warrior column is no winner, either.

Also on the Local front today, Bergen County Democrats could better spend their time getting their own corrupt house in order than in criticizing Republican County Executive Kathleen Donovan for gridlock in Fort Lee (L-1).

This really stinks

The Better Living front carries one of the worst headlines I've seen in months -- an awkward play on words to describe a woman who left the fashion industry to develop her family's online seafood market (BL-1):

The fish-ionista

But the story is even weaker, failing to report on whether the pricey salmon or other seafood sold by ShopFresh is wild caught or farmed raised.

The latter raises the potential use of artificial color (salmon), antibiotics and preservatives.

And why give all this publicity to an online market that charges more than $15 a pound for "Canadian salmon," plus $9.95 for shipping, when there is an abundance of pristine wild seafood offered by Whole Foods Market, Costco Wholesale and other North Jersey retailers?