Hackensack schools chief is out; wacko Trump taps Plump

Karen Lewis, superintendent of Hackensack schools, has been suspended with pay, according to BergenDispatch.com (Photo credit: Schoolword.com)

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

The Record missed another big Hackensack story today -- the suspension with pay of Schools Superintendent Karen Lewis.

On Monday, Paul Nichols of BergenDispatch.com cited "multiple sources" in reporting that Lewis is out despite a 5-year contract that paid her $167,500 a year starting on Dec. 1, 2013.

With bonuses, Lewis was paid more than Governor Christie, who receives $175,000 a year.

Board of Education President Jason Nunnermacker had no comment, but told Nichols "the matter will be appropriately addressed" at tonight's scheduled board meeting in the high school media room.

The suspension comes about three weeks after the April 19 Hackensack school election.

Two incumbents and a former board member were elected to three-year terms, and a tiny minority of registered voters approved a $79 million tax levy to support a total school budget of $104 million.

Trump and Christie

Since Christie took office in early 2010, the GOP bully has transformed New Jersey into a state of emergency.

So, you have to wonder why the editors are making such a big deal over wacko racist Donald Trump picking Christie to head a transition team in the unlikely event the billionaire and presumptive Republican nominee is elected president (A-1).

Satirist Bill Maher referred to the pair as "Trump and Plump."

Trump's election is as much of a long shot as was Christie's bid for the nomination.

Women to bury him

The billionaire racist likely will be buried under the votes of millions of women for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

One thing Trump and Christie have in common is their hatred of Muslims, and both have tapped into the deep-seated racial animosity toward our first black president.

In New Jersey, not only has the governor been waging war against New Jersey's middle and working classes, but his cancellation of the Hudson River rail tunnels has really screwed up mass transit -- as another Page 1 story reports today.

The story on the Gateway Tunnel project carries a dual byline -- Christopher Maag, who covers NJ Transit, and Paul Berger, the Port Authority reporter.

But the first paragraph is overly long, and contains the phrases "environmental permits" and "environmental regulations."

Federal agencies are said to want to "rush through environmental regulations" -- whatever that means.

Local news?

From the looks of the local-news section, there was plenty of room for a story on the Hackensack schools superintendent.

The only other Hackensack news is a huge photo of two vehicles burning on Byrne Street after a power line fell (L-6).

Below that is another filler photo, this one about a stove fire in Paramus.

'Army of hacks'

A brief on Uber drivers forming a new labor organization in New York City to win better treatment and pay refers to them an "army of homemade hacks" (L-9).

Surely, that's an insult, considering that many Uber drivers in the city have years of experience as livery drivers or work for Uber to supplement their income from other driving jobs.

The true hacks are the reporter and editors who handled the story, which is from an unnamed news service.

Better Living

What are readers to make of today's Better Living cover story on grown men racing miniature radio-controlled racing cars in Hackensack (BL-1)?

And why does the piece carry the byline of Maag, a transportation reporter?

On BL-2, Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung promotes another spot for Callahan's mystery meat hot dogs.

More clueless reporting on latest toll hike, elderly drivers

The New Jersey entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, where tolls went up today for the fifth year in a row, as they did at all of the crossings operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in what The Record suggests was a plot between Governors Christie and Cuomo.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Once again, The Record is portraying New Jersey's bridge and tunnel crowd as powerless to do anything beyond bitching and moaning about the latest toll increase at the GWB and other crossings.

Today's story on the Local front ignores off-peak toll discounts available to drivers of hybrid and other green cars, as well as the biggest break of all, available 24/7 to any motorist -- the Carpool Plan.

Starting today, the peak E-ZPass toll went to $12.50 from $11.75, and the off-peak E-ZPass rate also is up 75 cents, to $9.75 (L-1).

Go green, save green

But owners of more than 40 hybrid, plug-in and all-electric models with a "Green E-ZPass" pay only $7 off-peak, and any driver with an E-ZPass and a total of three people in the car pays only $6.50 at all times.

The Green Pass and Carpool Plans require pre-registration. The Green Pass discount has been available since 2004.

Major error

Staff Writer Marina Villeneuve also includes a major factual error that was overlooked by all of the editors who read her story before publication.

"Starting today," the reporter says, "auto motorists using cash will have to pay $15 to cross, a trip that until recently cost half that" (L-1).

Putting the awkward phrase "auto motorists" aside, the cash toll was never "half" of $15.

It was $8, but that was four years ago, in 2011, not "recently."

And that was when Governors Christie and Cuomo perpetrated the great, annual toll-hike scam to finance construction of a new World Trade Center and other projects.

Elderly drivers

Road Warrior John Cichowski is another reporter who ignores the facts, as readers can see in today's attempt to drum up business for "a low-cost, volunteer ride service ... for the elderly and visually impaired" (L-1).

ITN's North Jersey affiliate in Wyckoff hasn't be able to find enough volunteers so the improvement in "public safety" -- by removing seniors who are visually impaired from behind the wheel -- has been limited.

Cichowski knows from all of the seniors who mistake the gas pedal for the brake pedal that retraining would cut the number of accidents and deaths far more dramatically than a ride service for the elderly.

But in more than a dozen years of writing his column, Cichowski has been too lazy to contact AARP  and similar groups to find out if retraining is available to his peers.

Today's front page

I've rarely seen a Sunday edition with a front page so devoid of useful news for readers in North Jersey.

On the Opinion front, Columnist Mike Kelly doesn't seem willing to denounce lawmakers for taking contributions from the National Rifle Association to block a bill that would stop "terrorists" from buying a gun (O-1 and O-4).

Kelly calls an average of three dozen people killed by guns on any given day "embarrassing." 

And "heartbreaking" is how he describes the lack of "any concrete political action to stop this blood-soaked trend."

I won't bore you with the rest of his column.

Uber screws drivers

The Record's Business section has been anti-worker for decades.

Today's long story on the impact of Uber on the traditional yellow-cab industry continues the trend (B-1).

Staff Writer Richard Newman's focus are the potential losses faced by banks that have issued hundreds of millions of dollars in loans backed by "New York City taxi medallions, which have declined in value from ... $1.3 million two years ago to about $80o,000 today."

Newman doesn't discuss the impact on cabbies nor report on the exploitation of Uber drivers, who supply their own cars and pay for gas, insurance and repairs.

Sinatra overload

I'd much rather hear Frank Sinatra sing and watch him act than plow through three major pieces on him in today's paper (A-1 and BL-1).

Two of them are by Staff Writer Bill Ervolino, whose regular humor column bombs every Sunday.

The only saving grace is that Better Living editors couldn't find room for The Corner Table column from food critic Elisa Ung, who usually promotes celebrity chefs and wealthy restaurant owners or makes excuses for why they don't serve naturally raised food.
   

Editors still obsess over Christie's White House dreams

Residents of Tenafly have asserted their constitutional right to commute individually in gas-guzzling luxury vehicles, rejecting an NJ Transit proposal to extend pollution-free light-rail service to their wealthy community. Plans now are for light-rail service only as far as downtown Englewood and Englewood Hospital and Medical Center.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Today and every Sunday it seems, The Record runs a column assessing how Governor Christie is doing in his bid for the White House.

In the past couple of years, Columnist Charles Stile appears to have done little else than report on how state and national politics will affect Christie's bid for the GOP nomination in 2016 (A-1).

Tabloid news

Today, Editor Marty Gottlieb went tabloid on Page 1, with a lurid story on a Closter couple's murder-suicide while their 15-month-old son remained unharmed.
The headline was trite:

Couple's violent end

shocks community

Really, how many stories like this does the staff have to do before realizing neighbors usually know very little about the lives of the people next door?

And when will The Record stop labeling photos of police on the front steps of a dead couple's home as showing officers "searching for clues" (A-6).

Christie, Wilson

But Stile's column also is at the top of the front page, next to this sensational report.

Far more interesting is Staff Writer Jim Beckerman's shocking story on the 100th anniversary of "Birth of a Nation," a racist film that apparently was endorsed by the last New Jersey governor to become president, Woodrow Wilson (A-1).

Wilson screened "The Birth of a Nation" in the White House, the first film to be shown there (A-10).

Focus on TV news

The fourth main element on Page 1 is a story about Brian Williams taking a break from anchoring the "NBC Nightly News" after false on-air statements that he was in a helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade while in Iraq in 2003.

Newspapers have far more serious issues to deal with -- from the faked Washington Post story on an 8-year-old heroin addict that won a Pulitzer Prize to fabricated New York Times quotes in stories by Jayson Blair to the drastic decline in local-news coverage at The Record.

More fabrication

What Staff Writer John Cichowski did recently in The Record's Road Warrior column isn't any different.

Despite a photo showing nothing of the kind, Cichowski deliberately tried to panic readers into believing a Route 4 bridge in Teaneck was unsafe, because, he claimed, it had a "gash" in a major supporting pillar.

Since then, that bridge and other Route 4 bridges shown in a subsequent column have remained open while state officials closed other spans for emergency repairs.

The Record hasn't run a correction of Cichowski's false statement, but today uses a photo of another Route 4 bridge that "got one of the lowest scores for deck evaluation" (O-2).

Does that mean the bridge is unsafe? If so, why hasn't that bridge been closed for repairs? 

If it's not unsafe, why run the photo with an editorial labeled, "Closing bridges"?

On A-2 today, a correction notes a Route 17 overpass was incorrectly identified in a Friday story on bridge repairs as a Route 46 overpass.

Worse was a correction on Saturday's A-2, admitting the inept news desk ran the wrong photo for U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman, who grew up in River Edge.

Turkeys galore

On the Better Living cover, Elisa Ung's The Corner Table column doesn't contain a word on whether the ground turkey in the restaurant dishes she loved was raised naturally without harmful antibiotics (BL-1).

And how did jazz musician and Teaneck resident Rufus Reid overlook the Golden Grill Restaurant as a great place to hang out in the township (BL-1)?

On the Business cover, Richard Newman's story on Uber, Lyft and other ride-sharing services doesn't mention the low pay and exploitation of the drivers (B-1).

And sad but true, Staff Writer Melanie Anzidei apparently couldn't find a single North Jersey company that used the windfall from cheap fuel to raise employees' pay (B-1).

On the Opinion front, Columnist Mike Kelly asks, "Did Saudi Arabia pay for 9/11 attacks" (O-1).

But Kelly never mentions what Americans have know for more than a decade:

Osama bin Laden was born in Saudia Arabia to the family of a billionaire and founded al-Qaida -- which claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attack -- after funneling arms, money and fighters into Afghanistan to oppose the Soviet Union. 

Second look

Last week, The Record ran a glowing story on how a developer will save $1 million by using a space-saving carousel parking system when an office building at 210 Main St. in Hackensack is converted into apartments. 

But the story didn't make clear the elevator-like steel structure won't be enclosed.

A photo of the Parkmatic structure on the front of Friday's edition of the Hackensack Chronicle shows just how ugly this space saver will be.