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| The crews of two NYPD patrol boats on the East River stop to shoot the breeze, a scene repeated frequently when municipal police in North Jersey do the same. |
By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR
The Record today helps boost Governor Christie's White House ambitions after his bandwagon spent months spinning its wheels in North Jersey's scandalous traffic.
When the GOP bully wants to shift attention away from the terrible job he is doing on the state economy, mass transit or any other deficiency, all he has to do is snap his fingers.
Editors like The Record's Marty Gottlieb and reporters like Herb Jackson, the paper's Washington correspondent, jump up like lap dogs to catch every deceptive morsel (A-1).
Sadly, Christie is no longer believable, no matter what he says about what he knew and when he knew it on the George Washington Bridge lane closures, the state budget or anything else.
Secret budget cuts
He has successfully kept secret cuts he will make to meet an $807 million state budget shortfall, but is there any suggestion he will do anything different than balance the plan on the backs of the middle and working classes, as he did in the past?
On the continuation page, Jackson reports Christie "did not hesitate to blame his predecessors, state courts and his own staff" for the current budget problems (A-6).
The unflattering photo of Christie on A-6 suggests the lap-band surgery he had a year ago in February hasn't been that successful.
He still looks like he is full of crap.
GWB scandal
Another story on A-1 today calls into question Christie's credibility on last September's lane closures in Democratic Fort Lee.
The lawyer for former campaign manager Bill Stepien says Christie misspoke when he said Stepien told him he didn't have "any knowledge" about the lane closures, which were ordered by a gubernatorial aide and a crony at the Port Authority.
On A-3 today, The Record contrasts President Obama's transportation plan with Christie's failure to find a stable source of revenue for the state Transportation Trust Fund.
The story reports Christie used Port Authority toll money for some road projects, including the Pulaski Skyway, even though previous stories said the governor grabbed $1.8 billion left over from his cancellation of new Hudson River rail tunnels (A-3).
Which is it?
Solar confusion
On the Editorial Page, a boastful columnist and a confused reader's letter to the editor combine today to deliver misinformation about solar panels (A-20).
In "Global warming: It's real. It's Here. Deal with It" (Opinion, May 11), Alan Robock says, "I have solar panels on my roof, subsidized by the state of New Jersey, and have not paid an electric bill for years."
The heading on the letter, "Solar panels not free for everyone," is incorrect.
Robock is not saying his panels were free and he apparently doesn't read his bill carefully, because no system installed with a state subsidy would provide all the electricity a homeowner uses.
The letter writer, Melinda Thompson of Little Ferry, should be able to find a private contractor willing to install solar panels for free in return for the monthly solar renewable energy credits (SRECs) the system generates.
The contractor can sell those credits to the utility over the life of the system to recover his upfront costs.
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