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Showing posts with label Dictator Trump. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dictator Trump. Show all posts

Friday, March 17, 2017

Federal judges teaching Dictator Trump several valuable lessons in democracy

A cartoon from Marian Kamensky in Switzerland shows President Trump getting his ass kicked by federal judges after he signed a new travel ban targeting Muslims.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.


By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

So far, three federal judges have turned thumbs down on President Trump's revised travel ban targeting Muslims.

Isn't that rich? 

Trump's older sister is a federal judge on the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.

And on Wednesday, The Record reports, that very same appeals court granted a 25-year-old Afghan man a temporary emergency stay from deportation from New Jersey (1A).

It's unlikely Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who has been on senior status since 2011, took part in the decision, but I've yet to see The Record or any other news outlet try to interview her about her brother's attacks on the integrity of the federal judiciary.

An Associated Press story on 8A today reports judges in Hawaii and Maryland blocked Dictator Trump's latest executive order from taking effect on Thursday, "using the president's own words as evidence that the order discriminates against Muslims."

The judges agreed with civil liberties groups and refugee and immigrant advocates that the temporary ban on travel from six predominantly Muslim countries violates the First Amendment.

The Trump administration argued the ban was intended to protect the United States from terrorism.

Trump himself called the Hawaii ruling "unprecedented judicial overreach," and promised an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

By the way, today's paper was the first one Gannett delivered to my home since Monday.


Federal appeals court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry,
older sister of President Trump, will turn 80 on April 5.
This photo is from Reuters.


Spying claims

Meanwhile, the leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee -- the Republican chairman and Democratic vice chairman -- flatly refuted Trump's claims that his New York offices were wiretapped by Barack Obama himself or anyone else in the Obama administration (9A).

Trump tweeted the charges, but provided no evidence.

Days before the intelligence panel's decision, The Record ran two Page 1 columns based on an interview with Kellyanne Conway, the serial liar who was the Trump campaign manager and now is the president's counselor. 

The neutral headline gave Conway's lies more credibility than they deserved:

"Conway extends
surveillance tale"

Snow removal

Could a photo on the front of today's Local section be The Record's first mention of the effectiveness of snow removal in Hackensack, Englewood and other towns in the circulation area after Tuesday's big storm (1L)?

A man is shown clearing snow from the roof of a building "along Route 4 in Paramus."

Of course, drivers found many streets still covered with ice on Wednesday, and uncleared crosswalks forced pedestrians to endanger themselves by walking in the street.

Meanwhile, editors and reporters at the Woodland Park daily caught up on their sleep.

Photo blooper

On March 8, a photo caption in The Record's Better Living section mistakenly identified Alexander Graham Bell as the "inventor of the light bulb and telephone."

Surely, Thomas Alva Edison turned over in his West Orange grave.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Rampage by Dictator Trump overshadows deaths of two prominent local residents

A little after 7 on Wednesday morning, the rush-hour NJ Transit train I boarded at Anderson Street in Hackensack, below, was standing room only to Secaucus, an old story that has been ignored by The Record's transportation columnist, who continues to obsess over potholes and signs obscured by foliage.


By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Readers of The Record can be forgiven if they missed the obituaries of two prominent Teaneck residents amid all of the coverage of how President Trump is trampling people's rights and trying to destroy the environment to create jobs.

The first was award-winning jazz photographer Chuck Stewart, 89, an African-American whose death was reported last Wednesday.

"Texas-born and Arizona-raised, Stewart made money the first day he snapped a picture [at 13 years old]," Staff Writer Jay Levin wrote.

Richard A. Green, the peripatetic Gannett editor now running the Woodland Park newsroom, decided that instead of running the Stewart obit on Page 1, he needed that space to promote a boring Sports feature on "North Jersey players to reach the Super Bowl."

The second important Teaneck resident was Stephen P. Cohen, 71, whose obituary was published on Friday.

Cohen "for decades served as a back-channel mediator between Israel and its Arab neighbors," Levin said.

There certainly was room on Page 1 for Cohen's obit, if Green hadn't gotten so excited over conversion of the ferry boat Binghamton into a restaurant barge.

Just two more examples of the awful news judgment exhibited by a clueless out-of-state editor who swooped into New Jersey to run a once-great local daily newspaper.

Refugee ban

Trump, who has been acting more like a dictator than a president, suffered his first setback late Saturday, when a federal judge in Brooklyn prevented some refugees who were detained at airports from being deported (1A).

A sidebar with today's main story on protests over Trump's refugee ban notes "a Rutgers Ph.D. student who went to visit her ill mother in Syria was stopped on her way back during a Paris layover and barred from returning to Newark" (1A).

At the bottom of Page 1 today, a news story tries to guess at what was said during Trump's hour-long phone call on Saturday to his BFF, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin is believed to have been behind Russian meddling that helped Trump in the Nov. 8 presidential election, and he's been called a war criminal for unleashing his military on innocent civilians in Aleppo, Syria.

Food coverage

Petite Soo Chow, one of restaurants promoted in a Chinese New Year feature on Saturday, has been closed down at least twice by Cliffside Park health inspectors.

We stopped patronizing the restaurant after we saw a male waiter picking his nose in the dining room.

Staff Writer Sophia F. Gottfried also recommended Aquarius Seafood Restaurant in Fort Lee, even though its Chinese New Year menus "start" at $688 (Saturday's Better Living section).

Gottfried ignored Lotus Cafe, a BYO in Hackensack that is offering a special four-course Chinese New Year Menu for $29.95 per person.