Lock him up! Lock him up! Donald Jr. loved the idea of getting dirt on Clinton

"Dirty Donny Jr" is the title of this cartoon from Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

Editor's note: This post has been updated with the events of June 7, 2016. Were they a coincidence or a conspiracy?

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

"Donald Trump Jr. Makes the Russia Connection" is the headline on an editorial in today's New York Times.

"It's all there in the emails," the paper's Editorial Board says.

That's a reference to messages that set up a Trump Tower meeting between the younger Trump and a Russian-government attorney during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Times broke the story on Tuesday, when an online report carried this headline:

"Russian dirt on Clinton? 'I love it,' Donald Trump Jr. said."

And instead of the "transparency" President Trump has attributed to his oldest son, The Times said Mini-Donald only released the incriminating emails after the paper's Washington Bureau gave him a deadline for comment.

Father and son

The president has denied knowledge of his son's meeting with the Russian lawyer.

But on June 7, 2016, the New York businessman promised a "major speech" attacking campaign rival Hillary Clinton -- just hours after son Donald set up the meeting to learn the compromising information on the Democratic candidate, according to several news media reports.

Was that a coincidence or a conspiracy?

Russian support

On Page 1 of The Record of Woodland Park, USA Today reports:

The emails "appear to back up the most damning revelation" by The Times "that Trump's closest associates and family members actively sought out information they knew was part of a high-level Russian government effort to support Trump's campaign."

In other words, when it comes to the Trump family, the fish stinks from the head down.

Lock Don Jr. up! Lock Don Jr. up! 

Isn't that what the Republican National Convention delegates thundered last July about Clinton, even without evidence she had committed a crime?

Local news?

The Record leads the local-news section today with a rare story on Englewood's struggling downtown (1L).

But we've yet to see any stories from Staff Writer Michael W. Curley Jr. on why the small city is one of the most mismanaged in Bergen County.

The only local news about River Edge is a story on the construction of a more modern McDonald's restaurant that will have touch-screen ordering.

Staff Writer Melanie Anzidei doesn't say whether owner Brian Hairston plans to improve the quality of the crappy food.

The big news in Bergenfield and Rutherford? New artificial turf fields (2L and 3L).

Stories on affordable housing in Cresskill and Montvale appear on the Local front and 3L.

Editors blocked health-insurance success stories until Trump moved to repeal law

Staff Writer John Cichowski, The Record's so-called commuting columnist, rarely ventures far from his computer, preferring to rewrite press releases, as on today's Local front, or publishing emails from readers. He's too lazy to ride trains and buses to report on the quality of service. Above and below, NJ Transit's double-decker rail cars at Newark Penn Station.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

"HOPE, DREAD, UNCERTAINTY"

This headline on Page 1 of The Record today does a great job of summing up the emotions of roughly 800,000 New Jersey residents after President Trump started the process of repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Still, many readers are questioning why the Woodland Park daily is only now publishing success stories about former President Obama's signature health-care law (1A and 8A).

Staff Writer Lindy Washburn, the paper's veteran medical writer, doesn't report how many of those 800,000 New Jerseyans have health coverage for the first time.

Nor do readers learn how many want to see the law repealed or expanded.

A poll released in December by the Kaiser Family Foundation found only 26 percent of Americans were in favor of full repeal of the law, while 30 percent favor expanding it, according to NPR.

The poll found Americans continue to be divided along partisan lines about the law.

"Few brag about having Obamacare," Washburn writes, using the pejorative favored by Republicans who have repeatedly tried but failed to repeal the law since 2010.

Success stories

The story is filled with photos of smiling people whose coverage pays for care in their battles with breast cancer, debilitating heart disease and other conditions.

As in her past coverage, Washburn doesn't mention much of the confusion in New Jersey resulted from Governor Christie's attempt to sabotage the law by refusing to set up a state marketplace for purchase of insurance policies.

Instead, New Jersey residents were thrown onto an overburdened federal marketplace, and their choice of heath insurers has been severely limited. 

However, Christie did take credit for expanding Medicaid for low-income New Jersey residents, but relied completely on federal funds to do so.

Refugee ban

Another Page 1 story today reports Christie called the "rollout" of Trump's executive order temporarily blocking refugees from entering the country "terrible" (1A).

What the story doesn't mention is that after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Christie sought to bar all Syrian refugees, including children, from entering the United States.

That was followed by Record stories reporting that churches and social service groups defied the GOP thug, and settled Syrian refugees in North Jersey.

Free electric charging stations in the municipal garage in downtown Englewood.

Local news?

The Record today publishes three stories about Englewood, all by Staff Writer Michael W. Curley Jr. 

Two of the stories explore the many vacant storefronts in downtown Englewood, and a rise of bullying in the small city's public schools (1L and 6L).

But Curley -- and the editors who handled the first story before it was published -- downplay high rents as a leading factor in business vacancies.

The story on bullying in the schools doesn't mention that a bigger problem is segregation -- Englewood's elementary and middle schools are attended by few white students, and desegregation efforts apparently have been focused solely on the high school. 

For past commentary

 on The Record, see:

Eye on The Record