Attacking the courts, press and Congress, Trump is poised to destroy the presidency

"The Remaking of the GOP" is how cartoonist Nate Beeler of The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch sees President Trump's attacks on Republican members of Congress who don't do his bidding.

The Atlantic: He's bringing

 vital institutions down with him

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

President Trump is a "Frankenstein's monster of past presidents' worst attributes," The Atlantic magazine says in a hard-hitting cover story:

"Andrew Jackson's rage, Millard Fillmore's bigotry, James Buchanan's incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt's self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon's paranoia, insecurity and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton's lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty."

"Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?" is the troubling headline on the cover of The Atlantic's October issue, though I question the use of a question mark.

"He [Trump] disdains the rule of law. He's trampling norms of presidential behavior and he's bringing vital institutions down with him," Jack Goldsmith reports.

"Donald Trump is testing the institution of the presidency unlike any of his 43 predecessors," Goldsmith says:

"We have never had a president so-ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration."

At another point in the article, Goldsmith says:

"Trump, in short, is wielding a Soprano touch on American institutions: 'I'm fucking King Midas in reverse here,' Tony Soprano once told his therapist. 'Everything I touch turns to shit.'" 

Read the complete article here:

The White House is listing badly

Cartoonist Adam Zyglis of The Buffalo (N.Y.) News calls the Harvey Weinstein sexual-harassment scandal, "No Country for Dirty Old Men ... Except if you're President." Go to Cagle.com for many more political cartoons.

The Record

My so-called local daily newspaper, The Record of Woodland Park, pulled out all the stops in covering the Yankees' bid to play in the World Series. 

Five days of front-page coverage ended in the Bronx Bombers, well, bombing or, as the headline on last Sunday's front page put it:

"BITTER END

FOR YANKS"

What a joke. In these perilous times, putting sports on the front page is a real disservice to readers.

College rapes

What was Editor Richard A. Green thinking when he allowed Columnist Mike Kelly to give a Page 1 platform in last Sunday's paper to a defense attorney for male college students who rape and commit other sexual violence against women on campus?

Freshman women are the favorite targets of these predators.

Kill the headline

Many readers noticed a headline over a fatal accident in Tuesday's section:

"Man killed by own car on Route 80"

But if they bothered to read the story on 3L in the Local section, they realized nothing could be farther from the truth.

Turns out a Pennsylvania man crashed his Honda sedan into a guardrail in Parsippany, and was standing alongside the vehicle in the center lane when an SUV hit the sedan, which hit the owner, causing the fatal injuries.

Police blotter

Wednesday's Local section had only four news pages, but carried eight crime, fire and court stories.

And the Business section on Wednesday promoted UNTUCKit, a company that sells short men's shirts meant to be worn outside the pants.

The shirt front "reaches mid-fly and is tapered on the sides to reveal the pockets," says Staff Writer Joan Verdon.

The shirts range from $68 to $98 -- meaning you'd be paying a lot more for much less material.

Local foodie?

Wednesday's Better Living section profiled Brigitt Early of Ridgewood, praising the 30-year-old woman's Instagram food photos, "which will make your stomach growl with hunger," says Staff Writer Laura Adams Stiansen.

Unfortunately, the overwhelmingly older readers of the print edition may react with heartburn or worse when they hear about Early's affection for doughnuts, S'mores, apple strudel filling "topped with crunchy bacon pieces" and nachos.

USA Today

After The Record was purchased by the Gannett Co., the daily became part of the USA Today network.

That means North Jersey readers get a lot of news that has no relevance to them, such as today's front-page story on a California trucking company that cheated drivers and now has evaded paying a state judgment of $8.7 million (1A).

Teterboro flights

A story on the Local front today promises long-suffering Hackensack residents the FAA will divert business jets and other planes headed for Teterboro Airport "as early as summer 2019" (1L).

The planes would avoid flying over Prospect Avenue high-rises and Hackensack University Medical Center.

This would be the second attempt to do so.

Elite pilots reject extra work to continue their noisy flights over poor Hackensack

This sleek but noisy business jet flew low over the Fanny Meyer Hillers Elementary School in Hackensack in April 2016 -- just one of the many hundreds of private jets that are destroying the quality of life in towns near Teterboro Airport, which caters to celebrities, CEOs and other members of the 1%.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

Hackensack officials and residents know that many aspects of their daily lives are out of their control.

Property tax bills would be lower, if the county seat didn't host such enormous tax-exempt entities as Bergen County, Hackensack University Medical Center and Fairleigh Dickinson University -- none of which "give back" to city residents.

The quality of life would be so much better, if the city and neighboring towns weren't under the noisy flight paths of both Teterboro and Newark Liberty International airports.

And after a City Hall hearing on the abandonment of a quieter flight path for private jets heading to Teterboro, city residents also realize a decline in the quality of local reporting at The Record of Woodland Park appears irrevocable.

Six-month experiment

The Teterboro flight-path trial began on April 4, 2o16, and ran for six months, until last October, in an effort to cut noise for hospital patients, Prospect Avenue high-rise residents and elementary school children.

But the headline on The Record's story on Friday indicated the trial just ended:

"Relief from

air traffic

stalls for

Hackensack"

A much better headline ran on Thursday's report from the online Hackensack Daily Voice, which quoted airport and Federal Aviation Administration officials:

"Quiet Flight Path 

Was Too Much Work For Pilots"  

The lead paragraph:

"HACKENSACK, N.J. -- An air traffic control manager at Teterboro Airport said the trial flight path for incoming planes -- originally implemented to diminish aircraft noise and avoid Hackensack University Medical Center -- was too much work for pilots and thus abandoned."

The Record's lead paragraph on Wednesday's hearing talked about the six-month flight-path trial as if it just ended, and noted "there were few answers about steps to take next."

'Far less work'

Daily Voice reporter Cecilia Levine said:

"Testing began April 4, 2016, and ran for a continuous six-month period. Simultaneously, pilots had the option of utilizing the flight path that they were accustomed to -- RWY 19, which flies directly over Hackensack Medical Center [and] Prospect Avenue, the most densely populated street in Bergen County -- and other residential neighborhoods.

"That flight path utilizes an instrument landing system, the most common approach utilized by pilots which requires far less work than the quiet visual approach, officials said.

"Over the course of the six-month trial period, only 234 planes utilized the quiet visual approach.... Officials said the manual entry of landing waypoints increases the workload for pilots and requires a lot of 'heads down' time when they are supposed to be flying."

Levine also reported that in answer to a question from Deputy Mayor Kathleen Canestrino, "FAA officials said that both flight paths could work with instrument-landing systems."

Mayor John Labrosse's wife, a teacher at Hillers Elementary School in Hackensack, said on hot days, the windows must be kept closed so students can hear teacher's instructions without noise from business jets and other aircraft that pass over the school.

Filled with jargon

Record Staff Writer Rodrigo Torrejon quoted a lot of aviation jargon from Gary Palm, Teterboro air traffic control manager, for why most pilots refused to use the quieter flight path:

"One of the reasons given for pilots opting not to use the test flight path was waypoints.

"... A charting company removed the coding for waypoints depicted as visual reference points from aircrafts' flight-management system. This made it so pilots would have to input the coding manually mid-flight, causing safety and time concerns....

"The coding was removed due to pilots flying waypoint to waypoint instead of over Route 17."

Neither reporter defined "waypoint," which in air navigation is an intermediate point on a route.

New flight path didn't end noisy takeoffs

Was new flight path delayed or ignored?

Food coverage

The Better Living section on Friday and on June 9 was missing both restaurant inspections and dining-out coverage.

Since the weekly restaurant reviews ended last November, The Record has been running "food crawls," and articles recommending or ordering readers to try certain dishes and restaurants.

Two days after jet crash near Teterboro, pilots still are unidentified charred corpses

Boy, the shit is really hitting the fan in the nation's capital after The New York Times reported that in February, President Trump asked then-FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation of Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser who resigned after lying about his contacts with Russian officials. This cartoon -- "ANYONE CAN GROW UP TO BE PRESIDENT" -- is by John Cole of the Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pa.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

Editor's note: This post has been updated with the identity of the co-pilot who died in Monday's crash of a Learjet near Teterboro Airport.

VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

How long should it take for a newspaper like The Record to identify the two pilots whose Learjet crashed and burned short of their Teterboro Airport runway on Monday afternoon?

Thousands of words about the crash appear in the paper today, but readers don't know their names or whether they left behind wives, children or parents.

The focus today is on whether the pilots' decision to stay in Manhattan instead of Philadelphia set them up to crash as the result of a "rogue gust of wind" near Teterboro Airport (1A).

Check out the amateurish photos on Page 1 today: 

The bigger one is a trick shot of another jet landing at Teterboro that seems to show the aircraft below telephone-pole wires on Route 46.

Above that, a photo shows police officers gathered near their vehicles. What the F! That's worthy of the front page?

Trailer park news

Meanwhile, veteran Columnist Mike Kelly could have chosen any of the thousands of people who live in Hackensack high-rises or homes in Carlstadt or other towns to illustrate the danger and menace of the airport.

Instead, he found a 30-year-old man who lives with his "mother, brother, sister and three dogs" in a Moonachie trailer park across the street from the south end of the jetport.

The headline:

"Airport's neighbors still struggle with anxiety"

When the jet hit the parking lot of Carlstadt's public works building and burst into flames, Matt Vitale heard a "boom -- loud, metallic, deadly," Kelly says (6A).

"The trailer shook. The dogs started barking. Vitale got no sleep."

Another Kelly column that undoubtedly will be submitted for a Pulitzer Prize.

This evening, HackensackDailyVoice.com identified the co-pilot as Jeffrey Alino, 33.

"There are reports that the plane was upside down when it crashed," Daily Voice reported.

Living near Teterboro means endless noise

More slanted reporting on aircraft noise

Learjet 35A

On Tuesday, The Record reported Learjets like the one that crashed have been involved in 61 fatalities from 1979 through 2015.

A May 24, 1988, crash killed four in the middle of the night when a Learjet 35A crashed into "a Woodland Park hillside minutes after it left Teterboro [Airport]."

Federal investigators cited the pilot and co-pilot's "poor judgment and limited experience, as well as 'known deficiencies in equipment,'" Staff Writer Dave Sheingold reported, without elaborating.

And The Record's story makes no attempt to compare the Learjet 35A's safety record to other corporate jets.

Living near Teterboro Airport means endless noise and a lower quality of life

When the Federal Aviation Administration ordered new landing patterns to keep business jets away from Hackensack University Medical Center, residents of Hackensack saw little change. This jet headed for Teterboro Airport was one of four or five to pass over southwest Hackensack homes and the Fanny Meyer Hillers School in about 30 minutes on April 18, 2016.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

Day in, day out, the roar overhead is what is driving residents crazy in Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood and other towns near Teterboro Airport.

Here in Hackensack's Fairmont section, we're even bedeviled by commercial aircraft heading for Newark Liberty International Airport, and seeing a jumbo jet passing over your house at a low altitude will definitely give you the shivers.

Sure, there have been four major crashes of those sleek business jets in the past 32 years or so -- all with fatalities -- but none has hit a house or one of the high-rises on Prospect Avenue.

The Record of Woodland has never taken aircraft noise seriously, and Monday's crash of a Learjet in the parking lot of Carlstadt's public works building is treated cavalierly.

The big banner headline over a Page 1 photo of five or six cars consumed by fire says:

"'LIKE A SCENE FROM A MOVIE'"

Gee. Two crew members were killed, so how about focusing on them with a headline like this?

"TWO PILOTS DIE IN CRASH"

In November 2014, I photographed noisy aircraft passing over South Hackensack on the way to Teterboro Airport. The plane with the propeller on the nose sounds like an enormous banshee, above

Today's paper

Inexplicably, The Record's so-called commuting columnist compares deaths in road crashes to "drug overdoses and other poisonings" (1A).

Not sure why. Maybe other readers can figure that out as they sit in one of North Jersey's infamous traffic jams.

Today's column by Road Worrier John Cichowski is filled with enough numbers to make your eyes glaze over.

When a Cichowski column appears on Page 1, you know Editor Richard Green is desperate. 

And when he starts a column with, "If you think ... road crashes take way too many lives," you can be sure that hardly no one is thinking that, especially if they've seen all of the maniacs on the road these days.