Rupert Murdoch Talks, Andrew Cuomo Listens (and Snaps To Attention!)

Rupert Murdoch offered the following via Twitter yesterday after Mayor Bloomberg's State of the City speech:

Bloomberg’s bold teacher proposals today terrific. How will chicken Cuomo respond? If UFT refuses this money good teachers will scream.”

Now Cuomo, who needs and wants Rupert Murdoch's respect and love (and press) even more than he needs and wants air, could have responded two ways.

He could have responded the way he usually does when someone attacks him (or he even thinks somebody attacks him) - with a rhetorical sledgehammer.

This is what he did to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver this week.

Or he could bow down to almighty Rupert's wishes and back Bloomberg up on his teacher bashing.

Which is EXACTLY how he responded a half an hour later after Rupert's "tweet":

“I commend Mayor Bloomberg for outlining a positive vision for New York City’s future and the most important part of building that future, our students. The State and City’s education system is facing a crisis in accountability and performance. Our continuing pattern of being number one in the nation on spending in education and thirty-eighth in graduation rates hurts our students across the State, including the over 1.1 million public school students in New York City.

As I said in my State of the State Address, and Mayor Bloomberg reiterated in his State of the City today, we need an education system that puts students first. Both the Mayor and I agree that this starts with implementing a teacher evaluation system that holds teachers accountable for their performance. I look forward to working together to create an accountability system that puts the interests of students ahead of the interests of the education bureaucracy."

It is interesting how Cuomo says New York teachers are unaccountable while he does the work of a newspaper mogul/media oligarch who somehow has skirted the law in a scandal in Britain involving phone hacking, computer hacking, bribery, extortion, evidence tampering and conspiracy to cover-up a crime that has seen 18 of his employees arrested, including his number 1 deputy in England, and may yet see his son, James Murdoch, taken away in cuffs.

Yet somehow Cuomo ignores all of that mess (that "lack of accountability") to back Murdoch and Bloomberg up that teachers are unaccountable and until this "crisis in accountability and performance" in New York public education is fixed, New York's school system will continue to suck (even though as ED WEEK and the business channel CNBC both showed this week, none of this stuff Cuomo says about the New York State school system is true.)

So Andrew Cuomo is a chicken, all right - a chicken who snaps to attention when his patron and surrogate daddy Rupert ""Phone Hacking" Murdoch says a cross word to him.

Whatever Rupert wants, Rupert gets - from "Chicken Cuomo".

Fortunately the Daily News reports that Shelly Silver and the Assembly are no longer going to defer to the governor on policies that are harmful to New York State, as they did last year.

That's important, considering "Chicken Cuomo" seems to be in the business of doing the bidding of a corporate criminal like Murdoch who stands to make billions off the teacher accountability measures Cuomo and Bloomberg want to enshrine into law.