Preet Bharara Moves Ever Closer To Cuomo

Fred Dicker in the NY Post:

Attorney Preet Bharara moved “a giant step closer” to Gov. Cuomo late last week with an indictment that alleges insurance exec Anthony Bonomo, a top Cuomo contributor whom the governor made chairman of the New York Racing Association, gave a lucrative no-show job to state Sen. Dean Skelos’ son, sources have told The Post.

“Bonomo is Cuomo’s guy, and he wouldn’t offer anything to Skelos’ kid without first making sure it was OK with the governor or his people,’’ said a senior state Democrat.

“The fact that Bonomo, like Dorego, is cooperating with Bharara brings the whole investigation a giant step closer to Cuomo,’’ the Democrat added, referring to Charles Dorego, a top official at Cuomo megacontributor Leonard Litwin’s Glenwood Management.

Glenwood, a real-estate development firm, has been linked to the Skelos indictment and the indictment of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Dorego is cooperating with Bharara’s probe.

Others at the Capitol agreed Bharara appeared to be moving closer to charging Cuomo and/or one or more of his top aides in his investigation of corruption in state government, which originated with Cuomo’s abrupt closure last year of his Moreland Act Commission as it was closing in on evidence of wrongdoing.

“This is a drip by drip that’s getting closer and closer to Cuomo, with Bonomo and Dorego providing prosecutors with an inside look at how the corrupt Albany system works,’’ explained a second senior state political figure.

...

The indictment said a state-regulated insurance company — identified as the Bonomo-run Physicians Reciprocal Insurers (PRI) — gave Adam Skelos a no-show job worth more than $100,000 at a time when it was lobbying Sen. Skelos on legislative matters.

A spokesman for the Roslyn, LI-based insurer said Friday that Bonomo — who with family members contributed nearly $250,000 to Cuomo’s campaign committee — and others at the company “are fully cooperating with the US Attorney’s Office.”

Several sources at the Capitol said Bonomo’s alleged willingness to provide a no-show job to Adam Skelos was further proof of Cuomo’s close political ties to Sen. Skelos.

“If you needed any further proof of Skelos’ ties to Cuomo and his people, this job from Bonomo’s company for Skelos’ kid should provide it,” said a top GOP official.

 Bonomo cooperating with the feds is bad enough for Cuomo.

But then there's this:

Some in Albany think Skelos will eventually plead - here's NT2 blog from a few weeks ago:

Not everyone can hack the hard core world that is state politics and government today.

Silver can. Deposed, he won’t quit. He sits in the back of the chamber and seethes. He lives for the day when he can testify and tell people how crazy it is to think that a grant for cancer research could be a bribe to get a client referral nine years later.

So can Libous. They investigated him for seven years and the best they could come up with was a charge that he lied when he said he didn’t remember how his son got a job. Then they went after the son and charged him with nine counts of which two counts stuck. It’s a tax offense for which an ordinary person would have to re-file and pay a penalty, but the son is going to jail for it. Libous struggles with both cases and with cancer and complications from back surgery, but still he won’t give in.

And then there’s Skelos. He’s not steely like Silver and Libous. He’s a mess. He can’t think clearly. Over the weekend, he dissembled to the point of telling colleagues that if they forced him out, he’d quit and they’d lose their majority. Only after everyone reassured him that they’d stand by him did he relent, but this isn’t a situation in which anybody thinks he’ll have the stomach to continue the fight. He’ll make a deal with the Feds. He’ll do anything to make it easier on himself and his son.

Something similar happened with Brian Meera. He’d had it good for a long time and was approaching retirement. Even though he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, he wasn’t going to take a chance. He made a deal to protect himself.

If Skelos looks to plead, Preet's going to want some information on somebody big.

I would bet Skelos has some dope on Cuomo the feds would find interesting.

Couple that with the Bonomo and Dorego cooperation, and you interesting times in Albany.

Cuomo Administration Teetering On The Edge

From NT2 (a blog that has been Cuomo-friendly in the past):

It’s Cuomo. Ever since the day after his speech, he’s been acting weird. Remember? He gave his State of the State speech and did the dorky thing he always does – he made a totally lame attempt at humor. This time is was the Three Amigos — Cuomo, Silver and Skelos in sombreros. Hah, hah. But what happened? The very next day, PB exposed Silver for using his office to get rich.  As we’ve written, we still have our doubts about whether Silver’s actions constitute a federal crime or not, but we’re not disputing the fact that he’s now the all-time poster boy for personal gain in public office.

The Three Amigos is the picture worth a thousand words. It’s the punch line for PB.  It tied Cuomo to Silver and Skelos in a way that PB never could.

Cuomo knows it. He knows that everybody else knows it and now he’s desperate to change the perception.

...

The latest maneuvering has a different quality. It’s not hard pragmatism, which you can more or less respect if it’s driven by a desire to reach a policy goal that’s good for the realm.

What he’s doing has a totally different feel. He’s rushing to reposition himself and he doesn’t care who he upsets or alienates. It’s all about getting on the right side of PB and it has a frantic, scared quality to it.

There is no doubt there has been a frenetic quality to the second term.

Even before the Silver arrest, there was a frenetic pace to the pre-State of the State/budget address policy rollouts - there was one a day every day for about a week and a half.

Then came the Silver arrest the day after the State of the State/budget address and Cuomo's been even more frenetic since - threatening the legislature, insulting whole cities, pushing back on negative news stories with a sledgehammer, now taking on Long Island school districts over teacher evaluation systems that NYSED signed off on.

I was wondering why he would take on Long Island school districts in an evaluation fight - that made no sense to me because it's a fight he isn't going to win.

These are well-funded, well-heeled districts we're talking about, where people like their public schools and respect the teachers who teach there.

It's one thing for Cuomo to take on "failing" schools in NYC, Syracuse, Rochester or Buffalo - there's polling to indicate that could be a winning fight for him.)

But public schools and public school teachers are very popular in a lot of Long Island districts and the affluent people who live in those districts aren't going to sit still while he screws with their schools.

The attack on the Long Island districts struck me as ill-conceived - and I wasn't the only one.

Here was Michael Fiorillo:

Let's all hope that Long Island and Westchester turn into Cuomo's Eastern Front.

Indeed it might end up like that - especially now that we see some polling showing only 10% of New Yorkers blame "failing" schools on teachers.

Cuomo's getting increasingly shrill and personal in pushing his education reform agenda and, to borrow another WWII metaphor, this just might be a bridge too far for the governor.

And even if it doesn't quite end up that way, it surely is an indication of desperation on Cuomo's part that he's decided taking on affluent school districts in an evaluation fight is a winning gambit.

Here's NT2 again:

The way Cuomo and his people are acting now is really scaring us.

They are acting like they don’t need friends – which is a recipe for a downfall.

They are fighting with everyone. And some of these fights make no sense at all. They lashed out at Dicker yesterday for reporting what everyone knows – that Schwartz hasn’t left the administration. Why react that way? Is it going to influence Dicker? Is it going to scare him?  Fred is exultant right now. This moment goes into the FUD Pantheon – Norman Adler, Mario Cuomo, George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson and now Andrew Cuomo.  He’s bested them all.

That Cuomo, who knows Dicker better than anyone, allowed himself to do this is a bad sign.  That Fred is back after an extended period of irrelevancy is scary too. What happens in situations like this is that everyone who’s fed up with Cuomo now starts to feed Dicker info. Few people were talking to Fred a while back, but now everyone will again.

It’s a bad dynamic. Nobody is afraid of Cuomo and his people anymore. There’s no fear, no respect, and thanks to the administration’s long record of churlishness — no friendship.

We hate to say it, but this has the mark of an administration that’s teetering.

Fred Dicker reported earlier this month that Cuomo was "rattled" by the fed investigations into Albany and was way off his game.

If anything, that "rattled" thing Cuomo's got going has gotten even worse since that Dicker column earlier this month.

Murdoch Company Pays Andrew Cuomo At Least $700,000 For His Memoir

Okay, this is absurd:

ALBANY—Gov. Andrew Cuomo's book deal with HarperCollins is worth at least $700,000, according to a disclosure form Cuomo filed last week.

The publishing house is planning to release Cuomo's autobiography, “All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life,” in August. Cuomo's 2013 tax returns showed $188,333 in income from the book, but the governor's aides said $35,127 of that advance was spent on “representation and legal fees associated with the book.”

A disclosure form filed last week with the state's Joint Commission on Public Ethics reflects that payment, and shows Cuomo is due between $550,000 to $650,000 in additional, deferred compensation. A Cuomo spokesman would not immediately say if the governor would also receive additional royalties linked to book sales.

The book contract, signed after his first full year in office, was responsible for nearly doubling Cuomo's income between 2012 and 2013, tax returns show.

How many copies of this book do you think Harper Collins sells?

Do they think there's a readership out there for Andrew Cuomo's memoir?

Or maybe they think fans of Chris Cuomo will buy it?

Andrew Cuomo has the reputation for being one of the biggest asses in politics.

I can't imagine the book sells more than a few thousand copies at best.

So why did Murdoch give Cuomo at least $700,000 in compensation for this memoir?

Notice when the contract with Harper Collins was signed - right after his first year in office.

That was when Cuomo and Harper Collins Rupert Murdoch were still best buds (as demonstrated by how Murdoch flack Fred Dicker treated Cuomo in the NY Post.)

Even then, Murdoch had to know that few copies of this book would be sold.

This was a bribe from Murdoch to Cuomo in the form of a book contract.

I can't wait for the book to come out and see how many copies get sold.

I suspect this Cuomo memoir will be up there as a loss-leader, along with Murdoch's other great loss leader, the NY Post.

Fred Dicker: Cuomo Will Get No Support From Dems If He Runs For President

If it's Monday, it's time for a Fred Dicker column slamming Andrew M. Cuomo.

Today's no different:

Gov. Cuomo, long known for his presidential aspirations, won’t enjoy the support of his own Democratic Party if Hillary Rodham Clinton decides not to run for president in 2016, top state Democrats have told The Post.

The Democrats said Cuomo’s worsening relations with his party have led many to look elsewhere for a presidential standard bearer, should Clinton not run.

He has had issues almost daily in recent weeks with Mayor de Blasio, top union leaders, the Working Families Party, former state Chairmen Jay Jacobs and John Sullivan, and key party leaders including state Democratic Co-Chair Stephanie Miner, who resigned abruptly last week.

Last month Democratic activist Bill Samuels — whose father, Howard, was the Democrats’ official choice for governor in 1974 (defeated in the primary by Hugh Carey) — even called Cuomo an “embarrassment’’ to his party and said he should run for re-election as a Republican.

“People don’t like Andrew Cuomo, and if you ask about the presidency, there’s no support there,’’ a prominent Democratic activist and party official told The Post.

“People don’t think he’s principled, they see him supporting people they oppose and not supporting people they support, and they believe he only cares about himself,’’ the activist continued.

...

Cuomo’s declining popularity among New York Democrats was reflected nationally in a Fox News poll last week.

Just 2 percent of Democrats picked Cuomo as their preferred candidate for president in 2016, down from 4 percent in December. Biden was backed by 14 percent and Warren by 6 percent.

Cuomo has been widely criticized by left-of-center Democrats for his refusal to back de Blasio’s plan for higher taxes on the wealthy, his support for charter schools, business-tax reductions, restraints on state spending, and his cozy relations with state Senate Republicans.

Cuomo was blistered last week by influential liberal Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, executive editor of “The American Prospect,’’ under the headline “Democrats need to replace Andrew Cuomo.’’

The Post disclosed last week that influential Democrats for the first time believe Cuomo is vulnerable to defeat by GOP challenger Rob Astorino because of a lack of enthusiasm for his re-election.

Unfortunately this lack of support for Cuomo isn't translating into a challenger from the left to take him on in a primary or to run in the general election and take votes away from him this year.

Dicker And Cuomo

More fireworks between the once married couple now on the outs:

Cuomo’s deputy secretary for public safety, Liz Glazer, has become the latest high-level departure from an administration concerned about the governor’s increasingly halting performance, insiders said.

The Post disclosed last week that several high-level departures were expected in the coming months and that two had already occurred.

After Cuomo denied the exclusive report, The Post planned a followup today about Glazer’s departure — but made the mistake of giving Cuomo’s increasingly notorious spokesman, Josh Vlasto, an opportunity to respond. Within an hour, Cuomo’s office leaked the exclusive to the Albany Times-Union.

Vlasto, considered untrustworthy by many reporters, recently claimed that another Post exclusive — that Cuomo told business leaders that he feared the Legislature’s reaction if he moved ahead with fracking — was “totally false.” But Vlasto was then directly contradicted by the Business Council of New York State’s president, Heather Briccetti, and others, who said they were there when the governor said it.

Hey, Fred, I could have told you Vlasto is full of crap.

Most p.r. people are.

So are most journalists.

But it takes special person to be able to sling Cuomo's lies.

Fred Dicker: Shelly Silver Will Follow Tisch And Endorse Thompson

From the NY Post:

While Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has yet to endorse a candidate for mayor, insiders predict he will follow Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and back former city Comptroller Bill Thompson, who lost narrowly to Mayor Bloomberg four years ago.

Silver and Tisch are longtime friends and political allies and many on the inside say Tisch wouldn’t have endorsed Thompson last week without Silver’s approval.

“Shelly backing Billy, the only black in the race, would win him a lot of points with the African-Americans in the Assembly, who help keep him as speaker,’’ said a longtime Thompson backer.

I'm less interested in Silver's potential backing of Thompson than I am of Shelly's friendship and political alliance with Merryl Tisch.

There's little doubt that Tisch and NYSED Commissioner King have the political backing and support of Governor Cuomo as they seek to fire tens of thousands of teachers via APPR and Common Core over the next few years.

But Tisch, who like all Regents board members, is appointed by the legislature, must also have the backing of Assembly Speaker Silver as well.

No wonder she seems little worried that her ill-conceived, badly planned "reforms" will backfire on her.

She has two powerful figures backing her up.

Cuomo Dishes To Fred Dicker, Then Takes Back The Dish

Weird.

This morning, Fred Dicker wrote a column that supposedly came from a Cuomo source that said Andy was going to have Silver whacked from the Assembly for failure to get a hold on crooked Albany politicians and replaced with a more pliable lackey from Rochester.

Later in the day, Little Andy denied dishing dirt like that on Silver:

Governor Andrew Cuomo this morning denied that he was seeking to unseat Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver as part of some sort of larger anti-corruption crusade in Albany.

"It is wholly up to the legislative bodies to select a leader," said Cuomo (who has been involved with the leadership question in the Senate, approving Republican-gerrymandered lines and tacitly blessing a coalition with breakaway Democrats that has kept the chamber out of Democratic hands). "I would never even for a moment try to influence that decision.”

Then he blamed Bloomberg for all the scandals:

In fact, according to Cuomo, the recent corruption allegations, which have directly involved two members of the state legislature, one councilman and two city Republican officials, actually have more to do with city malfeasance than the state's.

"In terms of Speaker Silver, remember again the context," he said. "First of all ... the majority of the actions and the players, it was about a New York City mayoral scandal. It was not an Albany scandal."

He also said, in an apparent allusion to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "It’s not that we don’t know the problems of getting on the ballot, the New York City mayoral problems. It’s not that we haven't had cases where people have been proven to be paying large sums of money to political parties and county chairs to try to get on the ballot in New York City. No, we know the problems and we know the solutions. We haven’t had the political will."

I find it hard to believe that the Dicker column came out of the ether.

Nice to see Little Andy take a new tack and try and tie the scandal to Mike "How Much Do You Want To Put Me On The Ballot" Bloomberg though.

Anything but taking responsibility for somebody close to him talking smack to Dicker.

Fred Dicker, Andrew Cuomo Look To Be Splitsville

For the first couple of years of the Cuomo administration, you could bet that if information about the governor showed up in Fred Dicker's NY Post column, it would be deferential of Cuomo and serve to promote the governor as the bestest thing to happen to Albany since the Erie Canal.

But not anymore - here's Dicker's latest, a broadside against Cuomo from the right:

Gov. Cuomo has veered sharply away from the reform and pro-business policies he followed during his first two years in office and is “adrift’’ on a course of murky proposals, frequent indecision, and political obsessions focused on re-election next year and the presidency in 2016, insiders have told The Post.

The insiders, some of whom have known Cuomo for decades, said the governor has become so obsessed with maintaining what until recently were record-high job-approval ratings that he has refused, for fear of alienating politically potent liberal voting blocs, to make tough decisions to cut costs for fiscally troubled local governments, reduce regulations to attract businesses, and approve hydrofracking for natural gas.

“It’s all about maintaining his numbers now, not about the best policies for the state,’’ said a source who knows Cuomo well.

“If he makes the political tough decisions, his numbers will go down, so what he’s trying to do is avoid anything controversial. That’s why he’s adrift,’’ the source continued.

The insiders describe Cuomo as hypersensitive to criticism and prone to argue at great length with anyone who says his administration has, as one of its own members put it, “run off the tracks.’’

“He’s running around like a banshee, blaming his staff and everybody else for the problems of his own making,’’ said a highly knowledgeable source, adding, “I’ll be a dead man in Albany’’ if his identity is disclosed.

Cuomo signaled his new direction in a State of the State Address last month that was so devoid of serious, game-changing initiatives that he had to rely on two catastrophes — the Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut and the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy — for its principle news-generating proposals.

The third major substantive piece of his speech — the so-called Women’s Equality Act — was a largely manufactured effort because the supposed “problems’’ being addressed in the proposals are already largely covered by state law, the insiders agreed.

“It was put in the speech because there really wasn’t much else there,’’ said a second source close to the administration.

Democrat Cuomo’s unfocused new direction is tied to the Republicans’ loss of control of the state Senate, which the governor openly sought to prevent.

For Cuomo’s first two years in office, Senate Republicans joined with him in forcing the Democratic-controlled Assembly to end years of irresponsible state spending, cap runaway local property taxes, and create a new pension system to reduce the cost of future public employees.

But with Republicans now forced into a “coalition’’ government with a rump group of “independent’’ liberal Democrats, that alliance is over.

And what support Cuomo still retained in Senate Republican ranks was badly damaged last month when he pressured Dean Skelos, the weakest GOP leader in modern times, to support a tough new anti-gun law that was so politically damaging that state GOP Chairman Ed Cox has publicly denounced it.

Last week, Senate Republicans exacted revenge as they embarrassed Cuomo by publicly questioning the fitness of the governor’s controversial choice of CUNY law prof Jenny Rivera for a seat on the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals.

At the same time, Assembly Democrats, who deeply resented the Cuomo/Senate GOP alliance, embarrassed Cuomo at a budget hearing with hostile and insulting questioning of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Joseph Martens over the controversial hydrofracking issue.

The Democrats even allowed flash mobs of anti-hydrofracking activists to interrupt and mock Martens who, for his part, was tense and defensive and left lawmakers with the impression that he wished he worked for anybody but Cuomo.

Business leaders, meanwhile, see the long-delayed hydrofracking decision — which could come this week — as the definitive test of whether Cuomo is serious about changing New York’s reputation as the least business-friendly state in the nation.

“The New York/Pennsylvania border is like the old Berlin Wall, with Pennsylvania being free West Berlin, with prosperity and good jobs thanks to gas drilling,’’ said a top New York business official.

“The New York side is communist East Berlin — poor, humbled, and humiliated, with no high-paying jobs to speak of,’’ the official continued.

Gotta love the fracking propaganda at the end comparing NY State to East Germany circa 1980.

Okay, a few things to say here:

First, this is clearly Dicker doing Murdoch's bidding to set down markers before Cuomo announces his fracking decision to let Little Andy know what life will be like if he fails to give the "business community" (i.e., the hydrofrackers) what they want.

Second, Dicker is letting Cuomo know that while he is getting criticism from the left these days as well, it will be nothing like the hammer job he'll get from the right if he doesn't give the "business community" the kinds of policies they want. 

Third, the Republican loss of the State Senate has hurt Cuomo's ability to govern from the right.  Give the UFT and other groups kudos for putting money into the election and helping take some seats away from the GOP.

Fourth, Cuomo is NOT presidential timber.  He is maniacal, paranoid, thin-skinned, and runs the government like Nixon.  While things were going well in the first two years, those qualities didn't hurt him, but now that things are going a little less swimmingly, you can see the "friends" coming out of the woodwork to hammer him.  I don't see how somebody with Cuomo's personality and temperament makes it through the vetting process.

Fifth, Cuomo has made a lot of enemies over the course of his political career.  He has made many of those in the last three years or so.  Those people are going to look for opportunities to stick a knife in him.  We are beginning to see how that is playing out.

Finally, Rupert Murdoch is letting Cuomo know that he is in danger of losing Uncle Rupert's political and editorial support at the Post and the Journal if Cuomo doesn't give Murdoch what he wants on fracking.

Just last month, Cuomo had 70% approval ratings.

Those ratings dropped in two polls taken after his gun control push.

One poll has him down to 59%.

This is still sky-high territory for a politician, of course (just ask the unpopular Bloomberg about that), but the trajectory is not so good for Cuomo.

Whatever decision he makes on fracking, he is guaranteed to lose even more support in the coming months.

He may even fall below 50%.

He is going to try and thread the middle on the fracking issue, but that is impossible to do on such a controversial issue.

You can guarantee that somebody is not going to be happy after he announces his decision.

No matter what, he will not have the same power to impose his will on the state in the next few years that he had in the first two.

As a teacher looking down at Cuomo's APPR system, this gives me some hope that it can be revisited in a few years after it becomes clear that it is unworkable.

The same goes for Cuomo's rule that education aid increases are tied to having an APPR techcer evaluation system in place.

He's getting away with this crap for now, but he won't get away with it forever.

Winter is coming.

A Murdoch Monday

Rupert Murdoch spent the weekend bragging about his new Sunday Sun and rejoicing in the publication of the Teacher Data Reports in New York City.

But has hasn't had such a good Monday:

LONDON - Rupert Murdoch's top-selling U.K. tabloid, The Sun, had a culture of making illegal payments to corrupt public officials in return for stories, a senior police officer said Monday, as Murdoch announced that the paper's first-ever Sunday edition had sold more than 3 million copies.

Sue Akers, a Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, told Britain's media ethics inquiry that the newspaper openly referred to paying its sources and that such payments had been authorized at a senior level.

Her comments came the day Murdoch's company paid former teen singing sensation Charlotte Church 600,000 pounds ($951,000) in a phone-hacking settlement for violating her and her family's privacy.

...

Church's settlement Monday resolved her claim that 33 News of the World articles were the product of journalists illegally hacking into her family's voicemails. Despite her legal victory, Church said years of tabloid intrusions followed by years of legal battles had horrified her.

"What I have discovered as the litigation has gone on has sickened and disgusted me. Nothing was deemed off limits by those who pursued me and my family, just to make money for a multinational news corporation," she said outside London's High Court.

At one point, Church's mother attempted suicide after Murdoch's papers reported that Church's father was having an affair.

That got the information from a hacked voicemail.

Nice work, Rupert.

It also turns out that News Corp. executives knew as far back as 2006 about phone hacking and other corruption but did nothing about the problems:

Senior executives of Murdoch's British newspaper division, including former News of the World editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, have always insisted they were unaware of widespread phone hacking at the tabloid, even though private investigator Glenn Mulcaire was jailed briefly in 2007 for eavesdropping on royal aides on behalf of the tabloid.

But an email from the News of the World's then-lawyer, Tom Crone, submitted to the inquiry suggests that both Coulson — who later became Prime Minister David Cameron's communications chief — and Brooks knew in 2006 that police had a list of around 100 people who may have been targeted by Mulcaire.

So much for plausible deniability by the News Corp. braintrust.

A former deputy prime minister gets at the root problem of all of this corruption in Britain:

Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, whose own phone hacked by the News of the World, accused Murdoch of having a corrupting influence on British politics.

"I always thought it wrong that politicians at the highest level were so close to Murdoch, because Murdoch asked a price," Prescott told justice Brian Leveson's inquiry. "I thought it gave a kind of corrupting influence — not in the payment sense but in the power sense."

Indeed.

And Murdoch has enjoyed the same kind of corrupting influence here in the United States too.

Clearly the influence he has over the Republican Party through FOX News is enormous, but the corruption infects the other party too.

Just ask Fred Dicker's best pal, Andrew Cuomo, about that corruption.

He'll tell you - if he can get his lips off Fred Dicker's ass first.

Cuomo Will Cut Aid To Districts That Do Not Tie Teacher Evaluations To Test Scores

And he's calling Shelly Silver a teachers union shill in a broadside attack against the Assembly Speaker via Cuomo's favorite venue for political attacks - the Murdoch-owned NY Post:

In one of his most dramatic moves since taking office, Gov. Cuomo will use the budget he makes public tomorrow to impose union-hated teacher evaluation systems on 700 school districts throughout the state, The Post has learned.

The popular governor will do so by including language in the budget that ties receipt of 4 percent state aid increases promised to the districts in last year’s budget — some $800 million — to adoption of the teacher-evaluation system developed by the state Education Department, which has been blocked from city schools by a teachers-union lawsuit, a source close to the situation said.

All the systems, including the New York City schools, will have until Dec. 31 of this year to adopt the teacher-evaluation systems or lose the money, the source said.

...

Cuomo’s tactic will be based on a controversial set of Court of Appeals rulings that date from 1998 to 2004, finding that governors could change state laws and, in effect, adopt new ones by including language to do so within the budget.

“Shelly and the teachers union will likely go ballistic,’’ was how one source close to the Cuomo administration put it about the governor’s plan, referring to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), a teachers-union ally.

Notice three things here.

First, Cuomo is back in Rupert Murdoch's good graces now that's he returned to union-busting and teacher bashing.

Last week Murdoch nicknamed Governor 1% "Chicken Cuomo" for failing to impose a test score-based teacher evaluation system on teachers like Bloomberg wants.

But now that Cuomo's doing Murdoch's bidding on education reform once again, Post reporter Fred Dicker is back to slobbering all over Cuomo in the newspaper, writing about how "popular" the governor is and helping the governor by attacking Cuomo's enemies in the paper.

Also notice the preliminary strikes Cuomo lobs against both Assembly Speaker Silver and Senate Majority Leader Skelos as teachers unions shills through Dicker.

Cuomo is serving notice that he's going to smear anybody who stands in his way of his corporate education reform agenda as "harming the kids" or shilling for the unions - even though common sense says pushing through a massive new evaluation system that imposes new city and state standardized tests in every subject at every grade level might just be, you know, an idea that should be slow-walked.

But not in Governor 1%'s mind - state and city tests in every subject in every grade and teacher evals tied to those scores - that's just the ticket to improve public education in the state.

Last point - notice how Dicker changes the phrasing of Cuomo's "I'm going to be the chief lobbyist for students" from last week's State of the State speech to "Cuomo is the chief advocate for students."

A Siena poll released today showed people didn't like that term or idea - too close to the phrase "corporate lobbyist," I guess.

So leave it to Fred Dicker and the Murdoch Post to rebrand Cuomo "Chief Advocate."

Cuomo's a chief advocate all right - for the interests of the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, Pearson Education, and News Corporation.

When this new evaluation system goes into place, it will be interesting to see how parents in places like Scarsdale and Great Neck react to it.

Remember, this is a value-added system - teachers MUST add value to every student's test scores, even the high-scoring ones in Scarsdale and Great Neck.

The chaos that we have in New York City with school closures and firings and the like - that's going to come to Great Neck, Scarsdale and other wealthy suburbs too.

Not to mention all those new standardized tests they're going to add into all the subject in all the grades.

What will Cuomo's poll numbers look like after a year where parents see new city and state standardized tests added to every subject in every grade and teachers doing nothing but test prep for all these tests because if they don't "add value" to the scores, they're going to be rated "ineffective," humiliated in the local papers when they publish the individual teacher scores, and eventually fired?

Murdoch Papers Says ATR's To Be Sold Out

Murdoch Post writer, Fred Dicker, the namesake of the "Fred Dicker of the Day" award, writes the following:

State lawmakers are secretly eyeing a compromise that would allow Mayor Bloomberg to fire thousands of "nonteaching teachers" without consideration of the "last in, first out" law, The Post has learned.

The plan, being discussed at the highest levels of the Legislature and with aides to Bloomberg, would grant the mayor the right to fire between 2,000 to 4,000 nonclassroom teachers -- including all those who formerly languished in the notorious "rubber room" under disciplinary charges.

The plan would also target members of the "absent teacher reserve pool" -- which includes nonworking but on-the-payroll teachers from schools that have been shut down because of poor performance -- and teachers assigned only to "administrative functions," sources said.

Bloomberg warned Friday that the city might be forced to lay off as many as 20,000 teachers because of a combination of a city revenue shortfall and the severe state budget cuts to be unveiled tomorrow by Gov. Cuomo. If the plan becomes reality, about 10 to 20 percent of teachers slated for layoffs simply because they were hired last would be spared.

Bloomberg, conceding that significant teacher cuts are inevitable, has launched an aggressive campaign to overturn the state law that requires the city to fire teachers on the basis of seniority and not competence.

State lawmakers privately say Bloomberg can't win full repeal of the law because of intense union opposition and concerns over the criteria the mayor would use to justify teacher dismissals.

But the dismissal of poorly performing "nonteaching teachers" was described by a top state official as "potentially doable."

Cuomo and Senate Republicans have signaled they're open to such a measure, but Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) and his union-funded Democratic Conference have yet to weigh in.

As always, take ANYTHING written in the Murdoch Post (or any Murdoch "news" outlet, for that matter) with a grain of salt.

But it isn't too hard to believe that Cuomo and the Senate are working behind the scenes to give Bloomberg the power to fire at will.

Silver and the Assembly are all that stands in the way of this.

And once the mayor is given the ability to fire teachers at will, you can bet the "bad teachers" in the system will ALWAYS be the most expensive and senior teachers who will be scrubbed from the system every few years like clockwork.

What A Dicker That Fred Is!

Fred Dicker in the NY Post laments the "extraordinary power" the UFT has in Albany to get the Assembly and the State Senate to not agree to pass the Bloomberg/Paterson "Have As Many Charter Schools As You Want" bill:

It was crystal clear yesterday that New York's teachers unions aren't just joined at the hip with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the Democratic legislative leadership, they ARE part of the leadership.

The tragic evidence of their extraordinary power was out in the open for all to see minutes before the death knell tolled for Gov. Paterson's and Mayor Bloomberg's effort to win $700 million in federal "Race to the Top" education assistance.

Shortly before the Assembly planned to convene to at least consider the RTTT legislation, Education Committee Chairwoman Catherine Nolan (D-Queens) was huddled -- in full view of the public -- 30 feet from Silver's office with Carol Gerstl, counsel to the all-powerful United Federation of Teachers.

And who does Dicker get a quote from to show just how disgusting all this UFT lobbying in Albany is?

Why - a lobbyist, of course.

"The teachers have always been there helping incumbents that help them get elected, saying they 'do it for the children' when in fact they're pursuing their own union agenda at the expense of the children," one of the Legislature's most sophisticated lobbyists said late yesterday.

"Maybe they went too far this time with Race to the Top and charter schools. Maybe people will finally catch on," the lobbyist continued.

Can you explain to me why teachers unions aren't allowed to lobby, but other groups are?

Seriously, Fred's quoting "one of the Legislature's most sophisticated lobbyists" on why the UFT shouldn't be allowed to lobby on the charter school issue.

Might have to name an award of the day after Fred Dicker.

Atrios has the WANKER OF THE DAY award.

I think I am going to start the FRED DICKER OF THE DAY award.

Today's winners - Fred Dicker and the unnamed lobbyist with the balls to complain about other lobbyists.