What Could They Be Saying To Each Other?

Photograph of four Presidents (Ford, Reagan, Carter, Nixon) in the Blue Room prior to leaving for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's Funeral, 1981. National Archives

Jimmy Carter's turned 90 yesterday - there's an interesting interview with him at CNBC.

TB: As the 39th President of the United States, what do you feel were your greatest successes?
 
PJC: Well I kept our country at peace, which er..has happened very rarely since the second world war. And I tried to work for peace between other people who were not directly related to the United States like between Egypt and Israel. I normalised diplomatic relations with China. And I implemented a very strong human rights commitment that brought about a change throughout Latin America for instance, from totalitarian military dictatorships to democracies. So I would say the promotion of peace and human rights were the two things, that er, which I'm most proud. And we had a very wonderful environmental record at that time. We kind of foresaw, may be 30 or 40 years before it became a crisis, that we needed to conserve energy and have alternate sources of energy, cut down on our waste of er, of er, carbon and other fuels of that kind to protect the environment. So those are the 3 things that I think of right off hand.

I don't get too teary-eyed about politicians or anything like that, but Jimmy Carter looks better to me as the years go by.

Andrew Cuomo As Richard Nixon

The Nixon parallels for Andrew Cuomo were present well before the Moreland mess - both are known as famously controlling politicians with a penchant for ruling both friends and enemies through fear and intimidation, both had their "time in the wilderness" (Nixon from 1962-1968 after his famous "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore..." concession speech when he lost his race for the California governorship; Cuomo from 2002-2006 after he lost a gubernatorial primary to Carl McCall and was blamed by many in the black community for playing spoiler in the race.)

There is now another parallel between Cuomo and Nixon - the cover-up is the thing that got Nixon in Watergate and now it may be the final nail in Cuomo's political coffin as well:

Cuomo, who runs a state that leads the nation in federal public corruption convictions, is being informally scrutinized, and may soon be officially investigated, by the U.S. Attorney for witness tampering and obstruction of justice. He’s essentially being accused of strong-arming members of a state investigative panel that was originally formed — wait for it — to stamp out corruption in the state.

It dates back to spring of 2013, when no less than six New York lawmakers were arrested — not investigated, but physically arrested — on suspicion of bribing party officials for ballot access. In response to the subsequent uproar, Cuomo formed a special type of New York investigative body called a Moreland Commission to root out corruption amongst state legislators. However, as was later reported, the governor’s office routinely interfered with investigations that came too close to the governor, and Cuomo shut down the commission entirely after nine months.

That would be a sufficient scandal, but there’s more. The U.S. Attorney in New York, Preet Bharara, launched an investigation. A number of the commission’s members rose to Cuomo’s defense, and there’s now suspicion that the governor may have illegally coerced the commission’s members to wage those defenses. Put differently, Cuomo is being accused of forcing people to do something, then forcing them to say that he never forced them to do it.

While it’s nowhere near as explosive, the scandal has whiffs of Watergate. In addition to the fact that Cuomo looks vaguely like Richard Nixon, it involves a cover-up that could ultimately prove more damaging than the initial transgression. In remarks quite reminiscent of Nixon’s famous proclamation that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Cuomo brashly defended his involvement in the commission work:

It’s my commission. My subpoena power, my Moreland Commission. I can appoint it, I can disband it. I appoint you, I can un-appoint you tomorrow…it’s my commission. I can’t ‘interfere’ with it, because it is mine. It is controlled by me.

But second allegation would amount to tampering with a federal investigation, since Bharara was already looking into commission’s activities. In preparation for what could be a very lengthy legal battle, Cuomo has hired criminal defense attorney Elkan Abramowitz to represent him.

I think the phrase that sums up Cuomo's governorship as well as his parallels to Nixon comes down to:

"When the governor does it, that means it's not illegal."

Yeah, Cuomo didn't actually say those words, but surely that's what he meant when he said "I can't interfere with it (the Moreland Commission), because it is mine. It is controlled by me."

Same goes for when he had his Luca Brasi, Joseph Percoco, "offer" to help some Moreland Commissioners draft statements of support for him this past week that he could use in his public defense of his handling of the Moreland Commission.

And the same goes for when he had his former secretary, Larry Schwartz, order the commission to pull back subpoenas to entities connected to him like REBNY and Buying Time because he feared what might be found by investigators.

When the governor does it, it's not a crime.

Now we'll have to see Preet Bharara agrees.

From the public statements Bharara has made and the warning he made about witness tampering and obstruction charges if Cuomo continues to interfere with the investigation, it does not seem he does agree.

Common Core Proponents Get Nixonian In Their Retaliation Tactics

Jay Greene:

The entire Common Core enterprise has been characterized by shocking political naivete and over-reach.  Despite investing a fortune in political operatives and holding weekly conference calls “directed by Stefanie Sanford, who was in charge of policy and advocacy at the Gates Foundation,” the folks pushing Common Core did not anticipate that the Unions would betray them and oppose the implementation of Common Core as soon as it suited their purposes.  They did not anticipate that there was no authentic constituency for the proper implementation of the new standards and aligned high stakes tests.  They did not anticipate that the combined forces of the Unions and conservative opponents of centralized control would overwhelm the largely paid mercenaries they had on their side.  For people who imagine themselves politically sophisticated they look like a pack of amateurs.

...

This has not stopped the attempt to characterize opponents as kooks and extremists.  To be fair, some opponents are kooks and extremists, but many are not and Common Core supporters have had a bad habit of avoiding substantive debate by trying to dismiss their opponents as crazy.  There is something vaguely authoritarian about trying to centralize all education standards and testing, so not surprisingly Common Core supporters have also resorted to authoritarian tactics.  Taking a page from Tricky Dick, they have begun to use the power of the government to identify and punish opponents.

No, I’m not just talking about the threat that NCLB waivers and RTTP money would be more available to those who played ball with Common Core.  I’m talking about going after individuals who dissent.  Check out this story about  Brad McQueen, a teacher in Arizona, who published an op-ed against Common Core.

The state’s Associate Superintendent, Kathy Hrabluk, alerted her subordinates to this teacher’s dissent and asked them to “check your list of teacher teams (from which teachers are selected to work on tests at the Dept of Education)” so that he would not be involved in future teacher workgroups on state tests and other matters.  McQueen had been on those workgroups for the previous five years for which he received extra compensation.  No more.  As the Deputy Associate Superintendent for Assessments, Irene Hunting, replied to her boss, “We have made a note in his record.”  Another state official replied, “This was such a surprise for Arizona as Brad has been on many committees…  Let’s make sure he is not going to Denver later this month [to work on the new tests]. Please remove Brad McQueen from the list.”

Another Arizona education official, displaying all of the political sophistication of the Common Core movement, then replied on her government email, saying: “What a f*cktard.”

State education officials, doing their best to be the Common Core equivalent of the White House Plumbers, then proceeded to work on identifying one of McQueen’s fellow teachers to lend his or her name to a rebuttal op-ed that they would ghost write.  The bureaucrat in charge of PARCC for Arizona also called McQueen in his classroom to challenge him on why he opposed her test and quiz him about whether he was teaching the required standards.  McQueen feared they were fishing for grounds to terminate him and got off the call feeling like he has been threatened by a senior state official.

It’s an ugly story.  But this is what happens when you flirt with authoritarian reforms of education.  You start acting like an authoritarian.

This is how you know Common Core is dead in the water - when supporters and proponents channel the Nixon administration to save it.

Nixonian tactics work for a while, as we know from Tricky Dick's career longevity.

But in the end, they often come back to do more harm than good for the people employing them.

Have you heard of any other stories of CCSS supporters and proponents employing Nixonian tactics to smear and retaliate against CCSS critics and opponents?

Does The Obama Administration Have A "Starr Group" Out To Destroy Joshua Starr?

Valeria Strauss reported in the Washington Post that two members of the USDOE, including Arne Duncan himself, lobbied against Montgomery County Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr for the NYC schools chancellor position.

Duncan and Company don't like Starr because he has called for a three year moratorium on high stakes standardized testing and has expressed skepticism around the validity of the test score-based Obama/Duncan education reform agenda.

A few years ago, Mike Klonsky wrote a post about the USDOE's "Ravitch Group," a secret propaganda coterie within the USDOE that followed education reform critic Diane Ravitch and worked behind the scenes to damage her credibility and reputation.

At the time, a Duncan spokesman laughed at the claim, saying that that rumors of a "Ravitch Group" created by Duncan to dish dirt on Diane ought to be put on the shelf next to rumors of "Black Helicopters."

This year, we learned that the Duncan USDOE indeed had a secret Ravitch Group out to dish dirt on Diane because a former assistant secretary of education in the Duncan DOE admitted it in a blog post at Huffington Post:

With the acknowledgement today from former Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach in the U.S. Department of Education, Peter Cunningham, that he had the job to "monitor criticism of our policies and develop our responses" and "one of the people I monitored pretty closely was Diane Ravitch," Klonsky's post about Duncan's "Ravitch Group" rumors turns out to be very, very prescient.

Turns out Duncan did indeed have a "Ravitch Group" that was "monitoring" her "pretty closely" and developing responses to her criticism (i.e., dishing dirt to Duncan- and Obama-friendly journalists like Jonathan Alter and David Brooks to use in their columns on education reform.)

At the time of the Cunningham revelation, I wrote

They may not have called this an "enemies list" or anything like that, but this pushback strategy within Duncan's DOE is indeed Nixonian in breadth and scope.

Somebody ought to ask Arne Duncan about the "Ravitch Group" again.

Why is Ravitch so threatening to Arne and his Merry Men and Women in Reform at the USDOE that they have convened a group to target her, a group that still seems to be functioning, given the anti-Ravitch piece Cunningham posted at Huffington Post as a preemptive strike before her new book on education reform is published? 

Well, we know why Ravitch is so threatening to Duncan and Company - she articulates credible opposition and criticism of their reform agenda and represents a huge threat to their hegemony in the education messaging wars.

Starr is a huge threat to the Obama/Duncan/Gates/Broad agenda as well, having worked as a fairly high profile schools superintendent in a district that had a teacher evaluation system in place that was both well-regarded and not test-score based.

In addition, Starr has called for a three year moratorium on high stakes standardized testing, a direct threat to the Obama/Duncan/Gates/Broad agenda, which cannot allow the high stakes tests to ever disappear, since these so-called accountability measures are the way they try and ratchet up the "Public Education Is In Crisis!" meme that allows them to drive their radical reform agenda.

So it's not a surprise that Duncan and other members of his USDOE lobbied against Starr getting the top schools job in NYC - Starr represents a serious threat to their agenda and they don't want him pushing his own agenda in a high profile place like NYC.

But in addition to the pushback from Duncan and Company as reported by both Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post and Rachel Monahan at the NY Daily News, there have been other hits against Starr.

The NY Post, for example, launched an attack against Starr last month when they published a story alleging Starr oversaw a school district rife with widespread sexual abuse of students by teachers that he failed to crack down.

I wrote at the time that it was odd the Post was hitting Starr for failing to "aggressively" crack down on so-called pedophile teachers abusing students when the article only reported one incident of abuse.

But of course there was a reason the reform-friendly Post went after Starr:

And then we get to the meat of why Starr was attacked by the Post:

Formerly the director of school performance and accountability for New York City public schools, Starr is considered a favored candidate of the teachers union for the chancellorship.

This slimy attack from the Post comes on the heels of the Daily News report that the Obama administration is lobbying against Starr because he is anti-testing.

The attacks from the Obama people and now Murdoch shows how threatened the reformer camp feels over the possibility of Starr as NYCDOE chancellor.

In today's Washington Post article reporting that Duncan and other USDOE employees lobbied against Joshua Starr behind the scenes, there is the following comment from someone named Lilly41:

My guess is that the future mayor of NYC based his decision on information other than that from the USDOE. Dr. Starr is probably embarrassed and now trying to spin the negative outcome of his application.

From what I've heard, Josh should focus on being effective in Montgomery County. Some have said that he is in over his head.

Love the vague accusation that Starr is in over his head, hasn't been doing a good job in Montgomery County schools, etc.

It's a classic hit comment - anonymous, with vague accusations, and nothing documented.

Has all the earmarks of somebody looking to undercut Starr and destroy his credibility - like a USDOE or Gates Foundation employee working behind the scenes as a Starr Group troll.

I'm sure the Duncan DOE will laugh off the accusation that they may have a Starr Group out to destroy the credibility and reputation of Joshua Starr, just as they laughed off the Ravitch Group accusation from Mike Klonsky.

But we know they lied about the existence of the Ravitch Group, that they indeed did have a high level USDOE employee working to undercut Ravitch and destroy her credibility and reputation because Peter Cunningham admitted as much, that still do giving the pushback they do whenever she publishes a book or gives a speech.

It is totally plausible and completely believable that they have a Starr Group as well, especially since we know they felt very threatened by the possibility of Starr being appointed NYCDOE chancellor and worked very hard behind the scenes to ensure that wouldn't happen.

Clearly they feel threatened by Ravitch, Starr and others who oppose their reform agenda and will use any means necessary to destroy the credibility and reputation of the opposition.

There seems to have been a coordinated effort to undercut Starr and destroy his reputation so that if Duncan and Company couldn't convince de Blasio Starr shouldn't be named as chancellor, they could destroy his reputation enough to ensure that de Blasio couldn't name him to the post anyway.

Does Arne Duncan's Dept. Of Education Have Their Own "Enemies List"?

A former Obama administration p.r. guy at Arne Duncan's Department of Education attacked Diane Ravitch in a blog piece that made it to Huffington Post.

It's a piece full of vitriol, ad hominem attacks and unsubstantiated claims against Ravitch, a preemptive strike of education reform propaganda meant to discredit her before her new book on the reform movement is published.

I will leave the pushbacks on the piece to others, like Paul Thomas at @ The Chalk Face, who tears apart the post piece by piece and shows it to be nothing more than "partisan politics being played out in the compliant online media."

But one thing I did want to post about, though Raging Horse got to it before I did, is how the writer of the anti-Ravtich vitriol, former Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach in the U.S. Department of Education, Peter Cunningham, described what he did at the DOE:

One of my jobs was to monitor criticism of our policies and develop our responses. One of the people I monitored pretty closely was Diane Ravitch.

The Obama administration was accused of having an "enemies list" when the story broke that the administration may have been using the IRS to punish political opponents and groups.

While much of that scandal turned out to be overblown, I find Cunningham's publicly admitting that part of his job at the USDOE was to monitor opponents to the Obama administration's education policies and "develop" administration "responses" eerily similar to that story of the IRS being used for payback or the NSA "monitoring" the phone calls of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Where does the overreach of this administration end?  Why would the USDOE use taxpayer money to monitor its opponents and develop pushback responses?  How large was this monitoring program and who else was "monitored"?

As Raging Horse noted:

The US Department of Education “monitored ” Diane Ravitch ? And others ? To what end ? Does this mean that the DOE, like the FBI and the CIA and the NSA is building dossiers on those, like Dr. Ravitch, who have the temerity to point out their inconsistencies, absurdities, failure and lies?

I suppose I should not be surprised that an administration that would shred the constitution to preserve the NSA’s ability to have total surveillance over every American citizen would so casually monitor education critics but I am.

It is becoming more and more apparent that Barack Obama, the former Constitutional law professor, has torn the Constitution to shreds since he took power in 2009.

Drone bombings, the kill list, NSA spying, the war on whistleblowers, the torture of Bradley Manning, NCLB waivers that make new mandates (a power the USDOE does not have), mandating those without health insurance buy private insurance - the list of questionable or clearly unconstitutional Obama policies is growing more extensive by the year.

And now we have a former functionary at Arne Duncan's Department of Education admitting they "monitor" and track opponents of Obama education policies at the USDOE like it's no biggie.

As Raging Horse said, who else are they monitoring?  And to what end?

Let me add a couple of questions to his.

Do they have an "enemies list" at Arne Duncan's DOE? 

And if they do, what are they doing with that list other than using it for propaganda push back purposes?

Bloomberg News Reporters Spied On Bernanke And Geithner Through Bloomberg Terminals

Reporters at Bloomberg News channeling the hacks in the Nixon administration:

Both the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury Department are examining the extent to which Bloomberg-terminal usage by top officials might have been tracked by Bloomberg journalists, CNBC has learned.

A Fed spokesperson told CNBC that the central bank is looking into the situation and has been in touch with Bloomberg to learn more. A source said the Treasury Department is taking similar action.

Meanwhile, CNBC has learned from a former Bloomberg employee that he accessed usage information of the company's data terminals of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

The information appeared to concern general functions used by the officials and the frequency with which those functions — such as looking at a bond, equity markets or news — were accessed. The source said all Bloomberg journalists who knew of this capability of the terminal would have had access to the usage information of the officials.

The issue of Bloomberg journalists' access to individual data from the terminals was revealed in recent days when a reporter called a Goldman Sachs Group employee inquiring about a partner's employment status and noting the partner had not logged on to the terminal lately. The incident prompted a complaint from Goldman and led Bloomberg to terminate the ability of reporters to monitor subscribers.

In a statement on its website, Bloomberg said, "Having recognized this mistake, we took immediate action. Last month we changed our policy so that all reporters only have access to the same customer-relationship data available to our clients."

The former Bloomberg employee who worked in the editorial section recalled calling up the information on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner "just for fun" and displaying the information to new recruits "to show how powerful" the Bloomberg terminals were.

The former employee said he recalled seeing the functions used by the Fed Chairman and Treasury Secretary and the number of times those functions had been used. The person did not recall which specific functions he saw, but said it would have been at a broad level.

For example, he said it would likely have been information that the official accessed a page such as global equity indexes, though not which markets specifically. He said it also could have included information that the user looked up bond spreads, but the information would not have shown what specific bonds were searched by the user.

Still, with thousands of functions, the information could apparently get quite specific. And knowing how often a user looked up individual information and how often the user was logged in could provide valuable information.

A JP Morgan Chase source told CNBC that, "Multiple Bloomberg reporters very openly were using terminal login data to determine when traders were suspended and/or let go — during the London Whale situation, as well as during other rounds of layoffs."

A Quartz story (www.qz.com) said Bloomberg employees had accessed a transcript of a call of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to the company's help desk. The story said the information was not used in any editorial pieces written by journalists.

Did The Little Mayor know about this when he was still running the day-to-day operations of Bloomberg LP?

Did The Little Mayor know about this activity once he left the day-to-day operations at Bloomberg to somebody else and started running the city?

What does The Little Mayor think now that the word "Bloombergian" has some of the same associations as "Nixonian"?

Cuomo Hammered In Editorials Over Secrecy And Abuses Of Power

The Times Union:

THE ISSUE:

A DOT engineer is out of a job after he praised the Cuomo administration in a newspaper interview.

THE ISSUE:

Talk about a chilling effect.

We would fully understand if Mike Fayette didn't care to work again, after being forced into retirement at age 55 by his heavy-handed bosses at the state Department of Transportation. But it wouldn't surprise us if he'd prefer an employer that places a higher value on loyalty and dedication.
Those ought to be invaluable qualities in any workplace. At the DOT, however, and elsewhere in Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration, a troubling preoccupation with controlling public information has turned dedication into its own perverse form of insubordination.

In Mr. Fayette's case, it's even cause for a top gubernatorial aide to drag out what really is the unrelated dirty laundry of his disciplinary record at DOT.

Mr. Fayette is out of the job he held for 30 years because he dared to speak. That's right; he had the temerity to tell a North Country newspaper what a good job the DOT did cleaning up the damage to the Adirondacks from Tropical Storm Irene.

"DOT engineer on Irene: 'We were up for it,'" read the headline in the Aug. 30 edition of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.

Mr. Fayette said he was motivated to talk to the paper on the one-year anniversary of that brutal storm to rebut criticism of the DOT for its job repaving Route 86 between Saranac Lake and Lake Placid.
"The DOT as a whole, and maintenance staff in particular, we like to think we can take care of everything, and you fight it as long as you can, saying, 'I can take care of this,' " he said. "For a while we were holding on, but it just turned into something we had never seen before."

Mr. Fayette went on to describe how the DOT was able to reopen Route 73, also in Essex County.
"I told the governor we could do it," he said. "He wanted it open, and that's what we do. We like challenges, and we were up for it."

Up for natural disasters, perhaps, but not an obstacle course of political protocol. Mr. Fayette's pride in his agency's work, expressed in appropriately deferential terms, ran afoul of the DOT's rigid rules requiring his bosses' permission to talk to the press.

They were all set to fire him. Instead, he chose to retire.

And now comes Howard Glaser, the director of operations for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, so eager to talk about how Mr. Fayette had an affair with a subordinate and how he used the state's computers to carry on with her.

Mr. Fayette's defense, in part, is that the warning not to talk to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise came a day after he did just that.

So, really, what's the scandal here? Doesn't an administration ostensibly so committed to making state government work again have much more vexing worries than retaliating against a career civil servant who seems to believe in that very mission?

You would think that Mr. Fayette was another Ward Stone, the now-retired state wildlife pathologist who repeatedly ran afoul of state officials, particularly when Mr. Cuomo's father was governor, for talking about things his bosses preferred to keep quiet, like harm to the environment.

"The end result is I got screwed," he told the Plattsburgh Press Republican. "Hugely screwed. At the end of the day the taxpayers of the state lose, too."

And the state's answer is to drag up his sexual history.

Mr. Fayette's fate is an injustice that can't be ignored and needs to be fixed. Unless of course, in promising to promote more transparency in state government, Mr. Cuomo actually meant fear and intimidation.

And the Post-Star:

 

 

Talk to the press if you work for the state and you could get fired.

Protest your poor treatment, and the Cuomo administration will ransack your files for any black marks and try to wreck your life.

That is what happened to Mike Fayette, a Transportation Department engineer for Essex County, who made the mistake last summer of praising to a reporter the department’s response to Hurricane Irene.
The problem, according to a “notice of discipline” letter Fayette received, was the department’s commissioner, Joan McDonald, had wanted to do the interview herself.

Fayette explained he talked to the press because reporters had been trying for days to get comments from McDonald or other Transportation Department officials, with no luck. Fayette didn’t want the department to look bad, so when a reporter called with questions, he answered them.

It is right for public employees, paid by our tax dollars, to provide information to the public by answering questions from reporters. State employees can be held accountable and state operations opened to public scrutiny through the medium of the press.

Abuses flourish in a secretive environment, but that is unfortunately what the Cuomo administration is creating in Albany.

The state has long made it a practice to hire overpaid, uninformed public information officers to stand between state employees and the press. These mouthpieces are merely messengers; they do not know anything themselves. So reporters must engage in a game of telephone in their dealings with the state, asking questions of an information officer, then waiting for a return call while the information officer asks someone who knows.

Past administrations have left some flexibility in the system — places where trickles of truth could leak out. But the Cuomo administration is working to keep the public as ignorant about state operations as its own information officers are.

After Mr. Fayette talked to the press, he was told he was being demoted and would have to relocate to Albany. He retired instead.

Then, he committed the sin of talking to the press again, explaining to reporters why he was disciplined. In response, Cuomo consigliere Howard Glaser dug up an old disciplinary matter from Fayette’s file and set about destroying his reputation.

Mr. Fayette was disciplined previously for having an affair with a subordinate and using work email and telephones to communicate with her. That case was over, he was punished for it, and it had no connection to the discipline he received for talking to the press.

The details of Mr. Fayette’s earlier disciplinary case are the sort of private personnel information state officials would be unlikely to reveal, even if asked.

In this case, Mr. Glaser was not asked. He volunteered the information to besmirch and punish Mr. Fayette.

The paranoid persecution of Mr. Fayette, with the childish insistence by the commissioner she should have been the one who got to talk to the press, would be amusing if it weren’t so destructive. But this case demonstrates a penchant for secrecy and willingness to abuse power that has become a pattern with the Cuomo administration.

One manifestation of this pattern has been the governor’s reliance on messages of necessity to rush bills through the Legislature without giving political representatives or the public time to consider them.

One of those bills, NY Safe Act, included a provision that limits access to public records, in this case, handgun registrations.

Similarly, a recent court ruling limited public access to teachers’ pension records, which have for years been available on websites, such as Empire Center’s SeeThroughNY.

That court ruling grew out of an earlier, equally misguided one denying access to the names of New York City Police Pension Fund recipients. The public has an unequivocal right to know who is receiving public money, and how much they are getting. The Cuomo administration should be acting to reverse the effect of these court rulings, but unfortunately, the governor has instead been turning away from the traditions of open government.

The way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him, preferably with a crowd of allies behind you. We need to stand beside Mike Fayette now, before the bullying from the governor goes any further, and demand he get his job back, and an apology from Andrew Cuomo to go with it.

As I wrote yesterday, there is no way this guy is getting through a presidential primary season.

Politico ran a story today saying Cuomo has become obsessed with the Clintons and everything he has been doing in recent months is meant to position him to an advantage in 2016.

As the Politico story notes, it's hard to see how the firing of Fayette and going nuclear on him by revealing his disciplinary record helps Cuomo in that.

It's also hard to see how someone as controlling, paranoid, and vindictive as Cuomo gets through the press scrutiny of a presidential campaign

Vindictive Cuomo Never Going To Be President

Read the story of how the Cuomo people went "nuclear" on a former state employee by releasing as much damaging information as they could about him for his crime of talking to the press about the state's Sandy response without permission and then ask yourself, how is Andrew Cuomo going to handle a two year presidential campaign without having half a dozen "ferret moments" that expose him as the paranoid, vindictive Nixonian politician he is?

There is no way he or the paranoid, vindictive functionaries around him are going to be able to handle the scrutiny of a presidential campaign without major explosions.

Cuomo's Nixonian Side Re-Exposed

Ten years ago, Andrew Cuomo had a reputation as a nasty, vindictive, paranoid asshole.

After his loss to Carl McCall, Cuomo decided to reinvent himself (the "New Cuomo") and came back into public life trying to seem more measured, more mature - less like his old self, the nasty, vindictive, paranoid asshole.

One of the strategies he employed as part of his reinvention was to court Rupert Murdoch and Murdoch's man in Albany, Fred Dicker, in order to get the NY Post and FOX News on his side.

By courting Murdoch and his henchmen, Cuomo was following in the footsteps of British politicians like Tony Blair who had shown how powerful it was to have Murdoch and his papers on your side when you're a politician - even one who is ostensibly from the decidedly less conservative party.

So far, that reinvention has worked.

Cuomo has extremely high approval ratings two years into his governorship and he has managed to take his popularity and use it to push through all kinds of policies that Rupert Murdoch likes.

In return Murdoch's papers treat Cuomo with respect and promote this image of Cuomo as mature, measured, statesmanlike and indeed, presidential.

But behind the scenes Cuomo has the reputation for being the same nasty, vindictive, paranoid asshole he always was - he's simply learned to game the public relations so that few people outside of politics know that.

Unfortunately for Cuomo, both the connections to Murdoch and the re-emergence of the old Cuomo have been exposed today. The Village Voice political blog does a great job of covering the story:

Governor Andrew Cuomo's PR flack is under fire for a "file" he kept on a reporter who's often critical of Cuomo -- and now the gov's PR squad is running damage control.

First stop -- as always -- Andrew Cuomo apologist/New York Post state capitol bureau chief Fred Dicker's radio show.

It should be noted that we contacted the governor's office last night asking for an explanation of the "file." Like many other media outlets that publish less-than-flattering commentary on the governor, we were ignored.

Dicker -- who currently is in the process of writing a biography on Cuomo (natch) -- had Cuomo Press Secretary Josh Vlasto on his show this morning to discuss the "file" kept on Albany reporter Elizabeth Benjamin by Cuomo Communications Director Richard Bamberger regarding the "generally snarky" blog posts she's written about the governor.

Vlasto -- who took time away from his vacation to chat with Cuomo's pal Dicker -- claims the "file" isn't nearly as sinister, or "Nixon-esque" as certain members of the media are making it out to be.

An "unfortunate episode" is how Vlasto describes the "file" on Benjamin, claiming that it's nothing of any substance -- just a collection of blog posts with a few notes from Bamberger (read it for yourself here).

He blames the spread of the leaked "file" on the fast-paced nature of Internet journalism -- specifically blogs that can be particularly "snarky."

Dicker, obviously, agreed with Vlasto's assessment of how insignificant the information contained in the "file" is -- with no mention of what the "file" represents: how paranoid the governor's office is with Cuomo's media image, and how Cuomo's PR people pick and choose which media outlets will have access to the governor based on how favorable their coverage will be. For example, the governor has appeared on Benjamin's public affairs television show, Capitol Tonight, a grand total of once. Dicker, on the other hand, frequently has Cuomo as a guest on his radio show, and currently is writing a biography of the governor, for which he's been assured he'll have Cuomo's "cooperation."

Dicker, obviously, is at the top of the list when it comes to Cuomo-approved reporters, so the governor's office's paranoia with the media doesn't impact him. The rest of us aren't as lucky/don't treat the governor like he's royalty -- in the past two months, the governor's office has only once responded to our request for comment...on anything.

Dicker went so far as to suggest that there might be some sort of "espionage" going on on the second floor of the state capitol, and that reporters might be picking through the governor's trash looking for "exclusive" documents, like the "file" on Benjamin.

Dicker further blamed the distribution of the "file" compiled by Bamberger -- who Dicker apparently adores -- to the "snarky" nature of the blogosphere, noting that "snarky" is just a modern-day term for "nasty." He illustrated his point by saying how "nasty" the Village Voice has been with him the past "several weeks."

Keep in mind, this is the same Fred Dicker who's alleged to have sent photographers to the home of former gubernatorial candidate/Cuomo opponent Carl Paladino to take pictures of his daughter.

We sent Dicker an email asking if he really didn't see anything wrong with the gov's office keeping a "file" on a reporter. We'll let you know if he gets back to us.

This will be interesting to watch going forward.

First, the episode gives us a glimpse of the old nasty, vindictive, paranoid Cuomo in action once again - building a kind of enemies list of media people, compiling alleged crimes committed by these media people and perhaps looking for ways to retaliate against them.

Second, in this Voice piece you can see the resentment Cuomo has built up in the press corps who are not part of his Royal Court (NY 1, in another example, has a "Cuomo Clock" that counts the number of days Cuomo has refused to appear on the channel.) As Cuomo tries to pivot to presidential politics come 2014, it will be interesting to see if his hardball media tactics don't come back to bite him.

Third, you can see how the relationship between Andrew Cuomo, Rupert Murdoch and Fred Dicker is as corrupt as any between Murdoch and and British politicians like Tony Blair or David Cameron. Cuomo is completely on Murdoch's payroll, giving the man whatever he wants in order to stay on his good side and get the glowing coverage Dicker and the Post provide.

Witness when Cuomo almost decided not to push heavily for a new teacher evaluation system earlier this year. Murdoch took to Twitter to call Cuomo a "coward" and within minutes Cuomo had fallen all over himself to give Murdoch what he wanted on the evaluation system.

When Rupert (or Fred Dicker) talks, Cuomo jumps. And when Cuomo needs to be defended in the media, Fred Dicker and the Murdoch papers swing into action.

So far, Cuomo has gotten away with this strategy. But today's drama over Liz Benjamin, while certainly not fatal or even all that damaging to Cuomo's reputation (after all, other than politicos, who the hell reads the blogs this stuff shows up on?) does show that Cuomo is still the same nasty, vindictive paranoid asshole he always was and many in the Albany press corps will be happy to hand his head to him when they get the chance.

Bloomberg Like Nixon, Only He's His Own Bebe

Norm at Education Notes was over this story earlier in the week, the News has done a couple of articles on it, and Gotham Schools had a story as well, but between work stuff and parent-teacher conferences, I haven't been able to give the story that the DOE used parent coordinators to promote Bloomberg's political causes the attention it deserves.

First, here is the latest on the story from the Daily News:

The city Education Department has drafted school workers into political fights even before this week's controversial petition drive, union officials said Thursday.

In January and February, department officials asked parent coordinators to get parents who supported Mayor Bloomberg's policies to attend public meetings on closing low-performing schools.

"That is definitely, totally illegal," said DC 37 Local 372 acting President Santos Crespo, noting parent coordinators from all over the city were asked to participate in the turnout efforts.

A Manhattan parent coordinator said she was "dumbfounded" by the instructions for turning people out to public meetings.

"The model was 'We don't want to hear anything negative,'" she recalled.

Education Department spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said officials were within their rights.

"There is nothing wrong with encouraging parents to come out and participate in meetings that determine what happens to their children's schools," she said.

Ravitz again acknowledged that "DOE staff acted inappropriately in asking parent coordinators to circulate a petition" earlier this week that called for ending seniority protections for teachers.

Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew on Thursday asked the special schools investigator to determine who was responsible for the petition drive and how much the city spent on it.

The DOE violated the law by pushing this policy.

Who was behind the idea?

How far up the Bloomberg chain did it go?

What other political manipulations are the ypulling on the public dime?

Were any parent coordinators paid extra to aid in the cause?

Were any parent coordinators given Gates Foundation or hedge fundie largesse to aid in the cause?

Let's be honest here, the coordination of the education deform movement is pretty intricate.

Let's take the Asshats4Educators group.

They were supposed to be a "grassroots" movement of young teachers who were opposed to seniority protections, tenure and lots of other things that Bloomberg and Klein hate.

This group got lots of press at hedge fundie-funded Gotham Schools, got lots of press in the Murdoch papers, got lots of attention on the Murdoch-owned TV stations.

They DIDN'T get lots of scrutiny, however.

Mr. Talk at Accountable Talk was the first to notice that the Asshat4Educator website looked an awful lot like the DFER website.

A little scrutiny into the matter exposed the connection between the hedge fundie DFER's and the Asshats - they were funding the website and subsidizing the group.

Since then, the Asshats - who are still introduced as "educators" even though they no longer work as teachers - are enjoying not only Whitney Tilson-inspired hedge fund largesse but also lots of yummy, yummy Gates Foundation money.

No wonder Chancellor Klein met with the Asshats and hailed the group as "heroes" of the education world.

They're a manufactured grassroots movement, completely funded by corporate interests, who promote education policies those corporate interests want promoted in media outlets owned by those same corporate interests.

If you don't believe me, just read this NY Times story from back in February on the connection between the Asshats, the anti-seniority forces, the DFER's, the DOE, Bloomberg and the hedge fund managers.

They do a heckuva job on the coordination, don't they?

Now we get the story that the DOE was using parent coordinators to promote some of the same corporate-friendly policies that the Asshats are promoting.

I have no inside knowledge of any of this, but how much do you want to bet that some of the same money that has found its way to the Asshats4Educators found its way to any of the parent coordinators who have done the bidding of the Bloomberg administration and DOE on these political matters.

It's all very Nixonian, and while I am sure there are no tapes with John Dean saying there is a cancer on the presidency, I would say there is a cancer in the city that destroys the healthy body politic with bribes and corporate largesse and greed.

That cancer is located right down at City Hall Park in the two buildings off Broadway - City Hall and Tweed.

And what we need is a little scrutiny on the political operatives in those two buildings to see just how far the political manipulations have gone.

You can be sure that this use of parent coordinators to promote Bloomberg's political policies on the public dime is just the tip of the iceberg.