Running down the dailies:

Post: "That '70s Woe in Rerun: Gov Warning of Worst Economy in Decades"

Tell us something we don't know.

Frederic U. Dicker's "exclusive" is that Gov. David Paterson is going to make "an unprecedented special address" to New Yorkers about it.

It's not unprecedented for Paterson to make a special speech about New Yorkers getting fucked. He did the same thing earlier this year about Eliot Spitzer.

Daily News: "Father of 3 shot dead — 'asked the wrong girl to dance' "

Crime hed/lede of the morning. Courtesy of Edgar Sandoval, Xana O'Neill, and Simone Weichselbaum (and their editors), to wit and to the point:

Shameless propaganda for oil companies. The word "profit" doesn't even make an appearance, despite the fact that only four months ago Congress publicly grilled oil execs for their exorbitant profit-taking.

The paper's Keith Bradsher writes this morning:

Yes, the oil-patch president, the one who failed in the oil bidness despite subsidies from Daddy Bush's rich pals, is telling America about poor, poor Big Oil.

In any case, the Times story is relative hogwash — which will not, unfortunately, power your vehicle.

You're much better off (in knowledge, not money) reading this morning's overseas/oil story in the Washington Post, "China's Cars, Accelerating A Global Demand for Fuel," wherein Ariana Eunjung Cha notes:

She doesn't mention the word "profit" either, but the WashPost story at least points fingers at Chinese consumers and their SUVs instead of some hapless Indonesian and his battered wooden freighter. Typical of a Times story to blame the poor, no matter how many poor kids the paper sends to summer camp.

No one remembers, of course, the time when government regulation of U.S. oil production — a rational idea never considered these days — was actually pushed by a White House. Read this history lesson from the U.K. site Spartacus Educational:

He was referring to the former oil-depletion allowance, but the oil bidness still reaps the benefits of absurd, destructive tax breaks. When Congress roasted the oil execs last April, CNN's Steve Hargeaves pointed out:

Post: "PARTY'S OVER IN E. END"

Mediocre hed (for the Post), but Selim Algar's lede does a good job of mongering fear:

Post: "PAL'S 'SERMON' FOR '$INNER': NY CATHOLIC BIG DEFENDED FOLLIERI"

Classic Post toastie — investigative gossip — by Jeane MacIntosh and Kati Cornell:

It is hard to believe that the Post didn't at least use this piece to take a shot at Hillary and Bill Clinton — Burkle is perhaps their prime sugar daddy. (See my February 2008 item "Gelt Trip" for details.)

But the story does have a great kicker:

In the journo game, you haven't made your bones as a reporter until you've been threatened by a politician or a mogul's dogs or had a sheriff pin you against a wall like a butterfly.

Times: "Democracy Institute Gives Donors Access to McCain"

Timesman Mike McIntire's story is promoted this way: "The International Republican Institute is in many ways at odds with John McCain's political outsider image." His lede:

Sorry, Mike, I wrote about McCain's links to this GOP agitprop arm in April — when he called Bush "a president who dares to work for the best" — and about the IRI's links to the Wolfie/World Bank scandal before that.

Bush does dare to work for the best and richest oil execs. McIntire's story, however, does dare to insert some good detail.

But this continuing canard about McCain as a "political outsider." Jesus, he's anything but.

World Bank's "institutional integrity" chief Folsom overstayed her unwelcome.

In a move as overdue as a Citigroup payment to its debtors, Suzanne Rich Folsom, a crony of deposed prexy Paul Wolfowitz, finally bounced at the World Bank. Under pressure, she quit.

To the best of my knowledge, it was I who broke the news in November 2005 that Wolfowitz had tapped Folsom, already working at the bank, to be the head of its Institutional Integrity department. It was ludicrous because she was also was officially Wolfowitz's "Counselor." She did nothing, of course, when people complained about Wolfie's impropriety with Shaha Ali Riza, who worked under him not only at the bank but as his gal pal.

As I noted back in the fall of 2005:

Folsom was the wrong person for the job of keeping an eye on the internal integrity of the World Bank. In April 2007, while Wolfie was vainly fighting to keep his job, I wrote that Folsom was rumored in the flood of staff e-mails about Wolfie to have hosted a Republican fundraiser. She wouldn't respond to my queries at the time, but her flack denied that she had done so. It wouldn't have been a surprise, because her GOP ties run deep. She's married to George Folsom, former president of the International Republican Institute. And I reported in January 2006 that she hired Allison Brigati, the daughter of America's leading lobbyist for the gambling industry, Frank Fahrenkopf, to help her probe corruption within the bank. Hoo-hah.

Did I mention that Fahrenkopf is a former national chairman of the GOP?

Like Wolfowitz, she had no business being in charge of anything at the World Bank. See the extensive coverage of Wolfie by the watchdog Government Accountability Project, which notes today:

The best story on Folsom's skedaddle is from the excellent Bank Information Center, a sober watchdog on international finance institutions. Its piece today points out that Folsom's internal anti-corruption unit was "fraught with weak management and a conflict of interest at its upper management." She continued to be Counselor to Wolfie's successor, Bob Zoellick.

It's official: The Bush regime has tapped Bob Zoellick, longtime GOP operative and lover of giant pandas and giant businesses, to replace Paul Wolfowitz as World Bank president.

Following Wolfie's embarrassing reign of error, Zoellick will have it easy — believe me, my own experience is that when you replace a schnook, everybody cuts you slack.

But if you just pretend for a second that 9/11 never happened and Bush named Zoellick to head the World Bank, there would be some derisive howls because Zoellick's extensive resume as a lackey for big business includes a stint as a paid advisory board member for Enron.

If there had been no 9/11, the Bush regime would have continued bumbling along for one term, trying to do favors for its business pals before turning things over to the Democrats.

But there was a 9/11, and it provided all sorts of excuses to go to war.

Anyway, Zoellick is the guy, as I speculated on May 25, and the World Bank board, which just called for nominations, will have to live with it.

Zoellick specialized in international trade for Goldman Sachs, but don't let that fool you into thinking he's a businessman. He's a political operative since the Reagan era — that's why Goldman Sachs hired him last year from the State Department to be an "international banker." He has zipped in and out of government for years, parlaying "public service" contacts into private-sector jobs, and vice versa.

The best thing about Zoellick, as I previously noted, is that he hugs endangered animals instead of blowing their heads off.

The worst thing about his appointment is that the World Bank will probably fade from the news — unless he gets his swerve on with Wolfie's ex-gal pal, Shaha Ali Riza. Because the funniest thing about the whole Wolfie scandal was that Wolfie blamed an "overheated" atmosphere at the bank and in the media for his ouster.

Bob Zoellick, the investment banker who's the leading candidate for the World Bank job, according to Irish punters, is the only Republican we've heard of who actually hugs endangered animals instead of blowing their heads off.

But will this dog hunt as the new World Bank president?

As Zoellick's name continues to percolate, keep in mind that he was the designated hitter back in the 2000 presidential campaign to lay out the GOP's foreign policy objectives.

His patter back then sheds light not only on what kind of internationalist he is but also on how 9/11 fit so beautifully into the GOP's foreign policy objectives. No wonder everyone in the Bush regime was so motivated to invade Iraq.

Back in 2000, Zoellick, experienced in international diplomacy — unlike the deposed Paul Wolfowitz, who spent his time in Indonesia cozying up to Suharto and the army — was a war hawk who wasn't a hawk. He's not a neocon, but he was a signatory on their "New American century" manifesto to Clinton about Iraq before the Bush regime took office.

If you want to understand Zoellick, go back to January 2000, when he, Condoleezza Rice, and other Republicans mapped out the GOP's world view for that year's presidential campaign.

The essays by Zoellick and Rice in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs show just how lucky the Bush regime was that 9/11 happened.

In "Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest," Rice, then a Stanford professor, wrote:

Clinton, of course, wasn't special enough. Zoellick, in his essay "Campaign 2000: A Republican Foreign Policy," summed it up:

Zoellick ripped Clinton's "uncertainty on when and how to use American power — frequently hesitating, then overcommitting, and regularly failing to match means with ends," adding:

And here was Zoellick on Clinton's moves on permanently unhappy Haiti:

Feel free to compare this with George Bush Jr.'s Iraq policy.

Anyway, Zoellick also noted:

Things never change, do they? Zoellick continued on this thread, but just note what has actually happened since the Bush regime took power. Here's Zoellick:

"Much hubris but little credibility." Uh-huh. After castigating Clinton for the very things that Bush Jr. wound up doing, Zoellick laid out the GOP plan, proclaiming that "five principles distinguish a modern Republican foreign policy." Here's the somewhat lengthy passage — please bear with me:

What happens when evil falls into your lap? What happens when you ignore the warnings, as Bush and Rice did in August 2001 when the President's Daily Brief noted that Osama bin Laden might attack us with planes? What happens when you refuse to fill the key post of counterintelligence adviser, as the Bush regime did when Don Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith blew off filling Brian Sheridan's post?

And if you're spoiling for a fight, looking for a linchpin for your foreign policy, what's better than 9/11? Of course no one wanted 9/11 to happen. But it was the perfect moment for the GOP.

The coalition of the willing goniffs was born: A campaign against Iraq would draw in a wide spectrum, from oil execs like Cheney to fanatical Zionists like dual-disloyalist Feith to the GOP's powerful Christian right praying for Armageddon to the neocons and finally to the slightly more moderate Republicans like Rice and Zoellick looking for something to focus on as our "national interest" so we could re-establish our natural role as the planet's top dog.

And Saddam Hussein was always in the back of their minds. Rice noted in her essay:

Zoellick also had some harsh words for evil dictators, and while he was at it, he parroted the strong pro-Israel line of the new GOP:

But these weren't calls for invading Iraq. As Rice wrote:

What was needed was something that would justify the use of power, that would dissolve domestic opposition to such muscle-flexing against Iraq.

Face it: 9/11 was the best thing that ever happened to the Republican Party.

Now, whether the world needs another GOP foreign-policy architect to head the World Bank is another matter. One thing's for sure: He wouldn't be worse than Wolfowitz.

Forget the rumbles from overseas about the possibility of a non-American being chosen to head the World Bank. The Bush regime, as is custom, will get to appoint an American to replace Paul Wolfowitz as bank president.

Thanks to Wolfie's poor performance, it won't be another neocon.

Wolfie has no one to blame but himself. I broke the story back in September 2005 that Wolfie had set up a sweetheart deal for his sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza, at the State Department. But Wolfie's hubris made his fall inevitable. The smartest comment I've read comes from one of his friends, Fred Ikle, in Karen DeYoung's perceptive piece this morning in the Washington Post:

And think of the funerals Wolfie was responsible for as chief architect of the Iraq debacle.

At the bank, no one was killed on his two-year watch, thankfully. The guy's reign of error did permanently damage U.S. clout, but only to the extent that the Bush regime won't be able to shove another neocon down the world's throat. So don't worry that some ideologue like Wolfie — or John Bolton, the neocon who used to be the U.S.'s U.N. rep — will be thrust upon the bank again.

As the New York Times noted this morning:

Paulson himself is a good bet. The Europeans (including the Financial Times, the most influential newspaper in the hallways of the powerful development bank) call him "Hank Paulson," and he was careful to distance himself from the Bush regime when it came to Wolfie's steadily worsening situation.

Another name, Jim Leach, has popped up, and that would be really intriguing. Leach is a liberal Republican, from the Ripon Society arm of the GOP, which continually tries to keep the religious wing-nuts from controlling the party.

Leach also knows banks. The former congressman chaired the House Banking Committee and in the '80s famously referred to S&L scandal figure Charles Keating (John McCain's former sugar daddy) as a "financiopath."

No one had to coin that delicious word for Leach. He thought it up himself, his staff assured me at the time, and I believe them. He's a very clever guy.

Leach would be the perfect guy to put a face on fighting corruption, but he probably won't get it because he's jousted with the GOP's right wing so often. A decade ago, Robert Parry, dissecting the influence of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, wrote:

You may recall Norquist as one of Wampumgate scandal figure Jack Abramoff's old college pals. Karl Rove is, of course, another of those former GOP College Republican leaders, as we know from his interview by Dan Rather circulating on YouTube.

Can't see the Bush regime forgetting all that history and naming Leach. If so, it would mean that Bush is the lamest of lame ducks.

But Leach would help suck the poison out of the damaged relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the world.

So would another candidate, Dick Lugar, former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lugar, like Leach, is a pragmatic Republican pol. But he, too, has spent some time trying to dismantle neocons.

Considering the Bush regime's antipathy toward Leach and Lugar, its best choice would be Paulson, who already has solid relations with his European counterparts.

Bloody good news: World Bank officials are preparing an "exit strategy" for Paul Wolfowitz, according to ABC's Brian Ross.

Bloody bad news: The exit is Wolfie's own departure from the World Bank battleground and not the desperately needed strategy for exiting the Iraq debacle for which he was chief architect.

If worldbankpresident.org weren't suspiciously down (it may be back up by the time you read this), you could get all the details about this on that eminent site. You'll have to settle for Brian Ross, who's somewhat of a watchdog himself.

Ross's report shrewdly notes that Wolfie was likely to step down this afternoon because he was planning a trip to Europe on bank business. Others have already reported that he's no longer welcome at that European confab as a representative of the bank.

Here's what Ross wrote:

Worldbankpresident.org, the premier watchdog website on Paul Wolfowitz's very-soon-to-end reign at the World Bank, mysteriously went down this afternoon. One of its operators, Alex Wilks, e-mailed people to say, "Sabotage suspected."

Just after the site posted details of the rumors that Wolfowitz's resignation is to be announced this week, the whole shebang went down. Wilks, whose day job is coordinator of the watchdog group European Network on Debt & Development, e-mailed this announcement a few minutes ago from Brussels:

Paul Wolfowitz came unglued last year during the fallout from his sweetheart deal for his sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza, according to a story broken today by Richard Adams of the Guardian (U.K.)., who writes:

Wolfie must not have seen my story in 2005 about Riza's sweet deal. But that's no big deal. In fact, I'm relieved, because I wouldn't want to be fucked by either him or Riza — not for fun and not even for a story.

If the time finally comes when Paul Wolfowitz is forced to publicly account for his role as chief architect of the Iraq invasion, look for him to blame everyone else but himself.

He'll blame his attackers. And if he can possibly do so, he might very well blame his girlfriend. That's what he's doing in his wrangle with the World Bank.

The World Bank panel's final report on Wolfowitz's shoddy, unethical behavior regarding his sweetheart deal for his sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza, heavily criticizes Wolfowitz from dragging the institution through the mud. And it, in effect, brands him a liar.

So, don't wait for his book on Iraq — or for his 60 Minutes interview touting that book. Go right to the bank panel's report on the tenets Wolfie followed. I noted late yesterday some of the panel's harsh findings.

A closer look at the report confirms that Wolfowitz never had any business being "selected" (named by Dick Cheney and the others for whom George W. Bush is front man) to head the World Bank in the spring of 2005.

Fresh from helping initiate the invasion of Iraq, in which the U.S. flouted international rules of conduct, Wolfowitz apparently believed that the World Bank's rules didn't apply either. From the bank's Ad Hoc Group investigating panel:

The report continues:

When the whole situation started to unravel (started initially by my September 2005 story about his sweetheart's sweetheart deal to go work with Cheney's daughter Liz at the State Department), Wolfowitz responded like any other petty despot: He attacked his attackers. The bank panel notes:

Principles? Codes? Wolfie's current position is laughable. As the report says (and as I noted yesterday):

The bank panel says he couldn't be more wrong about that:

Shaha Riza is bound to be troubled, too. Wolfie claimed to the bank's investigating panel that the bank's ethics panel was afraid to deal with Riza because she was "angry and upset" over her past treatment. Hey, Wolfie, stop projecting. You're the one who's afraid of her temper. But, true to your bungling, you're just going to make her madder by thus blaming her for part of this situation.

You don't have to be a psychologist to parse this passage in Peter Goodman's story in this morning's Washington Post:

Wolfie sounds as if he speaks from experience. She gets that pissed off, eh? Wait till she reads the report and sees that you have blamed her supposed wrath for your own foolish actions.

Maybe that will solve the conflict of interest problem. No girlfriend, no conflict of interest. Case closed.

No, that won't happen — publicly, at least. The next big thing to happen publicly will be Wolfowitz's exit from the bank. But the longer he stays around, the more difficult it is to get him to withdraw gracefully.

Kind of like Iraq.

The World Bank's explosive report on Paul Wolfowitz was finally released late this afternoon and, as expected, it doesn't back up Wolfie's claim of a "smear campaign" against him.

In fact, the only smear is the slime trail left by Wolfie and his adviser Robin Cleveland (the Boeing-scandal figure he imported from the White House budget office) as they finagled a way-out-of-line sweetheart deal for Wolfie's sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza.

The most startling thing I've seen in an early perusal of the report is that Riza really screwed things up back in 2005 by demanding a huge pay raise once Wolfie unethically stepped into the fray on her behalf because, according to her, she had been screwed out of past raises by bank managers. That very well may have happened, but it threw a big monkey wrench into the works.

Read the "Second Report of the Ad Hoc Group," archived here by the up-to-the-minute site worldbankpresident.org.

As I wade through the report, I wish I'd talked with Xavier Coll, at the time the bank's vice president for human resources, when I broke the story in September 2005 that Wolfie had sent bank flack Riza to the State Department to work with Dick Cheney's daughter Liz. I had no idea back then that Wolfie and Cleveland had strong-armed the bank's personnel director — as subsequent reports have said and as this new report confirms.

One particularly delicious excerpt from the report:

Which is immediately followed by this:

Hoo-hah!

The way I read this report, the crucial period was August 10-12, 2005. On August 10, Coll met with Wolfie and Cleveland " "in preparation for a meeting on August 11 with Ms. Riza." The report continues:

Think about it: The bank's personnel director is instructed by the bank president not to get this potentially hinky employment deal for the bank president's girlfriend vetted by the bank's lawyers. Oh, brother. Hell of a way to run a railroad or a war. This should tell you something about how we got so snarled in the Iraq debacle.

A digression: Wolfowitz told the bank board's Ad Hoc Group investigating his behavior "that he had no clear recollection of the sequence of events." On the other hand, Xavier Coll, the panel said, "presented the Ad Hoc Group with detailed recollection of the chronology of events based on contemporaneous records." Hell, Cheney should have hired someone like Coll to plan the ill-fated and unjustified invasion, instead of letting Wolfie do it.

Anyway, on August 11, Coll met with Riza. She proposed a huge pay hike for herself, along with guaranteed promotions while she was being "seconded" to the State Department.

Riza, for her part, carried a grudge into that meeting. She much later told the Ad Hoc Group investigating committee that, in the report's words, " 'two consecutive MENA [Middle East North Africa region] vice presidents' had not promoted her due to 'discrimination,' because she is 'a Muslim, Arabic woman who dares to question the status quo.' "

As I said, she may very well be right that she was a victim of discrimination, but the new report deals with her harshly on this:

Xavier Coll apparently didn't think much of her strong-arming either. On August 12, the day after Coll met with Riza, he met with Wolfie and Cleveland again to discuss Riza's proposed terms. The report goes on:

Somebody's lying, and my money's on Wolfowitz's being the fibber. Moreover, the report notes:

But, hey, Wolfie says there were no rules, so he didn't break any rules. He's probably right: In his world, the two war fronts of Iraq and the World Bank, there were no rules.

I say "were" because he'll be out of the World Bank very soon. Iraq is another matter, of course.