Apparently Ron Paul has ripped a hole in the fabric of reality, and we’ve fallen through into another dimension in which U.S. foreign policy is debated on national daytime television.

Pretty amazing. I like this universe much more than the old one.

Nicky Gavron, Deputy Mayor of London, originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.

Nicky Gavron, the Deputy Mayor of London, discussed her city’s experiences with congestion pricing at a forum sponsored by the Drum Major Institute in New York this morning.

Congestion pricing, known in the less framing-conscious UK as “congestion charging” is a high-tech toll system that automatically charges drivers a fee for taking their cars into the city.

In London, congestion pricing and complementary improvements to the transit system, have cut the number of cars entering the restricted areas by a third. The money from the tolls is earmarked by law for improvements in the public transportation system. CP brings in about $122 million extra dollars for transit each year.

Gavron noted that CP has the rare distinction of being more popular since people started having to pay than it was before it was implemented. The measure initially faced steep opposition.

Skeptics predicted that business in Central London would be devastated-but the general consensus is that CP has been economically neutral.

Continue the discussion of congestion pricing at DMI Blog.

That is, assuming they want to. Here’s a piece of mine about this in Mother Jones:

What would a serious congressional strategy to block a war with Iran look like? Constitutional scholars and congressional staff agree there’s no one magic answer. The alarming truth is that 220 years after the adoption of the Constitution, there are few settled answers about what legal powers the executive branch possesses to start a war. But there are several steps Congress could take to make a war with Iran politically very difficult for the White House…

The limiting factor on a determined president is not whether an attack is “legal.” Rather, it is how high a political cost he’s willing to pay.

I found it hard to get my mind around this, but it’s true. If the executive branch is determined to do something, it’s extremely difficult for the legislative branch to stop it merely with laws.

For instance, take the spying program about which James Comey just testified. Congress has written clear laws about what domestic surveillance the executive branch can and cannot carry out. And it’s the Justice Department’s job to interpret such laws for the executive branch. But when the Justice Department told the White House that what they were doing was illegal, the White House didn’t say, “Oh! Well, we’ll definitely stop then.” Instead, they decided to keep on doing it. They only modified the program when all the top Justice Department officials threatened to resign.

In other words, it wasn’t the law that stopped them by itself, but the political damage they would have suffered from all the resignations. If they’d been willing to suffer that damage, the White House could have let everyone quit and then hire replacements who’d come up with some theory about why the spying program was legal.

So Congress should pass laws forbidding Bush from attacking Iran—but that by itself isn’t enough. They need to use all the tools they have to create a climate in which the political cost to the Bush administration of starting a war would be excruciatingly high. Those tools are what the article is about.

AND: Speaking of laws, Congress is voting today on the DeFazio-Paul-Hinchey-Lee amendment to the defense authorization bill. This amendment tells Bush he can’t attack Iran without congressional permission. If you think war with Iran is a bad idea, call the Capitol Hill switchboard at 202 224-3121 and ask your representative to support it.

Nope, the vote happened last night, and the amendment failed 136-288. Never trust the word of twelve year-old Capitol Hill staffers. Interestingly, Pelosi isn’t listed there at all.

MORE: Emailers tell me the Speaker of the House generally doesn’t participate in votes like this. Don’t ask me why.

Statue, originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.

As if it wasn’t mind-boggling enough that the Bush administration hired a anti-birth control activist to distribute birth control to poor women, RAW STORY has learned that the Bush administration mislead the public about Eric Keroack’s medical qualifications and professional history.

Reader JP forwards a link to declassified U.S. Central Command Powerpoint slides presented to the White House and Rumsfeld in 2002. Some highlights:

* * *

The buildup to the war in 2002 has been largely directed by the President and the Secretary of Defense. Options for initiating a war include responding to “an Iraqi action initially … continue into war.”

* * *

Central Command estimated that only 5,000 US troops would remain in Iraq in December, 2006.

* * *

Some “Key Planning Assumptions.”

More here.

The Village Voice brings us an update:

In a motion made public Thursday, May 3, city attorneys are demanding that the lawyers representing the 1,800 people who claim they were falsely arrested at the Republican National Convention swear under oath that they didn’t leak confidential police documents — documents that the New York Times obtained to write a March story about the NYPD spying on political groups in the run-up to the 2004 convention.

Meanwhile, May 3’s Wall Street Journal, reporter Judith Miller defends the NYPD after describing the same documents. And now the NYCLU has ripped off a letter to the judge overseeing the RNC-related lawsuits, claiming that the NYPD provided Miller the very documents the city is fighting so hard to keep secret.

NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn asked Judge James C. Francis to deny the city’s motion to keep 600-plus pages of RNC-related documents secret and make the information public immediately.

In Miller’s piece, titled “When Activists are Terrorists” (subscription required), she states that “stung by the criticism” of the spying allegations, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen and NYPD chief spokesman Paul Browne “outlined in interviews last week the nature of the police’s concerns, its conduct, and the goals of its intelligence surveillance effort” before and during the convention. Miller writes that she personally reviewed the “still-secret intelligence documents.”

“This reporting,” Dunn writes, “plainly suggests that the NYPD provided Ms. Miller with the very documents the City is insisting to this Court must be kept secret.”

Miller is best known for being jailed for 85 days after refusing to testify before a grand jury that it was Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby who revealed to her the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. When reached by phone today Miller said, “I’m not commenting on sources.” Then she added with a short laugh, “that should be obvious.”

That phrase should be familiar to our CEO President and should be repeated every time the subject of a “war czar” comes up. Is the job of overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan something you’re too busy to do, Mr. President? Do we need to reorganize your priorities so you aren’t distracted by less important things? Perhaps we should hire a “photo-ops with boy scout troops” czar to take some of the Presidential busy-work off your plate. That way you don’t have to waste our time and money trying to hire a middle-man that will only serve as a bottleneck between our troops and their Commander-in-Chief. If you really need someone else to take over some of the responsibilities of you and the Secretary of Defense, then give us a good explanation of why you’re unable to adequately do your job and why adding another layer of bureaucracy will make things better.

Jerry Falwell has died. Tammy Faye, who has suffered from cancer for almost ten years, is doing so poorly that she’s unlikely to live much longer. On her website she wrote “I am down weight wise to 65 pounds, and look like a scarecrow. I need God’s miracle to swallow.” These two giants of televangelism, whose paths have crossed in the past, seemed to have differing interpretations of what it meant to be a “Christian”. From Falwell’s obituary :

Falwell has found himself at the center of several controversies, such as the one sparked by his comments two days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which he seemed to blame “abortionists,” gays, lesbians, the ACLU and People for American Way for causing the attacks, saying they “helped this happen.”

During the PTL shows, she provided a sentimental touch to stories and loved to sing. In a move that sharply distinguished her from other televangelists, she showed a more tolerant attitude when it came to homosexuals, and she featured people living with AIDS on PTL, urging her viewers to follow Christ and show sympathy and pray for the sick.

nobighopes, originally uploaded by renedepaula.

An internal investigating committee has determined that World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz violated ethics guidelines when he secured a huge tax-free raise for his girlfriend.

Wolfowitz claims that he was FORCED to intervene on his girlfriend’s behalf because the investigating committee was too scared to approach her.

Poor pitiful Wolfie: The big boss of the bank was forced to violate ethics guidelines because his wimpy underlings were afraid to approach his girlfriend. As the investigating committee noted, Wolfowitz didn’t have to negotiate the package himself, he could have delegated the job to a vice president. His excuse comes down to the claim that Riza wouldn’t negotiate with anyone else except her boyfriend. Caving to her demand is textbook conflict of interest.

Riza knew she would get a better deal from Wolfowitz than she would with an impartial arbiter. That’s why she raised hell until she got what she wanted from Wolfowitz.

A lot of the discussion of the Wolfowitz scandal seems impervious to the fact that Wolfowitz was running the whole show. His employees balked at negotiating with Riza. Instead of making his staff follow orders, Wolfowitz knuckled under to requests he knew to be illegitimate. Having done so, he proceeded to abuse the trust of his underlings by negotiating a salary and benefits package that violated Bank guidelines.

Wolfowitz admits that didn’t tell the Ethics Committee or even the World Bank’s lawyer about the details of Riza’s raise. This secrecy undermines Wolfowitz’s claim that he gave Riza the absurdly generous compensation package in good faith, unaware that his sweetheart deal gave Riza twice as big a raise as bank rules allowed.

In his defense, he claimed that he couldn’t tell the EC because salary negotiations are confidential, and he couldn’t tell the general counsel because the Bank’s lawyer sat on the EC and this would be…wait for it… a conflict of interest.

Yet, Wolfowitz also maintains that he didn’t intend to hide Riza’s pay deal from the EC indefinitely.

Wolfowitz said it was not his intent to keep Riza’s raise secret: He said he assumed the ethics committee and Danilo would ultimately review it. He said he was told by Xavier Coll, the bank’s vice president for human resources, who negotiated with Riza, that her final "compensation package would be entered into the bank’s personnel system and many people inside the bank would have access." [WaPo]

That’s just insultingly illogical. If the EC was going to find out about Riza’s raise anyway, what possible justification would Wolfowitz have for keeping the details of the package secret in the interim? Wolfowitz expects us to believe that the Ethics Committee overseeing compensation isn’t entitled to know the details of a compensation package ostensibly arranged to avoid conflict of interest.

Wolfowitz is a sniveling disgrace who lacks the leadership or the moral authority to run the World Bank. I hope the bank delivers a vote of no confidence.

Riding my knife in the Heart, originally uploaded by khailey.

Deputy Attorney General Paul “Knife in My Heart McNulty tendered his resignation. McNulty claimed to be stepping down because of the “financial realities” brought of “college-age children and two decades of public service.”

Leave it to a Republican to spin resignation in disgrace as a whine about not getting paid enough.

Obviously McNulty’s stepping down over the US Attorney purge. He’s the fourth senior official to step down as a result of the scandal. McNulty lied to Congress when he claimed that the USAs were fired for “performance-related reasons,” so it’s not surprising that he’s also lying about the reasons for his resignation.

Michael Schwartz: “The Struggle over Iraqi Oil: Eyes Eternally on the Prize”

Patrick Cockburn: “A Small War Guaranteed to Damage a Superpower: What the Bush Administration Has Wrought in Iraq”

Dilip Hiro: “Unholy Alliance: How Secularists and Generals Tried to Take Down Turkish Democracy”

Tom Engelhardt: “What Price Slaughter?: In New York and Jalalabad, Human Life Is Valued Differently — by the U.S. Government”