Once again, our cynicism has been rewarded.

ABC News is reporting that Dennis Hastert is under investigation by the FBI.

Take a look at this excellent story by Larry Cohler-Esses in the Jewish Week about the bogus yellow star story. Kudos to the Anti-Defamation League for demonstrating some caution and good sense in this matter. AIPAC’s been trying to get the United States to go to war with Iran for some time now, so it’s hardly a surprise to see them acting in the maximally alarmist way. Nobody really expects lobbying organizations to be anything other than dishonest in pushing their agendas. The National Post, The New York Sun, and The New York Post are all supposed to be outlets for actual journalism, albeit of a conservative brand, but obviously they’ve decided not to go in that direction.

Late Update: Taylor Marsh also did reporting for that article, which was apparently reflected in the original version of the story and not in the one I saw online.

Credit where due! One of Andrew Sullivan’s correspondents is impressed with Tunisia, leaving “with a strong sense that this is a country headed in the right direction, a place the US should be actively supporting as an emerging model in the region.” He further notes, “Fortunately, it looks like we may be doing just that, thanks to Rumsfeld no less.” Sullivan remarks, “Credit where it’s due.”

But how much credit is due? According to the State Department, “Zine El‑Abidine Ben Ali has been the president since 1987. In the October 2004 presidential and legislative elections, President Ben Ali ran against three opposition candidates and won approximately 94 percent of the popular vote.” Must be a popular guy! What’s more:

The government’s human rights record remained poor, and the government persisted in committing serious abuses. However, the government continued to demonstrate respect for the religious freedom of minorities, as well as the human rights of women and children. The following human rights problems were reported:

• torture and abuse of prisoners and detainees
• arbitrary arrest and detention
• police impunity
• lengthy pretrial and incommunicado detention
• infringement of citizens’ privacy rights
• restrictions on freedom of speech and press
• restrictions of freedom of assembly and association

You can read more here from Human Rights Watch. Tunisia’s certainly a model for something, and in light of the country’s long history with torture and arbitrary detention you can certainly see why Rumsfeld is a Ben Ali fan. Me, not so much. France has historically been the Tunisian regime’s main backer in the West, though, so one might think American hawks would dislike it purely out of spite.

Senator and presidential aspirant John McCain (R-AZ) gives back $20,000 in donations from two brothers who once bankrolled “dirty tricks” against him. The Congressional Black Caucus is “on the verge of open revolt” because the House Democratic leadership is “picking on” Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), whose offices were raided last weekend by the FBI. And Cheney may testify in the Scooter Libby Trial. We’re firing on all cylinders in today’s Daily Muck.

New Hampshire phone jammer. GOP Campaign School. Need I say more?

Strangely, while Gregg Easterbrook’s evil twin was penning churlish reviews of An Inconvenient Truth the genuine article wrote a pretty smart op-ed on global warming for The New York Times. The stuff near the end is, I think, really crucial:

Scientific substantiation of a warming world is not necessarily reason for gloom. Greenhouse gases are an air pollution problem, and all air pollution problems of the past have cost significantly less to fix than critics projected, and the solutions have worked faster than expected.

During the 1960’s, smog in America was increasing at a worrisome rate; predictions were that smog controls would render cars exorbitantly expensive. Congress imposed smog regulations, and an outpouring of technical advances followed. Smog emissions in the United States have declined by almost half since 1970, and the technology that accomplishes this costs perhaps $100 per car.

Similarly, two decades ago a “new Silent Spring” was said to loom from acid rain. In 1991, Congress created a profit incentive to reduce acid rain: a system of tradable credits that rewards companies that make the fastest reductions. Since 1991 acid rain emissions have declined 36 percent, and the cost has been only 10 percent of what industry originally forecast.

Environmentalists, for obvious reasons, tend to emphasize the problematic elements of the current state of the environment. One unfortunate cost of this is that it sometimes leads the public to forget just how successful past interventions on behalf of the environment have been. On the global warming front, I think the biggest challenge to action hasn’t actually been all this pseudo-scientific controversy about whether the problem is real. Rather, what needs to be overcome is the widely held vague view that there’s nothing we can really do about it, or that anything we do do will be so catastrophically expensive as to be hopeless.

What people need to hear is that we’ve reduced emissions of all kinds of stuff in the past, the affected industries have always screamed doom, but it’s always worked out fine.

Here’s a curious story:

A 26-year-old college dropout who carries President Bush’s breath mints and makes him peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches will follow in his boss’s footsteps this fall when he enrolls at Harvard Business School.

Though it is rare for HBS—or any other professional or graduate school—to admit a student who does not have an undergraduate degree, admissions officers made an exception for Blake Gottesman, who for four years has served as special assistant and personal aide to Bush.

Now this got emailed to me from, shall we say, anti-Bush quarters. But is it really so crazy to make an exception for someone with four years’ work experience as a personal aide to the President of the United States? Perhaps I’ve been unduly influenced by Charlie on The West Wing but this actually seems like a non-trivial job to me that he’s been doing. On a personal note, I should say that I don’t like peanut butter, with or without jelly, which most people regard as freakish and un-American (and I’m not sure they’re wrong).

More on the peanut butter issue. Reader P.B. remarks: “I’m glad to hear that someone else out there hates peanut butter too. Everytime I tell someone that I hate peanut butter they look at me like I was dancing in the streets after 9/11. That’s all.” A colleague describes his own distaste for the stuff as “a great black mark on my life.” My roommate loves the brownish goo, though, and will wash it down with copious glasses of stomach-churning milk.

At any rate, none peanut butter eaters of the world, unite! You are not alone, and you have nothing to lose but your chains.

I remember the first time I spent a significant period of time outside the USA. It was the summer of 1997 in Telc in the Czech Republic. An entire town without peanut butter. I was in heaven. The town square is nice, too. The world being flat and all, though, it may be available over there by now. At any rate, back to serious issues later.

Breaking: Murray Waas reports that Karl Rove, Robert Novak’s source for learning Valerie Plame’s identity, may have collaborated with the columnist to cover up his leak. Upon first learning of the federal probe into the Plame leak, Rove and Novak spoke and invented a “cover story” to hide the truth about the leak, Fitzgerald’s investigators believe.

Rep. Jane Harman on Iran: “We have little clarity on Iran’s capability and intentions. This is not the time to talk of war.” Good for her.

Yesterday, Frank Foer semi-reported that “people who have talked this over with top administration officials say that the administration still dismisses the possibility of strikes against Iranian facilities–at least in the short term. These top administration officials, at least in private conversations, continue to profess faith in the Security Council sanctions.”

This seems a little naive to me. The option of attempting to negotiate a diplomatic settlement with Iran exists. It’s existed at least since the 2003 peace feelers, its existence has been reemphasized lately, and it’s an option that the administration keeps rejecting. At the same time, the administration has been at pains to emphasize publicly that military options remain “on the table,” and Dick Cheney and others have been describing the nature of the Iranian threat in the most hyped terms possible. Administration allies in the press have been beating the drums of war, and there’s no indication that the White House is trying to get them to stop. The President clearly isn’t prepared to start a war tomorrow but the logic of his policies leads to war, and he’s not doing any of the things that would disabuse me of that notion. This weekend is Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer. As Andy Card would tell us, you don’t really need to start marketing the war until Labor Day to use it as a campaign issue.