IT’S LOOKING BAD FOR BERLUSCONI, judging by the exit polls.

UPDATE: Could the exit polls be wrong?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Berlusconi now seems to have pulled ahead.

MORE: Reader Gene Dillenburg says he has a safe prediction:

If Berlusconi loses, it will be a referendum on Italy’s involvement in Iraq. If he wins, it will be due to some obscure domestic issues.

Interestingly, when the exit polls had Prodi ahead, it was a lead item on Yahoo news. As the results drew closer, it had dropped off the front page (though now it is back as “too close to call”).

Stay tuned.

SCIENCE FICTION UPDATE: Over the weekend, I read Joe Haldeman’s Old Twentieth. I thought it was pretty good — with an interesting “frame” about anti-aging technology, which I’ll write more about later — but as with the last Haldeman novel I read, Camouflage, the ending seemed rather abrupt and a bit unsatisfying. Still, I enjoyed it. I’d rather it had run 50 pages more and wrapped up smoothly, though.

STRATEGYPAGE doesn’t think much of the Seymour Hersh Iran story:

American journalists and politicians, who are hostile to American operations in Iraq, are pushing a story that the U.S. is planning to use nuclear weapons for an attack on Iranian nuclear weapons facilities. They offer no proof, and no explanation of how an American president would hope to survive the diplomatic fallout from using nuclear weapons for the first time since 1945. Iran loves these stories, because it enables the Islamic conservatives to make any democratic reformers appear unpatriotic for wanting free elections like those in the United States.

Thanks, guys! Meanwhile, here’s the regular war news roundup over at Winds of Change.

THE SPECULIST’S “FAST FORWARD RADIO” interviews Jim Bennett about the Anglosphere, China, and more. They’re also shamelessly shilling for podcast advertisers. Hey, why didn’t I think of that?

INEQUALITY among the little people.

IN A FRONT-PAGE STORY, NEIL MUNRO OF THE NATIONAL JOURNAL looks at fake war photos in the media. It turns out that a lot of media folks are running bogus photos — which coincidentally tend to reflect badly on the war — and not facing much accountability for it. (No subscription required.)

Read the whole thing, and remember this the next time some Big Media type criticizes blogs as unreliable.

UPDATE: Reader Russ Emerson emails:

The editorial staffs of the major media outlets would benefit from having veterans or other knowledgable people involved in vetting (no pun intended) photos and other material.

For instance, even though I was not in the artillery during my Army service, I could instantly see that the photo referred to in the second paragraph of the article (“a piece of military equipment placed on a damaged stone wall, flanked by a solemn old man and a young boy”) was in no way what was claimed: remnants of a missile attack. Any veteran, or indeed any reasonably smart person who watches the History Channel, could have told an editor that the photo was not what it purported to be.

In the networking industry, every company I know of has what are known as “subject matter experts” – people with long experience and a breadth and depth of knowledge in their fields that makes them the “go-to guys” on technical matters. It might behoove the media to avail themselves of the services of some military SMEs on a regular basis – something more than the retired generals doing 5-minute guest spots on CNN or Fox News.

Would the NYT put a tone-deaf reporter on the music beat? Would they put someone with no knowledge of football on the sports desk?

Of course not. Yet they seem to think they can adequately cover military matters by assigning a reporter to watch “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon” and then sending them thus-equipped to park their butts in the Baghdad Hilton.

It makes me glad there’s a Michael Yon.

They’re not all that bad, but overall the performance of the press in this war has been marked by dangerous incompetence. We need journalists who are smart and tough!

ANN ALTHOUSE: “So a depressed loner commits commits suicide and a friendless woman succumbs to old age, and you, you sensitive poet, show up to use their funerals as a political platform against the people who are outraged by the murder of Theo van Gogh?”

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEWS AGAIN: And it’s presented as an amazing scoop!

BLOGGER TO RUN AGAINST CYNTHIA MCKINNEY: The momentum is building.

MARC COOPER WRITES on Democrats and immigration. He’s not happy.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, John Hawkins is unhappy with Republicans, as is Bill Quick, and Michelle Malkin is just plain unhappy.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And be sure to read this Mark Steyn column, too.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: John Fund writes about Republican spending problems:

Republicans should have learned from the reaction of their core voters to last fall’s pork-stuffed transportation bill and the bloated Hurricane Katrina relief measure that excess spending was driving their base crazy. Earmarks–home-state projects slipped into budget bills without adequate review or transparency–became a dirty political word, led by the infamous $220 million Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska.

Apparently the lesson hasn’t sunk in, especially with porkmeister Jerry Lewis of California, chair of the House Appropriations Committee:

After tough negotiations, a deal was finally struck between GOP leaders and the reformers. First, members would have to have their names attached to individual earmarks. Second, projects that had not been included in either House or Senate bills but were created out of conference reports negotiated between the two parties would be subject to a debate and vote on the House floor. Simple transparency and accountability, you would think.

But not to House Appropriations Committee chairman Jerry Lewis. “The appropriators deep-sixed it,” Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin told National Journal. “They’re taking their toys and going home.” Last Thursday at 6:20 p.m., Mr. Lewis’s staff sent out an e-mail declaring that the reforms were unacceptable and trod on the prerogatives of the powerful committee, which is known as “Congress’ favor factory.”

In his email, Dave Gibbons, an Appropriations Committee staffer, told fellow committee staffers that Mr. Lewis “will NOT SUPPORT passage of the RULE and/or the BUDGET RESOLUTION tomorrow. He also requested that you inform your members of his position in this regard and asks that they likewise support the Committee.” Mr. Lewis followed up with his own statement saying it was “unfortunate that the whims of a few would prevent the overwhelming majority of our members” from passing a budget.

“Lewis’s move is political suicide for the party,” one top GOP official told me. “He is putting his self-interest ahead of the GOP caucus, the party and the country. If the president and Speaker [Dennis] Hastert don’t shut him down, then any pretense we are a reform party goes out the window.” . . . From their scramble to ram through a national legislative solution to Terri Schiavo’s plight, to their overreaction to Hurricane Katrina, to their failure to recognize the public’s disgust with pork-barrel projects, to the Dubai Ports deal, Republicans have appeared to the world to be as unprincipled and rudderless as the politicians they campaigned against back in 1994. Unless they change course dramatically in the seven months between now and Election Day, they may well find themselves facing the same fate as the Democratic political dinosaurs of that year that they replaced.

I hope somebody talks to Hastert about this. Otherwise, well, there are Democrats who are supporting these kinds of reforms.

UPDATE: More bad indicators for Republicans. The question is whether they’ll be inspired to take corrective action, or panicked into doing something stupid. I know which way to bet, but . . .