REMEMBER: MEDIA MATTERS IS “NON POLITICAL.”

Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.

IN ITALY: Paying mama’s boys to leave mama.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: More on earmarks and corruption, with a focus on West Virginia:

WHEN she took over as speaker of the House, Democrat Nancy Pelosi said she would “drain the swamp” of political corruption. Then she proceeded to push to have her old friend Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., to be her right-hand man.

But Democrats balked. After all, Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam scandal.

Still Murtha remains the leader of what can only be described as Earmarks Inc., a string of congressmen who have figured out how to use earmarks to benefit their campaigns and their families. . . .

There is a disturbing pattern of lobbyists raising money for congressmen who then steer earmarks to the clients of the lobbyists.

And some of those clients also are set up by the congressmen.

For example, Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va., set up five tax-exempt groups in West Virginia, including one headed by a former staff member.

Then Mollohan steered money to those groups. The FBI looked into those connections.

Mollohan is not alone.

Read the whole thing. I certainly agree with this:

The Bush administration has done a stellar job in going after the crooks. Republican Duke Cunningham’s eight-year prison sentence proves that.

In its final year, the Bush administration should not let up.

I hope the Department of Justices is listening.

35-14. It’ll be an unhappy night in Georgia.

HADITHA UPDATE: IT’S SAD WHEN SOMEONE LOSES THEIR “defining atrocity.” Because then how are they to do the defining they want to do?

HALLOWEEN STORIES BY Newbery Award winning authors.

Plus, a roundup of World War Two books for kids.

SADLY, SOME GOOD ADVICE from the Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War:

So a warning to Muslims who choose to criticize their religion or even extremist segments of it. Don’t expect to get away with the sort of thing white liberals get away with saying about Catholicism or the Church of England, because they won’t like you causing trouble.

Don’t expect solidarity or support, you will be seen as the authors of your own misfortune.

Most of all, don’t expect the snidely liberals to watch your backs.

They are so very tired of you.

Sad, but true. And the lessons this offers are likely to prove unfortunate all around.

UPDATE: “We’re living in a Freudian-Orwellian nightmare.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON TOURED FORWARD BASES IN IRAQ AND REPORTS: “Almost all the Marines and Army units I visited from Ramadi to Taji to various hot spots in Baghdad and Diyala believe there has been a sudden shift in the pulse of battlefield. Sometimes without much warning thousands of once disgruntled Sunni have turned on al Qaeda, ceased resistance, and are flocking to join government security forces and begging the Americans to stop both al Qaeda and Shiite militias. Commanders in the field are cautious. They know that if the Shiite dominated government in Baghdad stays vengeful for decades of past suffering at the hands of Sunni Baathists, the reconciliation will fail. So thousands of American officers are desperately pressuring ministries to start distributing the vast wealth of Iraq’s $80 a barrel oil revenues to Anbar and Diyala before the Sunni revert back to insurgency.” Read the whole thing.

THOUGHTS ON THE CULT OF CHE:

The author neglects to point out that, as far as I can tell, there is no memorial, no place of pilgrimage for the countless lives extinguished by Guevara; those accused of being “counterrevolutionary traitors,” for instance. Take this diary entry from 1957, in which Che explains how he dealt with someone suspected of being a spy in the rebel’s Sierra Maestra camp: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain…. His belongings were now mine.”

In 2002, Cynthia Grenier read through Che’s Congo diaries and found that “the beloved revolutionary icon sounds pretty much like an old-fashioned racist…”

But he photographed well.

NAME THAT PARTY! was actually invented by Don Surber, not me.

WELL, THAT’S EASY: “Need to update a kids’ book for modernity? No problem: just put Dad in the kitchen, change the police officers to women and the schoolteachers to men, and ditch any milkmen, ‘pretty stewardesses,’ and Wild West-style Indians. And if you want a better ratio of women, just add hair-bows.”

ACTUALLY, IN SOME PARTS OF TODAY’S AMERICA I’d say that patriotism is the highest form of dissent.

CSI MISSISSIPPI: Er, if “CSI” stands for “Crappy Scientific Investigations,” anyway:

In January, Mississippi’s Supreme Court took an unusual step. In the murder trial of 13-year-old Tyler Edmonds, the court tossed out the testimony of the medical examiner who had conducted the autopsy of the body.

The reason? The medical examiner in the case, Dr. Steven Hayne, had testified under oath that he could tell from the bullet wounds in the body that Edmonds and his sister simultaneously held the gun to fire the fatal shot. Of course, as the court concluded, it is impossible to make such a determination from examining bullet wounds.

Former Columbus, Miss., Police Chief J.D. Sanders has been trying for years to draw attention to Dr. Hayne. “There’s no question in my mind that there are innocent people doing time at Parchman Penitentiary due to the testimony of Dr. Hayne,” he says. “There may even be some on death row.”

In addition to state Supreme Court justices and police officers, defense lawyers, crime lab experts and state medical examiners have all made public their concerns with his practice, and with the testimony he has contributed to hundreds of cases over a 20-year career.

Scientific evidence is often neither scientific nor evidence, and there have been plenty of cases of fraud on the part of government laboratories in the past.

CHILD-BASED decadence.

ARMED LIBERAL: “If that’s what ‘the country’s intellectual leaders’ really think, we’re well and truly f**ked. What’s worse is that it reads almost word for word like a slam that I laid out against just that kind of thinking.”

As I’ve said, in some quarters, patriotism is the highest form of dissent. Er, or it would be. . . .

CRAIG VENTER CREATES artificial life? (Via Futuresheet).

IN THE MAIL: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Legacy.

Very different from the Miles Vorkosigan books, but I read the first book in the series and it’s good.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: A Death in the Family. “If America can spontaneously produce young men like Mark, and occasions like this one, it has a real homeland security instead of a bureaucratic one.”

A SERENITY SEQUEL? I emailed Tim Minear and he was unable to confirm or deny, but he did send me a link to a story on another new project of his. Our podcast interview with Tim Minear can be heard here.