YESTERDAY, I was sufficiently stunned that I didn’t have much to say about Dean Barnett’s death. I still don’t, really, except that he was a terrific guy and I’ll miss him. But I highly recommend his The Plucky Smart Kid With The Fatal Disease. It was touching when I read it last year; it would be more so now. Meanwhile, you can read this post of Dean’s.

MY COLLEAGUE BARB KAYE has a survey on people who use the Internet for political information online, and she’d appreciate your taking it if you have a few minutes.

CBS ON BARACK OBAMA’S FINANCING:

AN EYEWITNESS TO Bill Ayers’ revolution.

MARK KLEIMAN thinks he’s been unfairly judged. Megan McCardle responds.

A COMING election litigation “cataclysm?”

MICHAEL GRAHAM on the real loser in this election.

FROM JOE THE PLUMBER to Joe the Economist? Tim Wu has some thoughts in response to Greg Mankiw’s work-incentives post.

TWO ARRESTED IN Obama assassination plot. Jules Crittenden sees a surprising degree of androgyny. Well, at least they’re not Illinois Nazis. I really hate those . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Jen Bradford is reminded of Taliban “fashion.”

Meanwhile, a couple of readers think it’s wrong to mock these guys, but I disagree. They want to be scary. Mockery seems like an appropriate deterrent to future imitators.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ron Coleman blames the prison system: “It is in the pen, mainly the state prisons that are ruled by and large according to the law of the jungle, that this culture mainly flourishes.”

INTERESTING BACK-AND-FORTH DISCUSSION OF THE ROLE OF THE VICE PRESIDENT in the comments to this Volokh post.

UPDATE: More here.

NOOSES AND HANGED EFFIGIES: Unacceptable, except when they’re “art.”

HE WILL NOT BE MISSED: Sen. Stevens guilty on all counts, career in peril.

UPDATE: Well, Colin Powell may miss him:

One of the nation’s best-known retired Army generals, Colin Powell, described Sen. Ted Stevens in court today as a “trusted individual” and a man with a “sterling” reputation.

“He was someone whose word you could rely on,” said Powell, secretary of state in President Bush’s first term, who self-deprecatingly described himself as someone who retired as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then “dabbled a bit in diplomacy.”

That Colin Powell. What a great judge of character.

MICHAEL YON: Syria-Iraq: Bloody Border, Messy Politics.

BLOGGING: The microwave oven of journalism, or the George Foreman Grill of journalism? Katie Granju ponders the questions, but I’m going with the pressure cooker of journalism, but then, I’m a fan of those . . . .

MORE LOUSY NEWS: Tony Hillerman has died.

HOMEMADE FISHING LURES: Turning a hobby into a profitable business.

WELL, THAT SUCKS: Dean Barnett has died.

THOUGHTS ON DIFFERENTIAL AGING and the oldest human body part on earth.

A GRIPE ABOUT NONSTANDARD BATTERIES: “Anyone who’s ever traveled from Point A to B knows the misery of lugging around the cable salad of different proprietary chargers for a laptop, cell phone, digital camera, iPod and portable gaming unit.” Yep. I try to get devices that use AA batteries, but that’s harder and harder to do.

WHAT IT’S LIKE: Writing a Predator tie-in novel.

DONALD SENSING: What has NATO done for us?

HMM: Are Corn Ethanol Farm Subsidies Too Complex to Understand?

I think I’ll write another song for the Nebraska Guitar Militia: Waves of Grain: Subsidies Edition. They’ve been talking about another album . . . .

MCCAIN ON AN AUTO INDUSTRY BAILOUT: Spend the First $25b, THEN We’ll Talk.

OBAMA’S DONATION SETUP “INVITES FRAUD.” “It has chosen to operate an online contribution system that facilitates illegal falsely sourced contributions, illegal foreign contributions and the evasion of contribution limits.”

UPDATE: See this National Journal report too, which compares Obama and McCain’s websites’ resistance to fake donations. “The Obama campaign’s Web site accepted the $25 donation, but the McCain campaign’s Web site rejected it. Rebecca Donatelli, president of Campaign Solutions of Alexandria, Va., which processes donations for John McCain, said her system rejected the donation because American Express could not verify that the donor lived at the address given with the online contribution.”

USING 3D ARRAYS OF NANOTUBES to integrate nanotechnology and microtechnology.