DON SURBER: Who’s right? “Times of London: Muslim radicals are giving up on terrorism. Washington Post: A new generation of terrorists rises.”

RASMUSSEN: “Just 17% of voters nationwide believe that most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage of election campaigns.”

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE MOON ONCE WE GET (BACK) THERE? Mark Whittington has thoughts. Meanwhile, at Slashdot they’re taking suggestions. The starter: “I’d like to see it used as the set to film The Moon is a Harsh Mistress .”

A LOOK AT LAW PROFESSORS and SSRN rankings. You can make too much of those things, but overall I think it’s a good thing, for the reason quoted in the piece: “To the extent that people do start chasing download numbers, it is an incentive to careerist legal scholars to write in a way that is accessible. In the past, the incentive has been to write in a way that is impenetrable.”

Some (much) earlier thoughts on this general subject here.

FIGHTING FOR FREE SPEECH: It will require a hands-on effort to keep our government’s hands off the Internet — but it is a battle worth waging.

NATALIE SOLENT: Canada is no longer a free country.

JOHN TIERNEY: Expense-account science.

OBAMA WEBSITE: How the Jewish Lobby Works.

UPDATE: Airbrushed.

(Note: Added “website” to make clear it’s not Obama himself who said this stuff. But note that this is his official website.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Martin Shoemaker emails:

The Community Blogs at Obama 08 are no more “official” than the rantings of BDS sufferers at an Obama rally. I have a blog there, just to prove how easy it is to get one, and Senator Obama has ZERO chance of getting my vote. You could have one. It’s as simple as signing up. There’s no vetting process of any kind.

Any nut with an axe to grind can post any offensive material on the Community Blogs, and the Obama campaign will be unaware unless someone raises a stink. In fact, it’s entirely possible that a McCain operative could go on the site, create a blog, post offensive material, and then leak the URL to LGF to “prove” how disreputable the Senator’s supporters are. Shades of Dan Rather!

Or of Canadian “Human Rights” investigators. But the Kos-style open diary thing seems like a highly unwise approach for a Presidential campaign, even one that expects Big Media outfits to protect them on issues like this, as isn’t done for others.

MORE: There’s more on this at Political Punch. And John Aravosis says there’s nasty reader-generated content at McCain’s site, too. More proof that the “community” approach is a bad idea for official campaign sites. Meanwhile, I’d bet that if the McCain stuff had come out before the Obama stuff, instead of afterward, the press would be making a much bigger deal of it than they did about Obama’s . . . .

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Why is the U.N. holding conferences about rising food prices, but not spiraling oil prices that in various ways account for them? Somehow in the globalist mindset the agricultural producing world is more culpable than the non-productive OPEC world.” Probably a differential in bribery rather than in philosophy, accounts for this . . . .

THOUGHTS ON RICHARD CLARKE, TRIBALISM, and revenge fantasies.

PHOTOS: On the northern Martian plains.

OBAMA THE TROPHY WIFE? “It seems as if Hillary Clinton is just the latest mature, dependable, experienced woman to be unceremoniously dumped for a younger, prettier doe-eyed companion. No wonder many women are mad.”

VIDEO: David McCullough introduces the DVD release of John Adams.

IT’S A PORKFEST! “Remember when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid claimed that they would reduce pork and make what was left utterly transparent, after winning control of both chambers of Congress in 2006? Well, they certainly don’t, as an AP analysis published today shows.”

Plus this: “If the GOP had any sense, they would take this opportunity to declare an immediate and unilateral moratorium on pork and defy the Democrats to match them. They have an opportunity to take action on reform instead of just talking incessantly about it. Republicans will not win a majority in either chamber unless they demonstrate real leadership on real reform and demonstrate a clear difference between themselves and the Democrats on spending.” Yes, and if they’d done this in 2005 they’d probably have kept their majority.

WHY ARE ANTI-GUN ACTIVISTS so violent? Hmm. What would Freud say?

GAY PATRIOT: How Blogs Publicize Gay-Bashing When MSM is Silent.

JOHN TIERNEY: Why not perpetual progress? “Yes, there are physical limits to what can done with computer chips. But for a century now, each time computer engineers ran into previous physical limits — with the original electro-mechanical machines, with vacuum tubes, with transistors — they jumped to a new technology, and they’re already working on successors to today’s chips. It may seem naive to expect continuing leaps forward, but I think it’s naive to ignore the trend of the past century — or the past 10,000 years.”

HMM: Antibacterial soap kills 99.9 percent of germs. Should you worry about that other 0.1 percent?

IMAGINE WHAT GOES ON IN TOTALITARIAN STATES: J.K. Rowling at Harvard.

IN THE MAIL: David J. Williams’ The Mirrored Heavens. It’s blurbed by a bunch of bigshot science fiction writers, including Stephen Baxter and L.E. Modesitt, Jr., it’s about space elevators, and the cover looks like one of Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels. That’s enough to get my attention, anyway.

JAMES JOYNER on how blogging has changed.

MICHAEL YON: An open offer to U.S. Senators:

I hereby offer to accompany any Senator to Iraq, whether they are pro-or anti-war, Democrat or Republican. I will make this offer personally to a few select Senators as well. Our conversations during the visit would be on- or off-record, as they wish. Touring Iraq with me, as well as briefings by U.S. officers and meetings with Iraqis, would provide an accurate and nuanced account of the progress and challenges ahead, so that the Senators might have a highly informed perspective on this most critical issue. Our civilian leaders need to make decisions based on the best information available. The only way to learn what is really going on in Iraq is to go there and listen to our ground commanders, who know what they are doing. Generals Petraeus and Odierno have years of experience in Iraq, and vast knowledge of our efforts there. But the young soldiers who have done multiple tours in Iraq also have unique and invaluable perspectives as well. These young soldiers have personally witnessed the trajectory of the war shift dramatically, and can articulate those changes in concrete and specific terms. It doesn’t matter if a soldier is only twenty-something. If he or she spent two or three years in the war, that person is likely to have valuable insights. The best way to understand what is really going on is to listen closely to a wide range of service members who have done multiple tours in Iraq. Some will be negative, some will be positive, but overall I am certain that the vast majority of multi-tour Iraq veterans will testify that there has been great progress, and now there is hope. Combat veterans don’t tolerate happy talk or wishful thinking. They’ll tell you the raw truth as they see it.

Whether any Senators take advantage of my offer, I do hope that the presidential candidates visit Iraq, not just for a photo opportunity, but to spend time with our commanders and combat veterans, who know the truth and are not afraid to speak it.

I hope some people take him up on this.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: All about the earmark game:

It’s common for lawmakers to ask for many, many more earmarks than they can possibly get in order to go to bat for as many constituents as possible. The real list, the one that tells which projects a lawmaker wants most, is far more secret.

Freshman Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kan., for example, requested 66 earmarks totaling about $172 million in the upcoming appropriations round. Last year, Boyda obtained $20.7 million in solo earmarks, along with almost $18 million more that she requested with other lawmakers.

Hiring lobbyists helps. They know which buttons to push, and have easier access to key lawmakers on the Appropriations committees and their aides. Lobbyists ride herd on earmarks in ways that out-of-town officials and executives can’t.

The flip side is that lobbyists cost money. The Rochester Institute of Technology, for example, pays $280,000 a year to The National Group, a Washington lobbying firm, to seek earmarks. Over 15 years, the firm says it has helped RIT obtain $60 million for research and education projects.

Read the whole thing. And there’s more here:

The practice of decorating legislation with billions of dollars in pet projects and federal contracts is still thriving on Capitol Hill — despite public outrage that helped flip control of Congress two years ago.

More than 11,000 of those “earmarks,” worth nearly $15 billion in all, were slipped into legislation telling the government where to spend taxpayers’ money this year, keeping the issue at the center of Washington’s culture of money, influence and politics. Now comes an election-year encore. . . .

Millions of the dollars support lobbying firms that help companies, universities, local governments and others secure what critics like Republican presidential candidate John McCain call pork-barrel spending. The law forbids using federal grants to lobby, but lobbyists do charge clients fees that often equal 10 percent of the largesse.

Earmark winners and their lobbyists often reward their benefactors with campaign contributions. For many members of Congress, especially those on the Appropriations committees, such as Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., campaign donations from earmark-seeking lobbyists and corporate executives are the core of their fundraising.

Rules forbid lawmakers from raising campaign funds from congressional offices, but members and their aides sometimes find ways to skirt them.

Read this one, too.

RICHARD POSNER ON the costs of infrastructure deterioration. With a followup from Gary Becker. Thanks to reader Robert House for the link.