MAYBE THE CRITICS ARE RIGHT — this report makes it sound as if America really is turning into a police state. I blame John Ashcroft.

UPDATE: Despite the beating he takes from the pundits and blogosphere, Ashcroft is apparently pretty popular to judge from the many emails I’ve gotten complaining about this post and defending Ashcroft. Uh, folks, follow the link, and I think you’ll discover that your complaints are, um, premature.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Aaugh! One of my colleagues once said about teaching that you can never be too obvious. I thought I was obvious here, but this email convinces me that I wasn’t:

As you suggested, I followed the link, and it not only did not mention Ashcroft, but had nothing to do with him, since it was at a STATE park. Which means it is controlled by the STATE of Vermont. This obviously has nothing to do with the Patriot Act, the DoJ, or anything remotely connected to John Ashcroft. If you can’t look past your anti-Ashcroft agenda long enough to see that, you have lost any credibility I ascribed to you in the first place.

Um, see, the “I blame John Ashcroft” line was tongue-in-cheek, as was the notion that Jonah Goldberg was suffering from a police state (maybe a “Barney Fife state” but. . . .). Jeez. Maybe I should replace Frank J.’s endorsement with that quote from Andrea See about me having a dry sense of humor that some people don’t pick up on. Because this post clearly didn’t work. Oh, well.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Craig Myers emails:

am amazed that the people who complained about your hilarious reference “I blame John Ashcroft” (which you have used numerous times before), are able to actually figure out how to e-mail you in the first place.

I appreciate greatly your sense of humor, and don’t you dare give it up.

Well, people who don’t like it can get their subscription refunded. Oh, wait. . . .

Seriously, I’ve learned from blogging that there’s nothing so clear that someone won’t understand it in a way you haven’t foreseen, and that people who disagree with you are often especially eager to misunderstand what you say. And — even putting that aside — it’s very interesting to see the different interpretations people put on the same events, etc. One nice thing about the blogosphere is that it lets you see that sort of thing in real time.

So does my email, in ways that bring me varying degrees of pleasure.

BRAD DELONG writes that worries over outsourcing are misplaced and — sounding almost Hayekian — suggests that the cure would be worse than the disease: ” Given the all-thumbs hand the U.S. government has to try to guide industrial development through tools other than maintaining the infrastructure of a market society and the provision of basic research and other public goods, it is hard to imagine that the costs to the country as a whole will not greatly outweigh the benefits.”

Indeed. But even if you think a problem isn’t a problem, or that addressing it would make it worse, that doesn’t mean it won’t be an election issue.

UPDATE: Here’s more proof on the issue, as a reader emails:

I don’t know if you’ll read this message because of the e-mail viruses, but I had to comment on outsourcing. My property management company in Atlanta that manages VA foreclosures, is about to be outsourced. Hundreds of companies around the country, as well as hundreds of VA employees will be displaced shortly. The lovely Clinton administration decided to put the VA’s Property Management Division under the auspices of the VA Hospital System (???). The failing VA hospital system didn’t want anything to do with it, and they commissioned the same consulting firm that helped the HUD Property Management system become a fiasco. The consultants recommended virtually the same system that HUD had implemented – privatization – which has been very inefficient and costly. OCWEN, a Florida corporation, was the winning bidder for the VA job. According to their website, OCWEN utilizes staff in India. Hundreds of Americans will be losing their jobs and companies, and many will be replaced by workers in India. Fortunately, most of the displaced VA employees have been offered other government jobs. It seems ironic that the Department of Veterans Affairs will be outsourcing to a company using foreign labor.

I don’t know anything about this, but it seems like the kind of thing that could be turned into a campaign issue.

LOOK AND FEEL: My TechCentralStation column is up. Virginia Postrel’s new book is mentioned. So is Tim Blair.

DAVID CARR REPORTS on the “bizarre, seldom-seen world” of illegal vegetable-growing in England. What vegetables are involved? Tomatoes.

Ah, the British.

I guess this is a good time to put in another plug for The Guardian’s anti-agricultural subsidies blog.

RALPH PETERS writes that the U.N. bombing is actually a good sign:

Our enemies’ initial “Mogadishu Strategy” – based on the faulty notion that if you kill Americans they pack up and go home – was a disaster for them. Our response devastated their already-crippled organization. Now, with reduced capabilities and decayed leadership, they’ve turned to attacking soft targets. It’s the best they can do.

It’s ugly. But it’s an indicator of their weakness, not of strength.

Demoralized by constant defeats, our enemies have become alarmed by the quickening pace of reconstruction. Consequently, we will see more attacks on infrastructure, on international aid workers and on Iraqis laboring to rebuild their country.

We’ll also see al Qaeda and other terrorist groups become the senior partners among our enemies, as Ba’athist numbers and capabilities dwindle. There is more innocent blood to come.

Yet the bombing of the U.N. headquarters at the Canal Hotel was a self-defeating act. . . . The truck bomb didn’t simply attack the U.N. – it struck at the U.N.’s idea of itself. The lesson the U.N. must take away is that no one can be neutral in the struggle with evil.

Naturally, of course, the usual folks are coming out of the woodwork to say that this is America’s fault — or better still, Bush’s — but I think that Peters is right. Will the U.N. cut and run? That would be par for the course, but Kofi Annan seems to be saying otherwise.

If the U.N. does run, of course, it will simply be demonstrating — again — that its chief role is in providing diplomatic protection for dictators, and that it can’t be counted on when the chips are down.

AUSTIN BAY’S LATEST COLUMN ASKS the question, “Why didn’t Idi Amin rot and die in jail?”

Why no extradition and trial? One Ugandan theory argues that the Saudis simply will not let an African Muslim potentate be toppled, tried and convicted by a predominantly Christian African state. That’s an argument loaded with religious and ethnic explosives, too hot and politically incorrect to touch. However, East Africans I know believe it. Post 9-11, it may not seem so outlandish.

The usual “international human rights crowd” has been slow to condemn the current horrors perpetrated by Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. During the Cold War, Amin escaped their condemnation because he was “anti-colonialist.”

Bay minces no words.

ANOTHER THUG ASSAULTS THE U.N.:

Zimbabwe has ordered the United Nations and other relief agencies to surrender their emergency food aid to ruling party officials.

The move, revealed yesterday, may be designed to ensure President Robert Mugabe’s regime can resume food aid deliveries, which could then be used as a political weapon to punish opponents in the run-up to provincial and district elections. Representatives of aid agencies, who had won agreement from the government to distribute aid without interference, expressed shock at the decision. . . .

Mr Mugabe’s desire to take full charge of aid relief is seen as a ploy to reassert himself in these areas by using food as a political weapon. Last year, ruling party thugs seized donated food, forcing relief agencies to suspend distribution in the affected constituencies.

Officials were “shocked?” But why? Mugabe is, of course, just responding to the legacy of colonialism and can’t be blamed for acting this way. . . .

ROBERT SCHEER HAS BEEN WRITING ABOUT PROPOSITION 13 and the importance of higher property taxes. Stefan Sharkansky has checked the courthouse records and suggests that Scheer should probably devote more attention to making his own property tax payments before suggesting an increase in everyone else’s.

YESTERDAY, I only linked to Susanna Cornett’s post about it. So here’s a direct link to The Guardian’s anti-agricultural subsidies blog. And bravo to The Guardian for taking up this issue. Be sure to drop by and check it out.

The new Nebraska Guitar Militia album, Four Pickups of the Apocalypse, is now out, and it has a song about agricultural subsidies called “Farming the Government.” I’ll see if I can’t get a copy made available online somewhere.

HEY — I DO LIVE IN NERDISTAN! Paul Boutin test drives the RX-8 and calls it a sports car for nerds.

Coming from Paul, of course, that’s a compliment. But why has Kaus remained obstinately silent?

JONATHAN GEWIRTZ POINTS TO a post on the mythologizing of Salvador Allende. Interesting reading.

PEAKTALK POINTS OUT signs of incipient good sense in the Dutch press:

What is encouraging though is that many in Europe realize that there is no quick fix in Iraq and that it in the interest of many in the West to pitch in and help rebuild the country. One of the clippings referred to the fact that even the European left is coming to its senses with this great quote form the Dutch NRC Handelsblad:

Even the left-wing parties in Europe are, after a long period of doubt coming to the conclusion that there is a problem if people advocate that a good westerner is a dead one.

The deadly attack on UN headquarters today highlights that the terrorists do indeed not make any distinction between US, UN or UK representatives. The bombing is evidence that if we fail to build up this country and pull out in the face of terror and instability the place may very well destabilize even further and become a breeding ground for terrorism for years to come. We can not flinch, if we do we give Islamist terror their greatest victory on a platter.

Nice to see that people are catching on. The U.N. headquarters attack may make what is really going on plain, even to the most reluctant.

UPDATE: Kevin Maguire emails:

Thus, there could be no clearer indication that said bombing was actually perpetrated by the Mossad, or the CIA. Or the USMC, the Trilateral Commission, or the Carlyle Group.

Wait for it; it’ll come.

It already is — you should see my email. Interestingly, my initial post on the bombing, especially the “why do they hate us?” line, seemed to really set off a lot of the lefty antiwar crowd. Maybe it is a wakeup call, but the cognitive dissonance seems to be driving some people over the edge. Let ’em call me names — they can’t match this vicious calumny anyway.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Read this. Heh.

FRANK J. AS SUPERHERO? Well, sort of: “He ranks right up there with Aquaman.”

I would never say something that mean. But I would repeat it. . . . That’s what the Axis of Naughty is all about, right?

Uh, that, and linkage.

GENDER APARTHEID: Amier Taheri writes on the origins of the Hijab:

All these and other cases are based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam.

That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.

This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community.

In an interview in 1975 in Beirut, Sadr told this writer that the hijab he had invented was inspired by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself inspired by that of Christian women in classical Western paintings. (A casual visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Louvre in Paris, would reveal the original of the neo-Islamist hijab in numerous paintings depicting Virgin Mary and other female figures from the Old and New Testament.)

Sadr’s idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.

Sadr’s neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah’s regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.

In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that “scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane.” To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.

Those damn hair rays. Taheri continues:

Muslim women could easily check the fraudulent nature of the neo-Islamist hijab by leafing through their family albums. They will not find the picture of a single female ancestor of theirs who wore the cursed headgear now marketed as an absolute “must” of Islam.

This fake Islamic hijab is nothing but a political prop, a weapon of visual terrorism. It is the symbol of a totalitarian ideology inspired more by Nazism and Communism than by Islam. It is as symbolic of Islam as the Mao uniform was of Chinese civilization.

Western cultural imperialism can’t be stopped! Mao was aping a Western idea. And the Hijab is an imitation of Christian religious wear.

IT’S JIM BENNETT VS. THE GROUCHYCONS in his UPI column this week:

The California gubernatorial recall election appears to be creating the need to create a term for yet another kind of conservative. These I suggest we call “grouchycons.” These are the people who have taken to sniffing at the California recall election on what they feel to be Burkean grounds, believing that the very fact of booting out a high officer through such a demagogical method as a recall election is fundamentally illegitimate. Some even go so far as to advocate that Californians vote against the recall of Gov. Gray Davis.

To find out what he says, you’ll have to follow the link.

WHILE I WAS ON VACATION, my complimentary USA Today contained this flattering “source-greaser” profile of Los Angeles’ U.S. Attorney Debra Yang. It struck me as sort of odd, and this story quoting Yang from the same day didn’t seem important enough to justify it, but now I see that Yang is a strong candidate to become Deputy Attorney General, something that the USA Today folks must have figured out before I did.

No reflection, one way or another, on Yang’s suitability for the post. But it does provide some interesting insight into USA Today‘s reporting.

LYNN KIESLING continues to cover blackout and power-related stories. Drop by and follow the links — she’s got ’em.

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen is speculating on what a laissez-faire electricity system might look like.

ONE OF MY EMAIL ACCOUNTS is getting a colossally huge number of virus emails. They’re not making it though, of course, but there are a lot more than usual. I wonder if there’s a net-wide outbreak. Be extra-careful about attachments — though if a lot of folks are getting this many, the net will groan under the sheer volume.

UPDATE: ">SoBig seems to be behind a lot of these, though I’m getting a bunch of Klez hits, too. Lots of people emailed to say that they’re getting a lot more viruses than usual. This could really bog down the Net if it keeps up.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another reader emails:

I help run the email service here at Marist. On a typical day, we reject 30-50 emails a day for known virus filetypes. As of about 5 mins ago, we’ve rejected over 4100 today, and another couple thousand that we just blocked the IP address at the router, so yes there are a lot more virus/worm such as Klez active.

Yeah, one of my accounts is getting about a hundred an hour.

And, by the way, corporate antivirus servers that send back a message when they get a virus with your email address are utterly useless in an age of email-spoofing viruses, and just add to the load.

OF COURSE, ONCE THEY’RE ALL IN IRAQ it’ll be that much easier for us to take over Saudi Arabia should its government prove uncooperative in matters of antiterrorism:

Increasing numbers of Saudi Arabian Islamists are crossing the border into Iraq in preparation for a jihad, or holy war, against US and UK forces, security and Islamist sources have warned. . . .

According to Saad al-Faguih, a UK-based Saudi dissident, the Saudi authorities are concerned that up to 3,000 Saudi men have gone “missing” in the kingdom in two months, although it is not clear how many have crossed into Iraq.

Saudis who have gone to Iraq have established links with sympathetic Iraqis in the northern area between Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit, where they have hidden in safe-houses, a Saudi Islamist source said on Monday.

Pressure on Islamists in Saudi Arabia has grown since the bombing of an expatriate residential compound in May killed 35 people. The subsequent arrest of many Islamists has forced some underground while others are trying to flee to Iraq.

Flypaper, indeed.

UPDATE: Here’s more on the Saudi/Wahabbist connection.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile TAPPED says Bush is changing his story. You see, back in May Bush said “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” But now he’s saying “‘major military operations’ are over.”

Somehow, the difference doesn’t exactly leap off the page. At least TAPPED is big enough to admit it was wrong before: “Conquering Iraq turned out to be relatively easy, far easier than Tapped and other critics thought it would be.” Tapped goes on to say that the peace is harder than the war, to which I can only respond: well, yes. And, funny thing, Bush said that, too, in a speech that wasn’t quite as triumphalist as TAPPED makes it sound:

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. . . . The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

As TAPPED and President Bush agree, the rebuilding is the hard part. And it takes patience. Which is why partisan carping isn’t helpful.

JULIAN SANCHEZ IS FISKING JOE CONASON:

The piece is a useful reminder that Conason’s brand of smug condescension can be every bit as noxious as Coulterian venom.

He takes issue with Conason’s polling data (which he calls “cherry-picked”) and rebukes Conason for giving liberal politics credit for changes that resulted from economic growth and technological progress. Then he makes some interesting points about public attitudes in general.

UPDATE: Megan McArdle adds: “My goodness — how did we ever survive as a nation with Abe Lincoln sneaking out of the White House at night to poison our food?”

Was Lincoln a conservative? Hmm. I guess so — he was standing athwart history, shouting “stop!” after all. And he made it stick.

WELL, THIS ISN’T IN THE SAME CATEGORY as Al Jazeera trying to spark riots, but this story about the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan certainly is an example of a journalist trying to “sex up” a story by giving events a nudge:

Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter at the heart of the David Kelly affair, tried to draw the weapons inspector into admitting publically there was disquiet over the Iraq intelligence dossier, it emerged today.

The journalist sent an email to a Liberal Democrat press officer suggesting questions that could be put to Dr Kelly by the foreign affairs select committee.

In the email dated July 14, Gillligan described Dr Kelly as “an extremely interesting witness”.

“Above all he should be asked what kind of threat Iraq was in September 2002 and, if he was able to answer frankly, it should be devastating,” Gilligan wrote.

Gilligan did not admit Dr Kelly was the source of his “sexed-up” dossier story broadcast on the Radio 4 Today programme, which started the row between the BBC and the government.

I imagine all the journalistic ethics pundits will be all over this one.

HERE’S A ROUNDUP ON KOREA from Winds of Change. More’s going on than most people realize.

WHY I LOVE TECHNOLOGY: I’m sitting here blogging in the sun on the law school patio, via wireless. Okay, I’m not getting the same degree of benefit from technology as Rob Smith is, but it’s cool.

“DOMESTIC TERRORISM FROM ANIMAL RIGHTS EXTREMISTS:” And that’s what it is, all right.

THE NEW YORK TIMES seems to have found a new strategy to keep people buying newspapers and not just reading it on the web.

Works for me.

UPDATE: Charles Murtaugh has some observations, too.