Anyone that's been hearing the occasional soundbite about nations like Pakistan & Saudi Arabia going after the terrorists within their borders has to be wondering "how are they doing it?" Well here's an example:

At the start of the month, Pakistan massed several thousand troops in and around the town of Wana, near the country's mountainous border with Afghanistan. Using a harsh century-old British method, officials handed local tribal elders a list and issued an ultimatum.

If 72 men wanted for sheltering Al Qaeda were not produced, they said, the Pakistani Army would punish the tribe as a group, demolishing houses, withdrawing funds and even detaining tribe members.

Several days later, several thousand tribal elders held a jirga, or council, and agreed to raise a force of their own to find the wanted men. In the last two weeks, the tribes have handed over 42 of them. Tribal members, meanwhile, have bulldozed and dynamited the homes of eight men who refused to surrender.


Ouch...

Things like this remind us of the dillema we face in the "war on terror". Countries like this actually have it easy: in dictatorships & other forms of absolutist rule, heads of state can pick off nuissances however they feel like it, since they don't respect civil rights anyway. As a free, democratic nation, the US has to figure out how to catch those that would harm us without turning into the type of country where something like the above story is par for the course.

As of a few minutes ago, I've started getting into RSS newsfeeds. My sources'll expand, just bear with me.

Oh, and anyone who's messed with RSS readers before, holler back, I could use advice.

Student slays master: Don Luskin shows one of Paul Krugman's own former students destroying his recent NY Times "there are no spending increases, the Right is lying" rant.

Camp-Pain 2004: New Hampshire results are basically in, and...Kerry again? WTF?

I'd like to know why. This guy is a chameleon, no actual grounding at all. I mean, it's not like the rest of the crowd has any (unless it's of the type that proves suicidal), but what could possibly attract people to such an unabashed empty suit? He practically flaunts the fact that he'll say anything to get elected.

Update: Instapundit has links to everyone and their mother commenting on this, case you wanna surf.

Cam-Pain 2004: Kerry proves to be dumber than I thought:

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is discounting notions that any Democratic candidate would have to appeal to Southern voters in order to win the presidency, calling such thinking a "mistake" during a speech at Dartmouth College....Kerry noted that former Vice President Al Gore would be president if he'd won any number of other non-Southern states in 2000, including New Hampshire, West Virginia, and Ohio. "Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South," Kerry said, in response to a question about winning the region. "Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own."

Oh ye of short memory, what have you been smoking? It came down to a southern state, Florida in fact, and now because of the demographic shifts since then, the electoral college is such that Bush could win the same states he did then and have 7 additional electoral votes. Like it or not, the south matters, learn it now or have it hit you later...

In lesser news: I guess they have nothing better to do...Indie film shows result of all-McDonald's diet

[director Morgan] Spurlock, a tall New Yorker of usually cast-iron constitution, made himself the guinea pig in this dogged investigation into the effects of fast food on the body. He ate only at McDonald's for a month - three meals, every day - and took a camera crew along to record it....Neither Spurlock, 33, nor the three doctors who agreed to monitor his health during the experiment were prepared for the degree of ruin it would wreak on his body. Within days, he was vomiting up his burgers and battling with headaches and depression. And his sex drive vanished. When Spurlock had finished, his liver, overwhelmed by saturated fats, had virtually turned to pate.

Of course the nanny-state crowd is creaming themselves right now: "look what this stuff does to people! Let's ban it!" Problem is, who the hell eats 3 meals a day of fast food? People know what they're getting into, it's not that we've been tricked by some vast conspiracy, we don't care.