We tend to hear a lot more about Taliban sympathizers in the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan than we do about foreign purchases of chunks of Pakistani banks and telecommunications companies. But Musharraf's status quo could be under just as much threat from one sector as the other, if Pakistan's credit continues to deteriorate.

Good point.

But remember -- the problem in the north of Pakistan isn't just that Pakistanis who live in the north of Pakistan sympathize with the Taliban.

The Taliban were born in northern Pakistan. They were born out of decades of global political games played out in Afghanistan that pushed the most fundamentalist Afghan Pushtuns into the north of Pakistan -- land that many Pushtuns already believed belonged to Afghanistan.

When the Taliban took over -- they were like an invasion from Pakistan. Most of the Taliban leaders only got their first glimpse of Afghanistan when they came over the border to rule.

So the problem is much worse than a problem of Pakistanis feeling sympathy towards the Taliban.

It looks like desperate times ahead for Pakistan.

This to me provides an urgent reason why we should pull out of Iraq and come up with a much better strategy for Afghanistan. One that doesn't just drive the problems from Afghanistan into Pakistan, which is what everyone has been doing since 1973.

George H. W. Bush gets teary talking about a time when American soldiers treated prisoners with respect.

It's not like we can't get back to doing that.

How about it Republicans? Turn your grandpa's frown upside down.

Economic development in Afghanistan.

I think "Some Like It Hot" is a really great movie. But when I watch it, half of me wants to find someone who voted for Alcohol Prohibition and tell them,

"These men had to run for their lives and dress up as women because they witnessed a horrible mass murder. One that happened in real life. One that YOU VOTED FOR."

That's how I feel about gangster rap.

The War on Drugs will go down in history as the most entertaining and lucrative war we've ever lost.

I don't understand how Salon can disappear the entire War on Drugs from their political coverage, and at the same time celebrate Jay-Z's new album about dealing drugs.

Can someone please explain this to me?

It feels more bizarre every day.

I'm working on a magic realist novel but the real world just ups the stakes every day. Arrrgghhh.

But the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, has not broken with the establishment paradigm. She has hedged her bets but not staked out a completely new course.

Ho ho ho! And I don't mean Merry Christmas.

I wonder whether the overincarceration of our human livestock is feeding this problem.

California prisons are extremely filthy places with medical care that does not live up to third world standards.

MRSA is rampant in the LA County Jail system. That's one reason why the Sherrif Baca lets often lets the human livestock off with home detention.

I hear they shut down entire schools for disinfection when they find staph infections.

You can't shut down an entire prison for disinfection.

Now look at how authoritarian Putin has become. But Putin -- with all of his control freak instincts -- still refuses to launch an American-style War on Drugs.

Why does he resist?

There are already enough treatment-resistant diseases breeding in filthy overcrowded Russian prisons and not even Putin wants to make THAT problem worse.

Today Simcha is going to find the source of the ancient blue dye that inspired the phrase "True Blue."

You should watch his show, and not just because he's the sexiest Israeli-born Canadian on cable TV.

I still think censoring an entire issue from your election coverage is wrong.

It's really creepy, in fact.

The Republicans will label themselves Democrats but they'll still be Republicans. So the Democratic party will swing EVEN further to the right.

Hey you macho jerks who think calling in sick is for the weak:

It's really stupid to fling your germs around onto healthy people and it's not in the least bit admirable.

If women take more sick days than men, then that just proves women are smarter and more careful than men are about passing infections.

We should be rewarded instead of criticized.

The Internet is regulated heavily, by the way: The equivalent of trespass is forbidden. You can't libel people on the Internet.

But you can repeatedly and vehemently claim a person spent $200,000 on full body cosmetic surgery without having a single original verifiable source for the story.

On the Internet, having a "verifiable source" for a story like that just means the rumor was printed on someone else's web page.

You link to that page and voila! You've verified the story.

We now have thousands of pseudo-journalists in our country who have never taken a course on journalistic ethics and probably never will.

Compare the Paris Hilton story as it was treated online and by the LA Times:

In Salon, three different writers ranted very vehemently about the early release, citing all the poor and working class people who weren't celebrities who didn't get released early from the DUI probation violation terms.

The LA Times used a different approach. They sent actual reporters to get the actual incarceration statistics from the county jail administration.

They found out that the actual time served for female DUI probation violation in LA County has shrunk over the years so that now the women don't even serve a whole day before they're sent to home detention. Even the poor and working class ones get sent home early.

The problem is -- it takes time to dig up facts and calculate statistics. By the time the LA Times staffers had the jail stats all added up -- the story was all but finished on the Internet.

Who cares about Paris Hilton any more? That was yesterday!