• Here, I planned to provide a mini-lesson on finding the bias in your news source. The example was to be an article on the president's proposed budget from The Washington Post. However, the article has already been replaced. The author's political leanings could be seen in their word choice, such as "Bush's demands" for the budget, rather than requests or something more neutral.
• About the Danish cartoon: Many of the comments I've heard have completely ignored the huge cultural gap between the West and the Mideast. It's likely many Mideasterners have no concept of the freedom of speech (and the tolerance/ignorance for people with ideas that repulse you that go with it), just as Westerners can't imagine life without it. Specifically, we should keep in mind that many Mideast countries do not have free press -- what the press is saying is more or less the official government line. It's possible that their view of the situation looks a lot more like the Danish government mocking Allah than it does when we try to explain it. I haven't seen the cartoon, but I'm wondering if the papers that ran it were bordering on a type of hate crime in the first place.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez is an author unlike any other in my reading experience. An example: He (the general, Simon Bolivar) always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard. He had fought all his wars in the front lines, without suffering a scratch, and he had moved through enemy fire with such thoughtless serenity that even his officers accepted the easy explanation that he believed himself invulnerable. He had emerged unharmed from every assassination plot against him, and on several occasions his life had been saved because he was not sleeping in his own bed. He did not use an escort, and he ate and drank with no concern for what was offered him, or where. Only Manuela knew that his disinterest was not lack of awareness or fatalism, but rather the melancholy certainty that he would die in his bed, poor and naked and without the consolation of public gratitude. I love his characters. They are absolutely unpredictable.