The Times has their weekly magazine cover piece up - The Battle for Guantanamo. It's not very interesting other than it shows someone's point of view of what goes on down in the camp. The moral of the story for me seems to be that the more freedom you give the detainees, the worse things get, but I'm sure others will see it differently.

--------------------------

My dad is sure that the Bushies are the ones behind falling gas prices so that his poll numbers can go up. There's got to be a Krugman article out there somewhere blaming Bush for the rise in prices along with some kind of Friedman doomsday scenario about how we'll be suffering for years due to India and China's insatiable demand, but I imagine those of you willing to pay for Times Direct can find them.

--------------------------

I think I'm going to plunge into the HDTV market around the "holidays" assuming that prices will come down even further. Here's some buying guides in case anyone else is thinking the same. I'll probably just get them for the small rooms where we tend to do our evening DVD watching since the girls monopolize the family room TV. I don't know that we need to see Elmo that clearly.

Ultimate HDTV buying guide - CNET
Ten HDTV myths - PC World
HD Done Right - Best Buy (surprised I couldn't find a similar page easily at Circuit City).
TV Buying Guide - HowStuffWorks

------------------------

IN MEMORIAM: ORIANA FALLACI, 1929 - 2006

One of the few people in the European media who actually defended modern Western civiliation against moral equivalence. Ignore the inevitable out-of-context hate quotes you'll read in today's papers and try to understand what she was trying to say and what she has spent her entire life fighting for - defining liberal democracy as right and totalitarianism as wrong, in any form. While the liberal media seems to think "homegrown terorrists" are some sort of recent phenomenon that never would have existed without George Bush, she's been warning us for years. Were it not for her politics, this woman would be a feminist god - in her whole life she never backed down even, even taking up arms when necessary in a time when women weren't supposed to have beliefs of their own.
------------------------

I was listening to the BBC last night on my local public radio. The British interviewer seemed flabbergasted that a US official would vigorously defend against accusations that prisoners are regularly beaten for placing their dinner trays in the wrong place, etc.

As I heard a caller to a talk show say the other night - paraphrased - "Guantanamo, what a joke - If you want to know about torture, talk to a concentration camp survivor."

From the NY Times article at the beginning of the post. Over a dinner of fish sticks and fries, they began working out a solution. Not long after, Aamer sat down with the head of the mess hall, the base nutritionist and a logistics officer on the military staff. According to one officer briefed on the meeting, Aamer unfolded a piece of paper on which he had drawn up an elaborate two-week meal plan with daily suggestions for four different diets: a standard menu, a vegetarian menu, a vegetarian-with-fish option and a bland diet for older prisoners and those with intestinal problems. Two officials said Aamer’s proposal eventually became the basis for a new meal plan that raised the amount of food offered to detainees each day from 2,800 calories to 4,200 calories.