Franco's unsheathed sword, if you know what I mean

Evidently those soldiers didn’t have their throats cut or beaten with concrete blocks, if the army is to be believed.

Bush meets (away from cameras) with the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and offers his prayers, in perhaps the crappiest trade of all time.

The mother of one dead soldier, not at that event, helpfully pointed out that Bush could have dropped by when he was recently in her state, SC, for a fundraiser. If the D’s had any guts, they’d provide a map to the nearest families of dead soldiers for every future Bush fundraiser.

Governor Ahhnuld has cut the car tax increase. And proposed cutting payments to Medical doctors 10%, which should drive many of them out of the program, ending homecare for the disabled, blind & old, forcing some of those into homes, freezing enrollment in programs that had been and should be entitlements, like aid for the developmentally disabled, etc etc. Oh, and education will be cut; one of the maybe three explicit promises he ever made when campaigning was that it wouldn’t be. And all that accounts for just half of the car tax increase. Good to have those priorities straight.

General Tommy Franks says that if WMDs are ever used against America, democracy and the Constitution will be destroyed. He said this in an interview with Cigar Aficionado magazine.

I guess I knew this story was coming: “Iraqi Donkeys Suffer under U.S. Suspicion”.

On the other hand, the Indian government has set up a holiday camp for elephants.

In the small print of the latest defense appropriation act was money to develop a new nuclear weapon, designed for “bunker-busting.”

A book just out in Spain, The History They Taught Us, 1937-75, is about history books in the Franco years. Evidently Franco himself was a “Herculean hero of robust constitution,” who “came down to Earth in an iron bird to fight the dragon (of communism) with his unsheathed sword.” Jews drink the blood of Christians (well, that’s true. I find it’s quite delicious with a little chocolate syrup). The first thing Franco did was fire 50,000 teachers and replace them with Falangists.

In more recent news, Paul Bremer fired 28,000 Iraqi teachers....

Mayhem in the Middle East.

There’s been no news of Neil Bush for a while. Now there is. As expected, his divorce is stirring up all sorts of stuff. Neil admits to having had sex with women during “business” trips to Thailand and Hong Kong. He says that they just showed up at his door and presumably he just fucked them to be polite (although they may just have been asking if he needed more towels). From the deposition:

Lawyer: Mr. Bush, you have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her.

Bush: It was very unusual.

He denies knowing that the women were prostitutes, or paying them. Also, he’s getting $2m from a Chinese semiconductor firm--a field about which he knows nothing--in association with the son of Jiang Zemin. Haven’t heard more about the story a few weeks ago that the president of Taiwan paid $1m to meet Neil.