As I figure out that removing wallpaper and carpet tacks, spackling and painting take more time than I ever imagined, blogging will remain light throughout September. Nonetheless:

Historical girlie-man: When Austrian-born Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger told the Republican National Convention last week that in the "Socialist" country of his youth, "I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes," he's making shit up. "It's a fact -- as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria," the southeastern province where Schwarzenegger was born and raised, said historian Stefan Karner. And the "socialist" bit is wrong too. Austria was governed by coalition governments; from 1945 to 1970, all of the country's chancellors were conservatives. Schwarzenegger "confuses a free country with a Socialist one," says Graz University histrorian Martin Polaschek, adding that Arnold was "using the old Communist enemy image for Bush's election campaign... He did not speak as a historian, after all, but as a politician." (Thanks, Kemi.)

The Bush Legacy: After a bloody weekend in Iraq, the death toll of American GIs there has hit 999.

Graphic Agitation: Bush-Orwell 2004