Well, it’s official: opening weekend box office receipts for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” topped $70 million, putting it ahead of such blockbusters as “Titanic” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. After struggling to land a distribution deal, the movie has become the most talked about film since “The Jazz Singer” and its impact is being felt across the globe. In Jerusalem, an afternoon screening at the al-Aqsa mosque prompted hundreds of Muslims to hurl rocks on worshipers at the Western Wall below. In response, Israeli police in riot gear tossed stun grenades into the mob, which had overrun the square outside the Temple Mount. Although the uprising failed to produce any serious injuries, Gibson announced that he would soon team with Oliver Stone for a “Passion” sequel revealing how the Jews killed Kennedy.

Gibson is also working on plans to blame Jews for turning 4,392 innocent Catholic priests into rabid child molesters. According to the church-sanctioned National Review Board, these priests have engendered 10,667 abuse claims since 1950. The panel rebuked U.S. bishops for failing to stop widespread clerical sex abuse over the last half-century, calling the pattern of sheltering and reassigning accused clergy “shameful to the church.” And downright expensive, too. With settlements exceeding $600 million, church coffers are depleting faster than the Social Security Trust Fund. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan noted that the existing monetary configuration is no longer tenable. Testifying before the House Budget Committee, Greenspan suggested either reducing the benefice offered to abuse victims or ordaining priests without a penchant for raping little boys.

Perhaps the prelates could bolster the Vatican bank account by sublimating designs on sebaceous young lads into parlaying tithes on the foreign exchange markets, where the dollar’s monotonic decline has made easy pickings for currency speculators. Unfortunately, the 14% decline in the dollar against the yen over the last year has threatened Japanese mercantilism and after several ineffectual rounds of forex intervention, the Japanese government was reduced to raising its terror alert, which instantly pushed the dollar to three-month highs. Many were fooled by heavily armed police stationed around airports, nuclear plants and government facilities and by two explosions outside the Defense Agency. The government even trumped up concerns of reprisals for sending troops to Iraq and issuing a verdict in the case of Shoko Asahara, the cult leader who ordered the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subways that killed 12 people. And though the ruse halted the dollar’s slide, the year-long decline in the Chinese yuan (which, sadly, moves lockstep with the dollar) means there’s plenty more work to do before the Japanese are globally competitive.

Also captivating the international community this week was the saga of a corrupt and inept autocrat. A reviled despot who impoverished his minions while wrestling to keep grips on his floundering empire. The travails of Michael Eisner, however, were soon eclipsed by the exodus of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The beleaguered leader fled his island nation as rebel forces finally seized control of the capital city. A disinterested White House failed to intervene during an extended period of chaos and bloodshed despite the repeated entreaties of the Congressional Black Caucus. The administration steadfastly kept its distance from the conflict, merely feigning interest with a feckless power-sharing deal that was summarily dismissed by local factions. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who helped to restore Aristide to power a decade ago, said, “it was important that they accept the plan… we cannot support a government that comes to power through violence,” adding that President Bush had no interest in forcefully removing a duly elected leader without the prospect of usurping a significant cache of petroleum reserves.

With the Academy Awards around the corner, many celebrities are consumed with what to wear. If the French National Assembly has any input, you won’t see any hijabs, yarmulkes or large crosses (sorry, Mel) on the red carpet this year. After Education Minister Luc Ferry reported a “spectacular rise in racism and anti-Semitism in the last three years,” a law was passed banning conspicuous displays of religious affiliation in public schools. While the legislation is seen as a victory for French secularism, World Jewish Congress VP Lord Greyville Janner was left only to declare that, “We are indeed doomed if we are to be defended by the French.”

The launch of Janet Jackson’s new album, “All For You,” is anything but doomed after her Superbowl nipple wink. That NFL commish Paul Tagliabue was hauled before Congress not only speaks to the pandemic of overreaction, but also evinces our susceptibility to such anatomical sophistry. Forget the tits; I say you’d better watch your mouth these days. Martha Stewart may do heavy jail time for uttering one small word: sell. Howard Dean’s screech made $40 million in campaign contributions vanish into the ether(net). Even the President is on the defensive – agreeing to an independent investigation of intelligence failures – after peppering his State of the Union address with idiotic phrases like “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.” A post-broadcast Washington Post/ABC News poll showed this kind of gibberish was totally indecipherable, even among acute-listening demographics like gay couples and steroid-laden baseball players. Other poll results indicated that most people believed that Bush fabricated prewar WMD evidence and that Dr. Robert Atkins died of Mad Cow Disease.

In the wake of BSE, the outbreak of the Asian Bird flu may just spell the end of low-carb diets, though it couldn’t deter the Dick Cheney from a little duck hunting last month. The Vice President took Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia on a taxpayer-sponsored trip to a private hunting camp owned by oil services tycoon Wallace Carline. Bad weather kept the waterfowl at bay, but the notion of Equal Justice for All was shot-gunned to death in the marshes of Southern Louisiana. Cheney, it turns out, has a case pending before the Supreme Court and evidently enjoys a rarefied version of the judicial process. To be fair, I doubt that our social contract would survive if every slob out there had access to this kind of legal representation. Imagine getting arrested for drunk driving and having your neighbors put their paychecks in a hat so you could take the judge out to Hooters the night before your arraignment.

Cheney may very well get away with such a brazen affront, but for the rest of us, crime simply doesn’t pay. For our friends overseas, however, a plummeting greenback means a dollar’s worth of justice certainly doesn’t cost as much as it used to. A 42-year-old German man received merely 8 years in prison for butchering and eating another man. The court held that the light sentence was warranted because the assailant had no “base motives” in the crime. Some observers speculate that serving a crude Beaujolais Nouveau may have gotten him 15 – 20, which in any case is considerably more than was meted out to Abdul Kahn. Dr. Kahn, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, garnered President Musharraf’s full pardon after appearing on state television and apologizing for selling atomic secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. As part of a quid pro quo, Dr. Kahn told a stunned nation that, “There was never, ever any kind of authorization for these activities by the government. I take full responsibility for my actions and seek your pardon.” The speech allowed the government to circumvent a public prosecution and keep its nuclear program tightly under wraps. Sources close to the negotiations between Dr. Kahn and the government recalled Musharraf’s final words: “Like, hey, Abdul, I’ve known you for many years and while your actions have threatened the very survival of mankind, I am inclined to forgive you.” I guess American standards are a bit more stringent – after 14 years of exile, Pete Rose finally admitted to betting on baseball and he still can’t get into the Hall of Fame.

A blistering critique from the Army War College says President Bush’s war on Iraq was unnecessary and has, “diverted attention and resources away form securing the American Homeland against further assault…” Penned by professor Jeffrey Record, the diatribe has predictably garnered little support in Washington. In fact, Donald Rumsfeld is so consumed with washing the blood of 500 soldiers off his hands that he hasn’t even read the darn thing. Secretary MacBeth notwithstanding, Pentagon officials publicly characterized the report as childish and unrealistic, yet it proved unnervingly prescient when a suicide bomb tore through Des Moines last Monday night. The assailant, Congressman Dick Gephardt, committed political hara-kiri in an attempt to take out former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Gephardt’s attack eviscerated a quarter century on Capitol Hill and nearly decapitated Dean’s grassroots campaign. The Governor, critically wounded and squealing like a stuck pig, was airlifted to New Hampshire where pundits expected a partial recovery.

Despite Joe Lieberman’s drivel, the capture of Saddam remains a non-event and the White House is increasingly hard-pressed to justify the war and it’s attendant casualties. David Kay, who recently stepped down as Bush’s WMD bloodhound, cast grave doubts on the possibility of recovering any unconventional weapons. As for Iraq’s weapons stockpiles, Kay told reporters, “I don’t think they existed,” adding, “We don’t find the people, the documents, or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on.” Kay’s replacement, former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, didn’t give the administration any cause for optimism when he said, “I think that Mr. Kay and his team have looked very hard. I think the reason they haven’t found them is they’re probably not there.” High-ranking members of the administration continue to eschew their own hand-picked experts; Colin Powell now concedes WMD discovery an “open question”, while Dick Cheney defiantly stated in an interview that, “The jury is still out.” Well, yes, and so is Amelia Earhardt.

Who isn’t out (besides Jodie Foster) is any of the 40,000 soldiers who received “stop loss” orders from the Army. These are not the securities directives that landed Martha Stewart in federal court; rather they mean that military personnel cannot leave he service once their enlistment is up. A back-ended conscription of sorts. Defense analyst Ted Carpenter opined, “Clearly, if large numbers of personnel have their terms extended against their will, that violates the principle of volunteerism.” David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization observed that, “There is no question that the force is stretched too thin.” And with National Guard recruitment 10,000 below plan, Carpenter thinks the government may revive the draft. Though Dennis Kucinich is admittedly closer to psychiatric lockdown than the White House, he managed to hang a told a Sword of Damocles over 18-24 year-old voters when he told a student rally that, “The body count keeps rising [and] we are not that far away from this country moving toward a draft.”

Election fever is spreading like wildfire, even consuming Tehran where liberal lawmakers were reinstated on a national ballot after being disqualified by the hard-line Guardian Council. President Mohammad Khatami had threatened to resign if the council, made up of fundamentalist clerics appointed by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khameni, did not reverse itself. President Bush lauded these developments, declaring, “Democracy must prevail. The will of the people should not be hijacked by a few unelected codgers in long robes.”

The President, in addition to smearing John Kerry, will claim in coming months that invading Iraq was directly responsible for Libya surrendering its nuclear weapons program to the U.S. Department of Energy. Personally, I’m waiting for Congressional hearings on this administration’s version of the Ed Meese / Iran-Contra slush fund. W. will also take credit for normalizing relations between India and Pakistan. Diplomatic ties were severed at the beginning of 2002 when Islamic militants attacked India’s Parliament and the two countries raced to the brink of thermonuclear exchange. The restoration of cross-border rail and air service means the only conflict extant is confined to the cricket field; As Pakistani captain Inzamam-ul Haq said of the upcoming test against his arch rivals, “ We are ready for the home series against India… with a superior bowling attack we think we can stop the Indian batting.” Quite civilized dialogue for folks that were ready to kill each other only a year ago. Even Pakistani President Musharraf and Indian P.M. Vajpayee got on like old chums during their recent summit. The two leaders agreed on a timetable for resolving the Kashmiri issue and announced that as a symbol of cooperation the duo will open a take-out curry shop in the new World Trade Center.

Can New Year’s resolutions be meaningful given the ersatz nature of calendars? While I’m not personally equipped to address the issue as I’ve always utilized the deficits of others as a measure for self-improvement, I can say this: The practice of segmenting reality does impose an arbitrary order on human endeavors. Even patently disparate systems (Gregorian, Chinese, Hebrew) produce a universal compulsion to hit the reset button. In other words, the water in the Ganges need not be clean on order to cleanse. Nonetheless, writing ’04 on my checks means something’s changed and though it’s early, this year’s theme has begun to appear. Duplicity. Or as Donovan put it, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.”

First, Gray Davis gave driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, then Arnold Schwarzenegger took them away, then George Bush gave them back. With the election looming, the President is working tirelessly to promote our new zeitgeist. An unabashed free-trader, Bush imposed steel tariffs only to rescind them after Dick Cheney got a slug of the International Steel Group IPO (up 25% out of the gate) and polls showed increased approval ratings in the key states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. After declaring that, “These safeguard measures have achieved their purpose,” W. changed course, targeting the venality of UAW officials in Michigan. Not constrained by any domestic agenda, Bush flew to Baghdad and carted around a plastic Thanksgiving turkey. Though the holidays are over, the polystyrene bird remains an apt symbol of the impotent anti-missile defense system the administration is beginning to deploy. Early tests of radar-guided interceptor missiles, while admittedly rigged, still showed the system to be deeply flawed and unreliable. But when has efficacy ever shaped policy over at Homeland Security?

Just ask Tom Ridge who (again) raised the terror alert to orange only to (again) restore it to yellow after it failed to protect Britney Spears’ marital status. Or the legacy of Senator Strom Thurmond. The Stromster, you may recall, ran for President in 1948 on the Dixiecrat ticket, promoting a policy of strict racial segregation. Astonishingly, he carried four states and, as it turns out, fathered a child with his mother’s black maid. Apparently, the doctrine of non-fraternization didn’t extend all the way to his genitals.

In addition to changing the hue of Fox’s news crawl, Ridge told an anxious nation that the greatest threat to our wellbeing isn’t hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan, but rather hails from Vern’s Meat Company in Moses Lake, Washington. After decades of having their tits sucked dry, or worse, being chopped up and eaten, cows have understandably become mad. From Holstein to Pinzgauer, cattle want revenge. Despite the NRA’s strenuous lobbying efforts, assault rifles were abandoned (hooves and triggers being incompatible) in favor of bio-terrorism. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy is an insidious, if fatal disease. It is colorless, odorless and cloaks itself during years of silent incubation after which your brains slop out of your nose like shaving cream.

Unless you’re Michael Jackson who’s nasal privation means his cerebellum will ooze through that plastic triangle in the middle of his face like green Play-Doh extruded from the Fun Factory. And what better punishment for a child molester? Allegedly. Jackson defended himself on “60 Minutes” by telling Ed Bradley, “Before I would hurt a child, I would slit my wrists.” While this may explain the excessive amount of lubricant recovered by the Santa Barbara Sheriff in the course of their Neverland raid, the ex-pop star remained defiant, saying, “I am not going to do anything sexual to a child. That’s not Michael Jackson.” Well, neither was the white guy with long stringy hair we saw on TV. More like some drifter from Barstow with a large pocketknife or Jim Varney in “Earnest goes to Jail”.

Everything is shifting; even venerable CBS is no longer as it was. Having crossed the line of paying for news access (Jackson granted the interview as a quid pro quo for airing his once-shelved musical retrospective “Number One”), the erstwhile geriatric network is now using pedophilia to boost ratings in the all-important 18 – 34 demographic. One Studio City executive rationalized the move, observing that if Paris Hilton can anchor a hit series about slopping hogs in the wake of her internet porn video it is only a matter of time before cable starts in with pay-per-view programs featuring Catholic Priests and Air Force cadets. Maybe this year I’ll commit to programming my TiVo.

Now that the National Guard has been sent home and the search for Dru Sjodin has been called off, her family must sit through the winter with the grim reality that it’s not often a body dug out of the ground turns out to be alive. Saddam Hussein, however, is no ordinary fellow. The President said in a televised address to the nation that the arrest of Saddam marked the end of “a dark and painful era,” adding, “The capture of this man was crucial to the rise of a free Iraq.” Yet has anything on the ground really changed? Only hours after the former dictator was taken into custody, a car bomb ripped through a Khaldiyah police station, killing 17 people. The following day two explosions in Baghdad claimed nine more lives. Regrettably, nothing has obviated the massive power vacuum that rival Iraqis are trying, justifiably, to fill at any cost.

Whoever manages to seize control of the country will command vast opportunities for participating in the graft and corruption now practiced exclusively by the US military-industrial complex. Why just this week, Halliburton was caught overcharging the Pentagon $61 million. President Bush put on a straight face and stated that, “If there’s an overcharge, like we think there is, we expect that money to be repaid.” White House Spokesman Scott McClellan subsequently announced that Dick Cheney would hold a press conference on Friday where he will remove the illicit funds from his coat pocket and place them in his trousers.

Meanwhile, chaos still reigns across Iraq and irreconcilable differences linger among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds as to who gets to kill all the Baath loyalists. So what have we achieved? Besides, wasn’t the stated objective of this war on terror to get Osama Bin Laden? Wasn’t he the one responsible for killing 2,500 Americans on 9/11? I guess if at first you don’t succeed, set your sights a bit lower.

Like, for example, the White House’s current initiative to put a man on the moon. From the Hubble telescope to Columbia and Challenger, NASA has become the poster child for abject failure. But not without some heady competition. After five years of travel, Japan’s Mars explorer ran out of gas only a week short of its target. Formally scrapping the mission, Japan bowed out of the space race, leaving us to focus squarely on the Chinese. The administration was clearly rankled when astronaut Yang Liwei orbited the Earth 14 times in October and when Beijing unveiled plans to land on the moon by the end of the decade, the administration went into a full panic. NASA, severely crippled by budget constraints and exploding space shuttles, has now been given top priority – the White House even dispatched the Vice President to sway members of Congress. Senator Sam Brownback for one got the message, saying of China’s efforts, “we don’t want them to beat us to the moon.” The Senator, according to his staff, is also concerned about reaching the New World before Columbus.

Unless NASA uses balloons, Boeing won’t be part of any lunar mission; they are barred from any rocket deals as penance for stealing secret documents from Lockheed Martin. As a matter of fact, the airline manufacturer-cum-defense contractor won’t be selling much of anything to the feds now that fresh allegations have brought the departure of CEO Phil Condit. Over the past eight years, Condit had orchestrated a significant migration from commercial aviation to military systems, highlighted by the 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas. But only last year the company had to cough up $98 million to shareholders who claimed the deal was predicated on faulty valuations. While critics say this shift in focus explains why Boeing has finally fallen behind its European competitor Airbus, management claims that leeching the Pentagon enables them to diversify out of a vicious and highly cyclical industry. Either way, the defense effort has been handled so poorly that the company faces double secret probation now that Congressional hearings are gearing up to investigate Boeing’s business practices. The nitwits on Capitol Hill have plenty of other transgressions to examine, including the satellite division’s improper transfer of technology to China during the time of Condit’s ascension. Then there’s the recent episode where CFO Michael Sears offered a lucrative position to a Defense Department procurement official in order to cinch an aerial tanker contract worth $18 billion. Darleen Druyun eventually took a job at Boeing only to be fired along with Sears. While the Pentagon says the tanker contract is under review, not much can be done since the President already signed the $400 billion defense authorization bill. A government contractor with two fists in the public till… Dick Cheney must be proud.