Mary Poppins wasn't good enough?

Yesterday I talked about Bush using 9/11 as another clean-slate moment, like his falling on the wagon. I debated including his coming to Christ (I feel soiled just typing that phrase), but I believe Bush doesn’t consider himself a true “born-again” Christian, because that would entail admitting that he was once wrong, which he is congenitally incapable of doing.

Take a quiz: which America-hating minority are you?

For once, it’s the Poles invading Germany. Polish gnomes, anyway.

According to the Post, the source for the US claim that Iraq had mobile weapons labs was some defector who talked to a foreign spy agency. Bush, Cheney, Powell, etc, bandied it about everywhere and no one in the US knew so much as the name of this alleged source. Now it turns out he’s related to a leader of Chalabi’s organization. Remember when a woman who testified to Congress in 1990 about Iraqi troops ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwait turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador?

More news from the culture wars: the relevant House committee approves increasing fines on broadcasters who air “indecent” material from $27,500 to $500,000.

Good Jeffrey Sachs piece on Haiti.

3 strikes inmates are now 1/4 of California’s prisoners. 672 of them are serving 25 years to life for simple drug possession, 354 for petty theft.

I mentioned that in Orange County three 12-year old girls falsely accused a homeless man of assault to cover up coming home late. They were, against expectations, given actual sentences. 30 to 45 days (the homeless man spent 8 months inside before being released).

Blair gives a defiant speech saying that everything he did in Iraq was right, and he’ll do it again. Possibly channeling one of those Bush ads, he says, according to the Guardian: “In what amounted to a personal testimony of his reasons for taking the country into conflict, the prime minister said the September 11 terrorist attacks had been a "revelation" that had convinced him of the need to tackle rogue states and "religious fanatics" prepared to "bring about Armageddon".” Armageddon, revelation, and THEY’RE the religious fanatics.

Speaking of religious fanatics, John “Lost to a Dead Guy” Ashcroft is in the hospital with something painful. Do you suppose he did something to piss God off, like give in to the temptation to...dance?

Or trying to get the medical records of women who had abortions, which a district judge has just refused to allow. The law banning “partial-birth abortions” included language asserting that the procedure (if there is such a procedure) is never medically necessary as justification for not allowing any exemptions for the health of the mother. And perhaps to set up this slimy little blackmail attempt by Justice.

David Bell, the chief inspector of schools in Britain, says that for girls to fulfill in life the potential they show in schools, they need strong role models, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Elsewhere in the papers, Patrick Stewart of Star Trek blames films for violence against women. He says nothing about violence against vampires. Or Klingons.