"[Lieberman] will campaign as the unabashed Dean critic. The Connecticut senator plans to spend much of January bashing Dean on taxes, national security, personal leadership and other issues, his advisers say ... Lieberman's advisers say this message will hit the airwaves for the first time this month. Their goal is to paint the senator as the clearest alternative to Dean."

"At Billy's Sports Bar and Grill (in Manchester, N.H.), financial consultant Dick Dryer told [Lieberman] to 'just become a Republican. You're the only Democrat I love.' "

Angry men are 70% more likely to develop gum disease than chilled-out ones, a study in the Journal of the American Dental Association suggests. Anger prompts the release of stress hormones, which dampen the immune system and can encourage gum inflammation.

Cleveland school officials have gotten several complaints lately about censored words or sites. They plan to create a task force soon to rethink what's naughty and nice.

"This is not a perfect science," says Peter Robertson, the district's chief of informational research. "It's a juggling act."

Most local schools, public or private, use commercial filtering programs, such as SmartFilter or Bess. These frequently updated programs assign Web sites to different categories, and schools pick which categories to ban.

Cleveland's closed categories include Games, Sex, Cults/Occult, Lifestyle and more. Students who click on www.nazi.org get a message saying, "Forbidden. . . . Hate Speech."

And Cleveland goes a rare step further: It stops students from even searching the Internet for the names of sites, banned or not, that use certain touchy words. A search for "gay" or "lesbian" invokes a "Forbidden" message.

HOWARD DEAN IN A PACKER HAT? [Tim Graham]
I propose that all Democratic presidential contenders (especially Dean, the biggest tax-cut repealer) be banned from wearing insignia worn by professional athletes, since they almost uniformly qualify as the hated "super-rich" that George Bush is pandering to at the expense of everyone else...

He said it was appropriate in a meat-packing town to bring up bovine spongiform encephalitis - "and I challenge President Bush to pronounce that correctly," he said to laughter from a supportive audience.

My gut tells me to look for and publicize the failings in the married lives of the individuals pushing so hard for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

My heart tells me that if I do, I'll be as bigoted and self-righteous as they are.

My head tells me it wouldn't matter anyway.
...
Nationally, the 2000 census found 1.2 million Americans who said they lived with a same-sex partner. That same enumeration discovered 21.5 million divorced Americans and 9.7 million heterosexuals living together out of wedlock. Two weeks ago, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that 'the number of births to unmarried women reached a record high of 1,365,966 in 2002.

Souder rounded up support from colleagues for his bill with a letter, headed "Win One for the Gipper," that lambasted CBS for its "vile miniseries."

... "I believe [Reagan] represents conservative values as we would see them implemented through a president better than anybody else we've had in American history," Souder said. "He, to conservatives, represents kind of the reverse of FDR ...

"Why would we want to turn America into a magnet for homosexuals?" asked Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, a conservative group. "These incremental steps eventually result in governmental indifference to families. And that is suicidal in terms of civilization.

A California jury has declared MTBE-containing gasoline a "defective product" that oil companies knew would endanger drinking-water supplies while they sold the product as environmentally beneficial.

... Jurors also found that Shell (Oil Co.) and Lyondell Chemical Co. of Houston, the largest domestic manufacturer of MTBE, acted with "malice" in failing to warn consumers that the chemical posed an extraordinary environmental hazard.

... The records showed that oil companies knew of the chemical properties making MTBE problematic in groundwater years before they increased its use in gasoline. Industry studies showed that in some ways MTBE is more worrisome than gasoline's cancer-causing benzene."

In the Tahoe case, internal transcripts revealed oil executives joking that [MTBE] stood for "Major Threat to Better Earnings" ...

Judges protest as Supreme Court turns into a nightclub

For 121 years the red-robed judges of the Royal Courts of Justice have held out against the intrusions of modern life.

But this Christmas the court's quiet solemnity has been shattered by the sound of late-night discos and thumping rock music as the court has reluctantly opened its doors to corporate entertainment. In the past month, the baroque building on the Strand has become the hottest venue in town, bringing in nearly £100,000 in desperately needed fees.

But for a number of the 150 judges who work in the court, the disruption has been at too high a price. One judge has made an official complaint about the disturbance caused by a late-night party when he was preparing for his next day in court. He was told that he would have to grin and bear it because the evening had raised £7,000.

The Treasury insists that the courts must start generating more money. The financial reality is that although the Royal Courts of Justice is expected to generate fees of £21m next year it will cost £76.5m to run - leaving a shortfall of £55m. Despite judicial protests, the new policy has been a massive success as banks and insurance companies queue up to pay the £7,000 a night for the hire of the Grade I-listed Great Hall. The society magazine Harpers & Queen has named it one of Britain's top 10 party venues.

Its strict "no riff-raff" policy has given it an exclusive status that won a booking from the producers of the Rowan Atkinson film Johnny English for their after-premiere party. Other satisfied customers include the Royal Bank of Scotland, Shell and the US Navy.

But court staff have declined a number of unsuitable bookings including one for a 1920s gangster party where guests would be carrying toy guns.

SATISFACTION: I got some satisfaction that Saddam’s daughters were outraged at Saddam’s unkempt appearance when he was caught, but surely not the satisfaction the families of U.S. soldiers and victims of the 9-11 tragedy must have finally felt.

Greg Hanks