DAMFA

We're disappointed that our efforts to increase the efficiency standards of air conditioners by 20 percent was overturned. We are currently reviewing the court's opinion."

This is a vindication of good energy policy, good environmental policy" and shows that a new administration "can't simply ignore" rules that already have been put in place, said New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, one of those who challenged the Bush standard.

Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged.

The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

By accepting the government's vague, poorly explained allegations, and by filling in the gaps in the government's case with its own assumptions about facts absent from the record, this court has converted deference into acquiescence.

Harkin also said he would like the Democratic nominee to be "someone who comes from a working-class background, someone who's had life experiences that most normal people might have had."

That would better describe Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, whose father, among other jobs, drove a milk truck, than Dean, son of a Wall Street financier.

Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark said "the two greatest lies" of the last three years were that the Sept. 11 attacks could not have been prevented and that a future attack is inevitable.

"If I'm president of the United States, I'm going to take care of the American people," Clark told the Concord Monitor for a story published Friday. "We are not going to have one of these incidents."

In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones ...

Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.

But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness.

The programs of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.

Visiting a second-grade class at a new charter school in Rochester, Lazio was asked by little Victoria Fagan, 7, if he really wanted Clinton to "sign that piece of paper" - a reference to the soft-money pledge

There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting attention. For distances of less than 100 kilometres it was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but sometimes there were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who examined the papers of any Party member they found there and asked awkward questions.

"I'm running not because I've been scheming and plotting to climb the political ladder; I'm running because I think the nation is at an incredible crossroads," Clark said. "We're bogged down in Iraq, the world is angry about our unilateral position ... we have a foreign policy that is not sustainable. We need to help Americans help Americans, and then we can help Americans help the world," Clark said.

Thielmann says the nuclear case was filled with half-truths. So why would the Secretary take the information that Thielmann's intelligence bureau had developed and turn it on its head?

"I can only assume that he was doing it to loyally support the President of the United States and build the strongest possible case for arguing that there was no alternative to the use of military force," says Thielmann.

Watkins said she believes President Bush has misled the public, "blurring the line" between the war in Iraq and efforts against terrorism. She said she supports Clark because "he's got integrity, he's not going to mislead the American people and he has a longterm vision."

As a retired Army general, Watkins said, Clark has the credentials to combat terrorism and the diplomatic skills to ease tensions between the U.S. and allies who opposed the war in Iraq.

"I think Wes Clark is just the person to help rebuild and restore the damage that has been done by the way we bullied our way into the war," she said.

"The time for excuses has passed," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.

'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.

There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?

The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two hundred years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state's interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens' Bill of Rights.

NOVAK: You know, it was just last year, General Clark was appearing at Republican fund-raisers in his home state of Arkansas, saying that there was a dream team that had been assembled of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. And -- and he -- he told people he was a Republican.

What do you think suddenly turned him overnight into a Democrat and a Democratic presidential candidate?

Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him.

a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters." ...

the FBI doesn't have to appear before a judge, nor demonstrate "probable cause" - reason to believe that the targeted client is involved in criminal or terrorist activity. Moreover, the National Security Letters are attached with a gag order, preventing any financial institution from informing its clients that their records have been surrendered to the FBI. ... the FBI will no longer be required to report to Congress how often they have used the National Security Letters....

Opponents of the PATRIOT Act and its expansion claim that safeguards like judicial oversight and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, are essential to prevent abuses of power.

Three people linked to white supremacist and anti-government groups are in custody. At least one weapon of mass destruction - a sodium cyanide bomb capable of delivering a deadly gas cloud - has been seized in the Tyler area.

Investigators have seized at least 100 other bombs, bomb components, machine guns, 500,000 rounds of ammunition and chemical agents. But the government also found some chilling personal documents indicating that unknown co-conspirators may still be free to carry out what appeared to be an advanced plot. And, authorities familiar with the case say more potentially deadly cyanide bombs may be in circulation.

Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.

"It's just an additional security precaution we are taking as part of our layered approach to homeland security," the official said. "About a dozen aircraft a week get reverse screened even when we're not at threat level orange."

"Paris Hilton" is the No. 1 fake name used by people calling for pizza deliveries ... U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft might want to open an investigation into these findings -- he was No. 2 on the list of assumed names used by people ordering pizza. ...

Among political pizza findings, people with "Dean for President" bumper stickers on cars in their driveways tipped 22 percent higher than people with "Bush for President" bumper stickers. People with "Bush for President" bumper stickers were three times more likely to order meat-topped pizzas than "Dean for President" drivers.

Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.

'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!'

Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.

Around 30,000 people were injured. Television broadcasts showed one girl, aged about six, lying in a hospital bed with tubes attached to her nose and a bandaged head.

"I want to show my dolls to my mummy and tell her what has happened to us. But I can't find my mummy," she said.

Despite the city's high security level and national terrorism warning, a small plane was able to enter LaGuardia Airport airspace without permission, fly along the East River and circle the Statue of Liberty, and a bus was stolen from the city's bus terminal and driven to Kennedy Airport the same day.

He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.

I've known Cheney since our Nixon days. He's thoughtful, calmly conservative, nonpompous, decisive and was accessible to me over the phone on the hectic morning after 9/11. Cognition No. 1: he's one of the good guys.

But he's fighting to keep secret the identity of his outside advisers on public policy clear up to the Supreme Court. Cognition No. 2: big mistake.

In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.'

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.

The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

And in the general hardening of outlook ... practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations -- not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

Killing lots of innocent people in the Middle East helps America befriend tyrants who were already desperate for international legitimacy after helping to kill 35 Syracuse University students, so vote Petrolican.

American oil companies own joint-venture concessions in the Libyan oil fields, but sanctions have blocked them from developing those fields. Oil experts say their Libyan state partners are now operating the fields, but at levels far below their potential.

"With U.S. investment, Libya can become a world class oil producer," oil industry consultant Peter Gignoux told The Associated Press. The American companies "hold the best concessions and they have got very good technology."

Saying "the soul of the Democratic Party is at stake," he added: "The Washington Democrats fell meekly into line" with President Bush and "failed to ask the tough questions" last fall during the run-up to the war.

The [9th Circuit] ruled 2-1 that prosecuting medical marijuana smokers under federal law is unconstitutional if the pot being consumed isn't sold, transported across state lines or used for non-medicinal purposes.

Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington state have laws similar to California. Federal agents have raided and shut down several medical marijuana growing clubs in California.

The retired Army four-star general also said that if Bush questions the patriotism and national security credentials of Democrats in the coming campaign, he would not hesitate to match his record against the president's.

"I'll put my 34 years of defending the United States of America, and the results that I and my teammates in the United States armed forces achieved, against his three years of failed policies any day," said Clark, who was NATO supreme commander during the 1999 air campaign in Kosovo.

He added, "We've got a president who will go halfway around the world for a photo opportunity but won't go halfway across town for a funeral for an American serviceman.

"I've been to those funerals. I've comforted families. ... I don't think you can make good policy at the top if you don't understand the impact at the bottom of your organization."

SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still --

BUSH: So what's the difference?

Quote of the Day: "Lots of people did not want to join the resistance because they did not want to be called Saddam supporters. But now all the people who oppose the Americans will join." That's from Ibrahim Mutlak, director of police patrols for Salahadin Province, where Mr. Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, is located.

Another reason for its success may be that the Modern Drunkard may have a more forgiving audience than most publications.

"Mistakes are made in every issue, but our readers accept that, because they know we're drunks," Rich said.

There is a simple solution to these problems. The California Secretary of State has ordered that these new computerized voting machines print out a paper copy of your vote for your approval before the vote is registered. These printouts would then be saved in case the machines malfunction or there is any question as to whether or not they have been tampered with.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities. ...

Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones. ...

Nelson wouldn't say what the original source of the intelligence was, but said it contradicted other intelligence reports senators had received.

"Saddam is no longer a problem now, so bin Laden is the focus," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said. The capture of Hussein "shows that with determination and good work it can happen," he added.

December 13, 2003 -- THE Times got another big-time snub from President Bush yesterday - just a few hours after its Washington Bureau Chief, Philip Taubman, boasted on C-SPAN that more than 100 copies of the "well-read" newspaper are delivered daily to the White House.

"I don't read those editorials," Bush told a reporter who asked a question specifically about a Times editorial that ran yesterday. "Maybe you ought to ask the question not in that context but in another context."

At the end of the session, Bush said more diplomatically, "I didn't mean to diss the New York Times editorial page, but I just didn't - I'm not reading it a lot these days."

He quickly added: "Or anybody else's for that matter."

This leak," Daniel Ellsberg replied, "is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers." The exposure of the memo, he said, had the potential to block the invasion of Iraq before it began: "Truth-telling like this can stop a war."

Katharine Gun's truth-telling did not stop the war on Iraq, but it did make a difference. Some analysts cite the uproar from the leaked memo as a key factor in the U.S.-British failure to get Security Council approval of a pro-war resolution before the invasion began in late March.

A forceful proponent of the war, Sen. Joe Lieberman, said Dean is in a "spider hole of denial,'" a reference to Saddam's ignominious hideout and Dean's assessment of the capture's impact.

President Bush scored a major political victory with the capture of Saddam Hussein, but it won't give him a break from Democratic rivals who continue to argue that he mishandled the war in Iraq.

With all respect, this is narrowed down to a choice between Howard Dean and me.

"If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would be in power today, not in prison."

Mr. Milosevic, whose trial began in February 2002, is facing 66 charges, including genocide, stemming from his role in those wars, which left more than 200,000 people dead, destroyed villages and towns, and drove more than a million people from their homes. General Clark will be a witness for the prosecution. ...

General Clark faces direct cross-examination by Mr. Milosevic, who conducts his own defense and usually demands as much time to question a witness as the prosecution. Frequently, he is given more time.

the Bush administration has demanded the right to edit videotapes and transcripts of the sessions before they are made public. ...

Closed sessions are routinely held at the United Nations tribunal that deals with Balkan war crimes, but usually to protect witnesses's safety. The conditions of General Clark's appearance are new. ...

Among the 280 witnesses who have already testified at the trial, there have been many high-profile witnesses and many senior military officers from other nations. Only France is known to have insisted that its top military officers testify behind closed doors.

Rochester has the fourth-best "knowledge-based economy" in the world.

So says Robert Huggins Associates, a think tank based in the United Kingdom that ranked 125 regions for its 2003-04 World Knowledge Competitiveness Index.

The report defines a knowledge economy as "the capacity and capability to create and innovate new ideas, thoughts, processes and products, and to translate these into economic value and wealth."

Rochester beat out better-known regions such as Seattle; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Tokyo; London; Hong Kong; and Ontario, Canada. ...

... The Huggins index ranked Rochester first in the world for patents per capita, first in instrumentation and electrical engineering employment per 1,000 inhabitants, fourth in expenditures on primary and secondary education, 15th in labor productivity and 18th in gross domestic product per capita.