The Review

My little heart problem

This is the before picture of the blood vessels in my heart. This is a bad thing.

the major blood vessel is 96% occluded, which means that blood flow to me heart was very weak. My doctor said I was about a week away from croaking at this point.

They went in through my leg with a catheter, and inserted a stent. So, the after picture looks like this:

Much, much better.

Anyway, as it turned out, I am a raging diabetic. My blood sugar was 416, and my triglycerides were at 885.

So, I'm looking at a lot of immediate life changes. But, all's well that ends well. I made it through, my heart attack was minor enough so that my heart wasn't actually damaged, and they got the vessel opened in time.

I'm one lucky SOB though.

Sorry for the blogging hiatus

As you may have noticed, blogging has been light since Wednesday. I had a heart attack Wednesday evening. More details will follow in due course.

You're not the only one, George

Photo: Reuters/William Philpott

He's so much like Eisenhower, it's uncanny

Photo: Reuters/Jeff Topping

The Democratic debates

(Review) Dorothy Rabinowitz's response to the Democratic presidential debates is that these guys are a bunch of whining losers.

Not since the Democratic Convention of 1984, which saw parades of the wild-eyed take to the streets of San Francisco for all the nation to see, have Americans had the opportunity to view so telling a display of the frenzy driving Democratic candidates. Walter Mondale lost for other reasons, of course, but San Francisco gave America a view of the Democrats, their values and their base constituency that it did not soon forget.

This display comes much earlier in the campaign. It's a struggle so revealing in its evidence of presidential aspirants willing to say virtually anything--about the war in Iraq, the motives of the administration and even the state of the nation--in order to appeal to voters, that it is hard to recall its equal. It is hard to recall any time in memory when we heard as extreme a level of assaultive oratory as the one directed Sunday at the administration, and the president in particular, from candidates for the nation's highest office. Can this unremittingly strident display of Bush hatred--barely lower than the cacophony that comes booming from the crowds of grizzled street activists waving placards that show President Bush's picture emblazoned on a swastika--be what these candidates think Americans will find appealing, and worthy of their trust? This is their program?

Well, yes, as far as I can tell, it is. It's a simple program: Leave Iraq, end the War on Terror, raise taxes.

Let's just huddle over here in America and never, ever do anything that might be construed as a defense of American interests.

Oh, yeah, and prepared to do the Clinton lip-biting thing on camera when the next 911 kills thousands of Americans because these guys don't have the stones to defend the country.

Two different films

(Review) Dennis Prager weighs in on the Mel Gibson Passion controversy. He writes that much of the controversy arises because Jews and Christians aren't watching the same movie.

Early this past summer, Mel Gibson invited me to see "The Passion," his film on the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. The invitation was significant in that I was the first practicing Jew and active member of the American Jewish community to be invited. He did so because he believed, correctly, that he could trust me. I have long worked to build trust between Jews and Christians, especially traditional Christians.

The increasing tension over this film has reinforced impressions I offered Mel Gibson that day. When watching "The Passion," Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films.

For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange the killing and torture of the Christians' Savior.

Actually, that explains a lot. So does the rest of Prager's article. Read it all.

Sowell on schools

(Review) Thomas Sowell comments on the problems with public education, particularly in California.

According to education officials quoted in the story, an "unprecedented rise" in test scores has been achieved by "shifting away from a nationally normed test and toward exams that measure what children are being taught in the classroom."

In other words, when school children in California were taking the same tests as children in other states, their results were lousy. But, now that we have our own test, results are much better.

If you or I or anyone else could make up his own test, wouldn't we all turn out to be geniuses?

Yes, we would. And the California Teacher's Association knows that as well as anyone. The problem is, as the CTA sees it, that if scores are low, then parents start blaming teachers. That, for the CTA, would be a bad thing. Too much of that, and parents might want to start making teachers accountable.

No, better for everyone all around if we can dump nationally standardized tests, and make up our own statewide tests, so that the test scores show incredible improvement.

Well, better for everyone except the kids, of course. But protecting the kids isn't CTA's job. Their job is to protect the teachers. It is, after all, a labor union.

While 26 percent of California's elementary schools scored above the level considered "excellent," only 14 percent of middle schools did and just 7 percent of high schools.

Other tests reported elsewhere show a similar pattern. Young schoolchildren in the United States score better, relative to their peers in other countries, but fall progressively further behind the longer they stay in school.

What this shows is that American children are not innately less intelligent but that the American school system leaves them falling further and further behind the longer they stay in our pubic schools.

The longer our kids stay in school, essentially, the dumber they get. Somehow, we get these bright 6 year-olds, who are eager to learn, and we spend the next 12 years beating that out of them. So, by the time they graduate high school, a large minority of them are functionally illiterate, and a large portion of the remainder, who can read, would look at you like a lunatic if you suggested that reading might be something one does for pleasure.

That's not an education system, that's an anti-education system.

A contest of wills

(Review) Ralph Peters gives several reasons why Iraq is nothing like Vietnam, except one:

There is only one way in which the situation in Iraq resembles Vietnam: Our enemies realize that they can't win militarily. This is a contest of wills much more than a contest of weapons. The terrorists intend to wear us down.

Our enemies are employing media-genic bombings to leap over our soldiers and influence our political leaders and our elections - just as the Vietnamese did. The suicide bombers themselves are deluded madmen, but the men behind the terror campaign calculate that, if they can just maintain a sufficient level of camera-friendly attacks, our military successes and all the progress of our reconstruction efforts will be eclipsed by a mood of dejection in Washington.

If the terrorists turn out to be right, the butcher's bill in the coming years and decades will be vastly higher than the casualty count in Iraq.

It's obvious that the leaders of the Democratic Party don't have the ability to fight this war of wills. It only remains to be whether the American people as whole recognize this, and are cognizant of the cost of failure.

Pretty people for peace

(Review) Half a century of diplomacy, peace plans, negotiations, cease fires, and superpower involvement have utterly failed to bring us any realistic hope of Mideast peace.

Clearly, it's time for Jennifer Aniston to give it a try.

Where presidents, diplomats and politicians have failed, Hollywood stars hope to succeed.

Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Danny DeVito are among celebrities hoping their star power can help achieve peace in the Middle East.

The Hollywood bigwigs have joined up with a group called OneVoice, which plans to appeal to Israeli and Palestinian "ordinary folk" to bring peace to a region that has recently seen every potential agreement shredded by bomb blasts.

"The past few years of conflict mean that yet another generation of Israelis and Palestinians will grow up in hatred," Pitt and Aniston said in a joint statement. "We cannot allow that to happen."

Ah. I see. And Brad and Jennifer are gonna stop it. They can't, you see, allow it anymore.

Uh-huh.

No word from either Brad or Jennifer how they are going to sway those "ordinary people," like the large majority of Palestinians who respond to polls by stating that they wish to destroy Israel even if they get a state of their own.

What a fascinating life Hollywood people must live, to give them such an...uh...expansive view of their influence on world events.

Some people's help you can do without

Photo: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

It's not a policy statement, exactly, but...

Photo: Reuters/Larry Downing

Sound it out: Cah-lih-FOR-nyah

Photo: AFP/Pool/File/Rich Pedroncelli

If you look closely, you can almost see them moving

Photo: AFP/Getty Images/File/Bill Pugliano

I love Janice!

(Review) The more I learn about Janice Rogers Brown, the more I like her.

What is most remarkable about Brown's jurisprudence is that she sees all basic individual rights as equally fundamental. Unlike many liberals, she counts property rights and economic liberties as deserving of judicial protection. In Santa Monica Beach, Ltd. v. Superior Court (1999), for instance, she dissented from a decision upholding a rent control ordinance, declaring that "[a]rbitrary government actions which infringe property interests cannot be saved from constitutional infirmity by the beneficial purposes of the regulators."

In a dissent in San Remo Hotel v. City and County of San Francisco (2002), which upheld the city's sweeping property restrictions, Justice Brown expanded on that theme. "Theft is still theft even when the government approves of the thievery," she declared. "The right to express one's individuality and essential human dignity through the free use of property is just as important as the right to do so through speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion."

Brown also consistently upholds such rights as freedom of speech, privacy, and the rights of criminal defendants—a position that bothers many conservatives. In People v. Woods (1999), Justice Brown objected to a police search of a home justified by the fact that a roommate was an ex-felon. "In appending the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, the framers sought to protect individuals against government excess," she wrote. "High in that pantheon was the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures."

Likewise, Justice Brown voted to strike down a warrantless search of a man arrested for riding a bicycle on the wrong side of the street. Describing the search as excessive, Brown noted that an arrest for such a silly infraction never would have taken place in an affluent neighborhood. "If we are committed to a rule of law that applies equally to 'minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich,' we cannot countenance standards that permit and encourage discriminatory enforcement."

That's my kind of justiciating!

Which probably means her appointment is doomed.

Fisking Clark & Kerry

(Review) Andrew Sullivan takes to the pages of The New Republic to deliver a stout fisking of Gen. Wesley Clark and Sen. John Kerry for their remarks about Iraq on the Sunday chat shows. He concludes by recalling a recent comment by Donna Brazile:

Watching this debate only confirms the wisdom of Donna Brazile's comments to the Associated Press over the weekend: "There's a huge credibility gap our party has on national security--not because we don't have enough military medals, but because we have no plan of action." Amen.

For some reason, this wisdom seems lost on most of the leading lights of the Democratic Party. 

How good (or evil) is your web site?

(Review) The Gematriculator has scored my web site. What is the Gematriculator, you ask?

The Gematriculator is a service that uses the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is.

Basically, Gematria is searching for different patterns through the text, such as the amount of words beginning with a vowel. If the amount of these matches is divisible by a certain number, such as 7 (which is said to be God's number), there is an incontestable argument that the Spirit of God is ever present in the text. Another important aspect in gematria are the numerical values of letters: A=1, B=2 ... I=9, J=10, K=20 and so on. The Gematriculator uses Finnish alphabet, in which Y is a vowel.

Experts consider the mathematical patterns in the text of the Holy Bible as God's watermark of authenticity. Thus, the Gematriculator provides only results that are absolutely correct.

Well, OK, if you say so, but I'm not sure why K=20. Isn't K the 11th letter? I mean, if this is so all-fired accurate, how come you can't get the K right? And, while we're at it, why Finnish? First of all, who speaks it? If this all biblical, then shouldn't we be using a Hebrew or Aramaic alphabet? And if we're using Finnish, how do you score a word like "Rakentamismääräykset"? English doesn't even have the "ä" letter, so it just doesn't seem fair.

Oops. There I go, using skeptical and rational inquiry again. Sorry. Let's carry on.

So, with that in mind, lets look at the score for the blog. For those of you who see the glass as half full:

For those of you who see the glass as half empty:

I guess I can live with that.  

Protecting us all from Tommy Chong

(Review) The Tommy Chong half of the Cheech and Chong comedy duo is now securely imprisoned in a Federal penitentiary. At last, the citizens of this great country are safe from his depredations, and can once again breathe the clean air of freedom. As Deroy Murdock writes:

At last, the homeland is secure from Chong, a 65-year-old comic whose merchandise spared potheads from fumbling with rolling papers. Could there be any greater triumph for public safety than that? And in this peaceful world and placid nation, taxpayers can rest assured that officials are using their hard-earned cash as wisely as possible. Recall that Chong and 54 others were busted in Operation Pipe Dreams, a February 24 crackdown on the drug-paraphernalia industry. That project involved 1,200 local, state, and federal authorities, the Drug Enforcement Administration estimates. These professional sleuths could have pursued al Qaeda instead, but what would that have accomplished?

It could have been worse. Chong could have run a business based on...gambling! The very foundations of the Republic would have been imperiled.

Unless, of course, the gambling was conducted in Nevada, Atlantic city, or the sovereign land of an Indian reservation, in which case it would have been just peachy.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Houghton's court pleadings sought Chong's harsh punishment because he got rich "glamorizing the illegal distribution and use of marijuana" in films that "trivialize law enforcement efforts to combat drug trafficking and use."

Chong must have wondered when such activities became criminal. Perhaps the FBI now will arrest Sean Penn for hilariously smoking grass in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Then they can handcuff Denzel Washington for portraying a crooked narcotics officer in Training Day."

Well, clearly, such fellows are committing thoughtcrime. Prison's too good for 'em. They should be put in bamboo cages and poked with sharp sticks!

Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing that happening to Sean Penn...but I digress.

Note, by the way, that Tommy Chong wasn't selling drugs. He had a store that sold bongs and rather odd pipes. Well, all I can say is if it takes 1,200 federal agents and millions of dollars to shut down a head shop, then it's money well spent!

Isn't it? 

China and Madame Chiang

(Review) John Derbyshire writes a very interesting....well, eulogy isn't the right word. Let's just call it a post-death article on Madame Chiang, in which he manages to impart a nice bit of modern Chinese history as well.

A.N.S.W.E.R.'s lies

(Review) Jon Henke has an excellent post that shows the depth of International ANSWER's problems with the truth. He's definitely got their number. 

Fire update

(Review) Well, it looks like most of the danger has passed. There are still a few hot spots burning from the fire I photographed yesterday, but the vast majority of it is out, and what remains has moved away from the house to the north.

Thanks to Jon Henke of the QandO blog for his concern.

Defending Scalia

(Review) Peter Lawler writes that Justice Antonin Scalia's public statements are no different from his published opinions. And his opinions on Lawrence happen to be correct.

Justice Scalia, in his dissent in the recent sodomy case (Lawrence v. Texas), does not deny or even bemoan the fact that "[s]ocial perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time." And he notes without judgment that "homosexuals have achieved some success" in their effort to persuade their fellow Americans that "consensual homosexual acts" should be perfectly legal. He even observes that it's true enough that laws that seem necessary and proper to one generation often seem oppressive to another. Later generations are, under our Constitution, perfectly free to repeal such laws.

But that liberty is given by the Constitution to the people, not to the Court. There is nothing in the Constitution that allows the Court to read into the Constitution views of liberty that have no specific textual support and would not have occurred to its Framers. To say otherwise would allow justices — who are by profession nothing but lawyers — to be philosophers, the sort of philosophers who pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of the spirit of their time. That means, in practice, that justices in their pride become captive, as Justice Scalia said in his lecture, "to the latest academic understanding of liberal political theory." And the shallow and naive way they so often understand trendy theory shows their pride to be mostly vanity.

Somehow, we have got to have some sort of civil audit of the judicial system. We are already perilously close to having an Imperial Judiciary. Somehow, the will of the people--which is theoretically sovereign in our political system--needs to have its say in the outcomes of judicial review.

Well, kids, I guess you can just throw that NASA job application away

(Review) Debra Saunders writes about a new charter K-6 school proposed in Sacramento next year. The charter itself is an interesting read.

Here's a clue as to how un-academic the K-6 school is likely to be if it opens next fall: "Mahatma Gandhi (the petition reads) once said, 'The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its non-human animals are treated.'''(Clue: Gandhi did not use the term "non-human animal.")

While the petition promises rigorous academics, it's hard to find advanced math or challenging literature buried under the avalanche of edu-jargon, as in "value of relationships," "a safe learning environment for students to speak about their own authentic feelings and experiences," "class bonding" and "constructivist and multicultural education and thematic, project-based learning."

Some of this sounds academic: Documents say social studies classes will "draw upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, religion, sociology." Except the school is K-6: Many students will be beginning to learn to read -- or are supposed to be learning to read.

Where's the math? The kids may not know how to multiply, but math classes will help students "explore economic costs as they relate to environmental degradation, the loss of wildlife and companion animal overpopulation." (No indoctrination there.)

Well, sure, the kids may not know much when the leave grade 6, but at least their little minds will be full of rightthought and goodthink. 

Canadian Doctors migrating south

(Review) Dr. Sydney Smith writes that Canada is great place to practice medicine. Unless you actually practice there.

Three years ago, a survey by the Harvard School of Public Health of over 2000 physicians in Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States found that Canadians were by far the most pessimistic. More of them felt that their ability to provide quality care had declined and that it would only get worse in the future. The overwhelming majority of Canadian doctors complained about medical and diagnostic equipment shortages, and long waiting times for care. And, like their counterparts in the United States, they feel short-changed in the time they have to spend with their patients.

But the dissatisfaction in Canada goes beyond venting in surveys. Since the 1990's, Canada has experienced an exodus of physicians. Their number one destination? The United States and its much maligned healthcare system. At last estimate, there were over 8,000 Canadian physicians practicing in the United States. The vast majority have let their Canadian licenses lapse, indicating no desire to return.

The plight and flight of Canadian doctors reached its peak in the mid-1990's when the government tightened its healthcare budget and physician reimbursement declined dramatically. And yet, although the Canadian government has tried to reverse the trend by committing more tax dollars to its healthcare system, physician emigration still jumped by 68% in 2001. According to Dr. Hugh Scully, co-chair of a Canadian task force on physician supply, the equivalent of two or three medical school classes are leaving the country each year. It's a not a situation that a country with too few medical students can afford to maintain.

By the way, have I mentioned yet today that socialism's failures can be seen practically everywhere it's practiced?

Oh, yeah, I have.

Teachers Unions: Keeping the dream alive

(Review) Although, as Joe Klein writes, in the case the dream was to keep charter schools from making regular public schools look bad.

Here's the deal. Bob Thomspon, a retired road builder, sold his company for 442 million. He then offered $200 million to detroit for charter high schools, with the proviso that 90% of the students had to graduate, and 90% of graduates had to go to college.

This was, essentially, the deal that Thompson offered Detroit. He didn't specify curriculum or who should run the 15 independent charter schools. Theoretically, any organization—including the teachers' union—was eligible to propose its own system if it presented a plausible plan for a 500-student campus and agreed to Thompson's 90-90 yardstick. New state legislation would be needed to establish the schools. But both Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Governor Jennifer Granholm were thrilled by Thompson's offer—at least until the Detroit Federation of Teachers made plain its opposition. On Sept. 25 the DFT held a work stoppage, which closed the public schools, and staged a rally at the state capitol in Lansing. The mayor withdrew his support, and Thompson withdrew his offer soon after.

I'll bet the 90-90 provision just scared the devil out of the DFT. Because, let me tell you, the Detroit school system doesn't sport numbers anywhere near that. And if the charter system could do it, people might start wondering why the public schools couldn't.

Why, before you know it, there might even be calls for...gasp!...school reform. Golly, some teachers could end up getting fired!

And we can't have that now, can we?

Eurosclerosis

(Review) Ralph Reiland takes a look at Europe's economy, and doesn't much like what he finds.

What's happened in Norway, and even more so in the other European welfare states, is that excessive regulation and taxation have killed the spontaneous market-driven process of job creation in the private sector, and the politicians are now stuck trying to fill the void in job formation with subsidies and handouts...

In France, with the welfare state in full bloom and the rejection of the more laissez-faire "Anglo-Saxon model" a point of pride, this year's jobless rate is running at 10 percent and overall economic growth is nonexistent, i.e., the gross domestic product for the second quarter of 2003 was down 0.34 percent from the previous quarter.

It's much the same in Germany, Spain, Finland and Greece, all operating this year with unemployment rates that are roughly 50 percent higher than the U.S. rate, and all running with jobless rates among under-25s that exceed 20 percent.

The bottom line is that Europe's highly developed welfare state and relatively egalitarian income distribution has undermined incentives, innovation, entrepreneurial activity and job creation.

This is the thing that really kills me about the Left. The world is full of examples of the failure of socialism. And they still don't get it.

Oh, and by the way, that 10% jobless rate in France and Germany doesn't count the number of people who are on permanent or long-term "disability", which amounts to about another 7%+ of the workforce. Real unemployment is about twice as high as the official figures.

But, that's the same kind of economic performance we'd have here if Teddy Kennedy got his way.

You know, when the USSR collapsed, I had this fantasy where Leftists would take a look at how badly the USSR and its client states were run, and they'd take a second look at the policies they were proposing. I just hoped that the inherent failures of the socialist model would be obvious. But, of course, it took about a month for the Leftist argument to shift to, "Well, you can't count the USSR, because they didn't have real socialism."

The Left embraces socialism with the fervor of religious belief that is every bit as intense as that of a bible-thumping fundamentalist in Alabama. The difference is, of course, that unlike religion, socialism is not immune to disproof. The Left just likes to pretend it is.

But, as the European experience shows, socialism in lighter doses is just as harmful. It just takes longer to drain the life out of the nation's economic life.

There's nothing better than getting your hands on cheap drugs

(Review) Bill Safire writes that price controls, and the market distortions they cause, are about to hammer pharmaceutical companies.

The price of most new prescription drugs is high in the U.S. mainly because it includes the producers' huge investment in scientific research. In Canada, the government strips out the cost of such research and imposes a low price ceiling. Shortsightedly, our pharmaceutical companies have meekly or greedily gone along with this foreign rip-off, picking up extra sales on a research investment already made.

But this foolish acceptance of foreign price controls means that the U.S. consumer is subsidizing the foreign consumer. Not being dopes, pursuing their economic interest, American bargain-hunters are now buying these drugs where they are sold cheaply — outside the U.S.

To counter this trend, our federal officials have been warning that imported drugs may be counterfeit or conflict with other drugs. That may scare some buyers, but most will take their chances. In reality, what with an open border and the Internet, sales will go to the cheapest seller. More Americans will join Canadians in buying drugs that do not support the cost of research into new drugs.

Thus has Phanny Pharma outsmarted itself. By willingly cutting its prices to sell into price-controlled economies, not only has it invited American buyers to go where the bargains are, but it has also invited U.S. politicians to call for foreign prices on products bought by U.S. state and local governments. And there go billions in private capital and earnings needed for costly research into new cures and treatments.

Politicians have this odd tendency to live in a fantasy land where they can repeal basic economic laws by political edict.

So, we have a situation now where it takes 7-14 years, and hundreds of millions of dollars to get a single drug approved by the FDA. And, after spending all that money to get a drug approved, politicians blithely assume that price controls will allow people to buy drugs cheaply, but the pharmaceutical companies will not be discouraged from spending billions on R&D and approval costs that they will be unable to recapture through drug sales.

This is, quite literally, fantastic. 

Rogue Nukes

(Review) Michael Barone writes that the threat of rogue nukes is best handled through regime change.

It is no accident that two of the most hideous regimes in the world have been seeking nuclear weapons. The Iranian mullahs and the North Korean maniacs seek nukes to hold on to power, and there is no reason to believe that they have any compunction about delivering nukes to terrorists who would use them against us. Diplomatic negotiations can delay the danger, at best holding it off for some years. But the effective way to end the threat of a nuclear September 11 is regime change, which has ended the threat that Iraqi WMD programs, now documented by David Kay, could produce weapons for use against us and our friends. Bush has embarked, with some effectiveness, on the multilateral diplomacy so often recommended by his critics. But he should not forget that our safety is best assured by regime change in the remaining axis of evil.

Works for me.

Susan Estrich must be a big Laker's fan

(Review) Susan Estrich writes that the prosecution is blowing the Kobe Bryant rape case.

A judicial offensive

(Review) Bob Novak writes that Senate Majority leader Bill Frist is about to launch an escalating attack on Democrats who have been filibustering all of the Bush Judicial nominations.

Phase One: Start this week with a cloture vote on the nomination of U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering Sr. of Mississippi for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. Pickering, bottled up in the Judiciary Committee during the 2001-02 Democratic interregnum, has just been sent to the Senate floor.

Phase Two: Next, order a cloture vote for the second time on Alabama State Attorney General William Pryor for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. Claims by opponents that Pryor's ''deeply held beliefs'' taint him for the court have produced accusations of anti-Catholicism.

Phase Three: Vote on three female nominees. Attempts to get cloture on Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen's nomination for the 5th Circuit have failed three times. California Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl's two-year-old nomination for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco is coming to the Senate floor for the first time. Just released by the Judiciary Committee and already threatened with a filibuster is California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, an African American.

Failure to reach 60 votes for cloture on each of these women is scheduled to be followed by consideration of the bill co-sponsored by Frist and conservative Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia. That measure would reduce the number of votes needed to end filibusters on nominations. That, too, will be filibustered.

All this refocusing is intended to set the scene for a bitter battle in next year's session of Congress. At that time, an effort may be made to rule out of order a filibuster against judicial nominations -- the ''so-called'' nuclear solution. This would require only 51 votes, but Frist does not even have that many today because of reluctance to tamper with the traditions of the Senate.

Ah, the beloved traditions of the Senate. I am reminded of the story Winston Churchill, who, when told by an admiral that a particular operation would not be in keeping with the traditions of the Royal Navy, replied, "The traditions of the Royal Navy, sir, are rum, sodomy, and the lash!"

I understand that isn't quite fair. The lash has never been a tradition of the Senate.

But whatever the traditions of the Senate, it seems pretty clear that they aren't superior to the Constitution. Not that Democrats have any great interest in the Constitution, except insofar as is required to subvert it for their own political gain.

A president--any president--deserves an up or down vote on his nominees, and it seems to me that, as long as the nominees are qualified (by which I mean they have the requisite experience) they deserve a vote on the floor of the Senate.

Of, course, the Democrats are desperate to allow such a vote, because they know they would lose. They have just enough votes to sustain a filibuster.

And, so far, Bill Frist hasn't had the guts to call them on it, which, as near as I can figure, makes him just as much of a gutless weasel as Trent Lott.

It's such a very holy time...

(Review) Hey, just out of curiosity, why is it that we have to walk on freakin' eggshells so as not to disturb anybody during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, but the Muslims themselves can blow up 40 people in homicide bombing attacks.

I'm just, you know, wondering.

Still here

A heavy pall of gray-brown smoke is covering everything. So, we can't see if the fire is still burning to the east of us. But the wind has remained calm, and our house doesn't appear threatened at the moment. So the big fire from last night appears to have slowed radically or completely stopped.

Another San Diego blogger reports

(Review) Bryon Scott of the Slings and Arrows blog reports on the status of the fires near his home.

More fire pictures

Chris wanted to get a clearer idea about how far the fire was from our house. We can only drive about 1/2 mile up the street in the direction of the fire; the police have blocked off the street past that point.

From that vantage point we were able to shoot these pictures.

The fire is about 1 mile away from our vantage point, which puts it about 1 1/2 miles from the house.

In case we have to evacuate, we have the staple items packed. All we have to do is gather up the pets, throw the stuff into the car, and we're outta here.

Fortunately, there is almost no wind in the area right now, so the fire is spreading very slowly. But, the trouble with Santa Ana winds is that they can come up suddenly, and blow up to 50 miles per hour. In that case, the fire could be here in less than an hour from where it is now.

So, let's hope the wind stays away.

Another acount of the fire from down south

(Review) In addition to my account below, Indepundit lives in San Diego, and provides his account of the fire down in his area.

Fisking the Gray Lady

(Review) The Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein fisks the NY Times editorial questioning Janice Brown's suitability for the Federal appeals bench.

My city burns

Chris and I are a bit nervous at the moment. 100,000 acres are in flames here in San Diego county as brushfires sweep across the county. She keeps looking out the upstairs windows at the huge plume of smoke rising to the east of our house as the fire rages in Valley Center. We live on the eastern end of Escondido, and Valley Center is directly to the east of us.

It's just after 1:00pm here, but it looks like late afternoon, because the sun is being filtered through this huge layer of brown smoke. There is a layer of ash coating everything, and you can smell the smoke in the air.

Valley Center is far enough away so that I'm not really worried yet, but the Santa Ana winds are pushing the flames in this direction.

Farther south, it's even worse. The I-15 and I-52 are closed, and the fire is eating into the Kearny Mesa area. This may end up being the worst fire in California history in terms of fire damage, houses and buildings destroyed. Maybe about $10 billion in property damage so far. The Fire department is evacuating the densely settled Tierrasanta area from the Scripps Ranch area to Mira Mesa High School, and North Tierrasanta to Qualcomm Stadium. God only knows how many people will be homeless before this thing is over.

The San Diego Union-Tribune has a photo gallery of the fires here.

The fire department is urging everybody to stay off the roads. Well, there's not much of a choice, cutting off the I-15 effectively shuts off traffic from north to south on the east side of the city.

Fire departments are stretched mighty thin, too. And, since all the available airborne firefighting equipment is fighting fires in San Bernardino county, out firefighters have no airborne firefighting support. The county Fire Chief has already said that fires in some rural areas are just going to have to burn themselves out, because there's no one available to fight them, since firefighters are already struggling to stop the fires in central areas of the city.

Now, the wind is picking up, making the fires even harder to fight. And, of course, the wind is blowing the Valley Center fire directly at us. 

UPDATE:

OK, now I'm getting worried. I can see the flames now. Here is what I can see from my back yard:

We have a main street about 40m to our west. From there I can see the fire better:

And this gives an overview of the fire's size from the same vantage point:

This is about 2 miles from the house at this point. And closing. Chris is preparing for the possibility of an evacuation order, and while she's doing that, I've taken hi-res pictures of every room in the house, just in case.  

UPDATE 2:

More pictures:

A closeup of the fires from the street:

It's 3:00pm. The sun is so dommed by smoke you can look at it with your bare eyes. The ambient light level is like dusk.

Choosing family over career

(Review) Lisa Belkin writes in the NY Times about women--college grads with high-powered jobs--who are just...quitting. Choosing to leave and raise families.

Women -- specifically, educated professional women -- were supposed to achieve like men. Once the barriers came down, once the playing field was leveled, they were supposed to march toward the future and take rightful ownership of the universe, or at the very least, ownership of their half. The women's movement was largely about grabbing a fair share of power -- making equal money, standing at the helm in the macho realms of business and government and law. It was about running the world.

Yes, it was. And it assumed that women would want to run the world. That they would want to engage in the same compromises and office politics in which men have always been engaged.

Gender, the feminists told us, was a "social construct", a cultural role imposed on women. Five billion years of evolution couldn't possibly have anything to do with the differences between women and men, except for providing different plumbing.

This was never anything more than a Utopian political fantasy.

I say this with the full understanding that there are ambitious, achieving women out there who are the emotional and professional equals of any man, and that there are also women who stayed the course, climbed the work ladder without pause and were thwarted by lingering double standards and chauvinism. I also say this knowing that to suggest that women work differently than men -- that they leave more easily and find other parts of life more fulfilling -- is a dangerous and loaded statement.

It's a "dangerous and loaded" idea? And why should that be? Wasn't feminism supposed to be about giving women choices?

Well, no, not really. Despite the fact that the women's movement talked about giving women choices, women who chose to stay home were treated as second-class citizens in the movement. They weren't supposed to make that choice. To do so was to knuckle under to the Patriarchy in a way that was practically traitorous. Throwing away a Princeton MBA to raise children? Why, it's beyond the pale.

And, to a large extent, it still is, if stating the obvious--that women want to raise families--is still a "dangerous and loaded" thing to say.

And lastly, I am very aware that, for the moment, this is true mostly of elite, successful women who can afford real choice -- who have partners with substantial salaries and health insurance -- making it easy to dismiss them as exceptions. To that I would argue that these are the very women who were supposed to be the professional equals of men right now, so the fact that so many are choosing otherwise is explosive.

The other Utopian fallacy the women's movement foisted upon women was the idea that they could have it all: a rewarding career and to raise a family.

But common sense should tell you that this just can't really be true. It implies that choices are cost-free. That you can get your MBA, work a 50-60 hour week, and still have time to bake cookies for the cheerleader bake sale and attend PTA meetings.

But, of course, the truth is that every choice we make has a cost. Sometimes, it's a cost we're willing to pay, either in time, or money, or inconvenience. But there's always a cost, and to pretend otherwise is to lose touch with reality.

But, if you lose touch with that reality, then I guess it is explosive to find out that women who do have real freedom of choice tend to choose family over career.

Look at how all these numbers compare with those of men. Of white men with M.B.A.'s, 95 percent are working full time, but for white women with M.B.A.'s, that number drops to 67 percent.

Perhaps that's because men don't have the luxury of having the same kind of choices. If you don't believe it, then try to tell a prospective wife that you want to quit working and raise the kids while she puts in 50 hours a week at the office. Chances are that, by the end of that conversation, she'll be your ex-fiancée.

Because women still have expectations about men, and that expectation doesn't usually include taking time off from your career to raise children for six to ten years. In general, the expectation is that you'll be getting up at 6:00 AM every morning and going to work, while she decides between work and child-rearing.

Not, that I'm complaining, but it's funny how rare it is for the work/family choice to cut both ways. On the other hand, men don't generally expect to get to make that choice.

As these women look up at the ''top,'' they are increasingly deciding that they don't want to do what it takes to get there. Women today have the equal right to make the same bargain that men have made for centuries -- to take time from their family in pursuit of success.

Ah. I see. It was bargain we made. We had a choice, I guess, but we held firm until we got the right to go to work every day for 45 years or so.

Funny, but I don't remember the negotiations that resulted in that bargain. The closest thing to it that I remember was my dad coming to my room when I was 14, and asking me, "Don't you think it's about time you got a job, son?"

It was "bargain" only in the sense that no woman would willingly marry a guy who wasn't pretty good at convincing here that he was a dependable provider. And it's not that easy to do so today, either.

In other words, we accept that humans are born with certain traits, and we accept that other species have innate differences between the sexes. What we are loath to do is extend that acceptance to humans. Partly that's because absolute scientific evidence one way or the other is impossible to collect. But mostly it is because so much of recent history (the civil rights movement, the women's movement) is an attempt to prove that biology is not destiny. To suggest otherwise is to resurrect an argument that can be -- and has been -- dangerously misused.

The trouble is, that you can argue all you want about how biology is not destiny, but that doesn't change biology. The women's movement tried to argue that 5 billion years of evolution was entirely unimportant. But argument didn't make it so, and biological impulses are, for the most part, completely unfazed by political ideology.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko forced the Soviet Academy of Sciences to proclaim that Mendelian genetics were an anti-communist heresy. This became the official position of the USSR on biology. As a result, Soviet biological and agricultural sciences were stunted for 50 years. The Soviet position didn't make genetics any less true, it just made Soviet science in those areas irrelevant and useless.

By the same token, the women's movement's rejection of the biological urges toward childbearing and child-rearing were similarly empty. Reproduction and the raising of children are the most basic and central of biological urges. For the women's movement to pretend otherwise is simply a form Lysenkoism.

''Everyone had an M.B.A.,'' says Tracey Liao Van Hooser, the only one in the present group without one, though she does have a degree from Brown University and a decade of work in advertising and marketing to add to the cumulative resume. ''It was wonderful to find a group of women who had made the same decisions I had. This play group is the reason I feel so happy with my choice.''

[...]

Van Hooser says: ''I am not a housewife. Is there still any such thing? I am doing what is right for me at the moment, not necessarily what is right for me forever.''

Talk to any professional woman who made this choice, and this is what she will say. She is not her mother or her grandmother. She has made a temporary decision for just a few years, not a permanent decision for the rest of her life. She has not lost her skills, just put them on hold.

''I'm calling this my 'maternity leave,''' Sears says. ''As long as I have the chit on the table that says 'This is not forever,' then I feel O.K. about it.''

Brokaw agrees, protesting, ''Don't make me look like some 1950's Stepford wife.'' In the years since she left her law firm, she has helped found the Atlanta Girls' School (the same place where Tarkenton once worked) and also raised a successful challenge to a bridge that was to have spilled its traffic into her residential neighborhood. ''I use my legal skills every day.''

This seems a bit defensive, like Fredo telling Michael, "I'm smart! I can handle stuff! Not like everybody says! I'm not dumb!" But why be defensive? Why does Ms. Van Hooser need the validation of these other women? Why isn't she simply saying, "I am taking part in raising the next generation. That is a perfectly honorable and rewarding thing to do," and being happy about it? Could it be because she's internalized the women's movement disapproval of making the choice of family over work?

I don't begrudge women the ability to have the work/family choice available to them. But I do begrudge fact that women who chose family instead of work are made to feel like traitors to their gender in some way. Almost as if they are failures for not choosing to stick it out in their careers, and to do their bit to overthrow the Patriarchy. I'm not sure that encouraging embarrassment among women who choose family is a wise thing to do.

No wait, that's not true. I am sure it isn't.

The task force begins its work this winter. But Hewlett's preliminary research makes her pessimistic about what today's women will face when they want to return to work. At any given time, she says, ''two-thirds of all women who quit their career to raise children'' are ''seeking to re-enter professional life and finding it exceedingly difficult. These women may think they can get back in,'' she said, when I told her of what I had been hearing in San Francisco and Atlanta and on my own suburban street, where half the women with children at home are not working and where the jobs they quit include law partner and investment banker. ''But my data show that it's harder than they anticipate. Are they going to live to the age of 83 and realize that they opted out of a career?''

So, when women leave the workplace for 5 years to raise children, getting back into the workplace is difficult? Really? You mean if I just quit working for a couple of years, I couldn't just jump right back into my old job?

I'm shocked--shocked!--to learn of this!

Again, I have to go back to what I said earlier: Choices are inherently costly, and it's a fantasy land you're living in if you think otherwise. Sure, it would be great to be able to move in and out of careers at your choice, but that simply isn't the way the world works. So, the question you gotta answer yourself is if child-raising is a choice that is worth the cost to your career.

And, of course, somewhere in all this, you have to ask yourself if you'd rather raise your kids yourself, or have an au pair or day care do it for you.

Gray's final appointees

(Review) Dan Weintraub's editors have approved the following post at the California Insider:

Senate Leader John Burton has notified members not to expect to reconvene in session before Gov. Gray Davis leaves office. That means last-minute Davis appointees who require confirmation will have their fates in the hands of Gov.-elect Schwarzenegger, who could rescind any of the appointments before they are confirmed.

So, that means all of Gray Davis' last-minute appointments are dead, unless Arnold approves them.

VDH on Iraq

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson has the number on America's "Allies" and their opposition to Iraq.

For some reason or another, a series of enormously important issues--the future of the Middle East, the credibility of the United States as both a strong and a moral power, the war against the Islamic fundamentalists, the future of the U.N. and NATO, our own politics here at home--now hinge on America's efforts at creating a democracy out of chaos in Iraq. That is why so many politicians--in the U.N., the EU, Germany, France, the corrupt Middle East governments, and a host of others--are so strident in their criticism, so terrified that in a postmodern world the United States can still recognize evil, express moral outrage, and then sacrifice money and lives to eliminate something like Saddam Hussein and leave things far better after the fire and smoke clear. People, much less states, are not supposed to do that anymore in a world where good is a relative construct, force is a thing of the past, and the easy life is too precious to be even momentarily interrupted. We may expect that, a year from now, the last desperate card in the hands of the anti-Americanists will be not that Iraq is democratic, but that it is democratic solely through the agency of the United States--a fate worse than remaining indigenously murderous and totalitarian.

Read the whole thing.

The "right" to privacy

I just want to expand on what I wrote previously about the judicial process and it’s effect on society. Earlier this year, the issue came up in reference to Sen. Rick Santorum’s comments about homosexuality. At the center of that issue was the “right to privacy”, which, as I said before, I think is a deeply flawed constitutional principle.

I suppose I should state at the outset that I don’t believe there should be laws regulating homosexual conduct, or adultery--or prostitution, for that matter. But it is one thing to support fairly liberal public policy vis a vis consensual activities between adults, and quite another entirely to say that the Constitution protects such activities. This is a volatile issue, mainly because the whole concept of a Constitutional right to privacy is so broad that the ripples from it impact on all sorts of issues, and mainly in a negative way.

If the right of privacy means that consensual adult activity A is protected, then one must explain why consensual adult acts B, C, and D are not. As a practical matter this means that if there is a protected right to consensual homosexual activities, then one must explain why incest, wife-swapping, and polygamy between consenting adults are not equally protected. Indeed, if economic transactions in a private setting are Constitutionally protected, and consensual sexual activity in a private setting is equally protected, then why isn't prostitution a protected activity since it simply marries (if you'll pardon the expression) protected economic transactions and protected private naughtiness? Unless you can argue that consensual homosexual acts are in some way qualitatively different than adultery, incest, or polygamy between consenting adults, then it seems that a valid argument can be made that those activities are equally protected as well.

Now, practically everyone says that the right to privacy is settled Constitutional law. Well, maybe, but the limits have never been settled, and it seems to me that fairly close limits have to be applied to such a right, especially as it is a judicially-created right that does not explicitly appear in the Constitution.

One of the key criterion a right must meet before it is recognized as a right is that it must be deemed "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," or "so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental." The Supreme Court declared abortion to be one of these rights in 1973. The ensuing 30 years of controversy, public protest, and bitter acrimony seems to argue against the court's position that the right to abortion was "so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental," since such a large percentage of the population disagrees with it. Indeed, the current filibuster in the US Senate over the matter of Bush judicial nominations revolves almost solely around the issue of abortion.

Rights that are "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," or that are "so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental" don't usually divide the nation 50-50. Indeed, by definition, they cannot. If they are so controversial, how can they possibly be deeply rooted in our history or traditions? No, it seems to me that the right of privacy as it has been extended by the Court does nothing more than create new "rights" about which the framers were entirely unaware.

As a result, there has not only been bitter public acrimony, but the very operation of government and judicial selection has been tainted by reference to it. That’s a pretty widespread effect for a right that is never mentioned in the Constitution.

The Framers didn't mention quite a lot of things, as it happens. And the reason they did not was because, outside of proscribing a range of specified, inviolable rights, they left the state and national legislatures free to make whatever rules that seemed best to the polity they represented. The proper place to define such privacy limits beyond those fundamental to the concept of ordered liberty is the legislature, not the courts. If we wish to enshrine new rights into the Constitution, the proper place to do so is through amending that instrument, not through judicial fiat whereby five out of nine lawyers in Washington DC promulgate rights at their discretion.

The whole area of judicially-created privacy rights has led to nothing but controversy that has poisoned political discourse. As a result it has politicized the Court to such an extent that the very process of selecting and confirming judges has been tainted. When interest groups are protesting regularly in front of the Supreme Court's steps, that's a pretty good indication that the Court is engaging in political rather than judicial activity.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole problem with the concept of a Constitutional right to privacy. Constitutional rights are first principles from which all other political actions flow. Once you set down a Constitutional rule, you have to recognize that, if broadly applied--and in general, that is how they are applied--it is going to cover a lot of things that you might not have thought about.

Constitutional rules are hard to limit to one specific subset of circumstances, denying the remainder of the superset. Constitutional rights are blunt instruments, not scalpels, and that is precisely what they are meant to be. That is why the Framers created a limited set of 10 rights in the Bill of Rights. The rest they left up to us, to decide by the political process, or the process of amendment.

What they did not intend was for the Courts to create new rights without any sort of audit by either the citizens or their representatives. None of this is to say that anti-sodomy, or anti-adultery, or anti-prostitution laws are wise or just. I personally don't think they are, and I am not interested in having the armed agents of the state popping by to cart me off to jail because I'm having sex outside of marriage, or because I’m spending some of my disposable income to procure some company for the evening.

But the Constitution's purpose is not to prevent the passage of unwise or silly or useless laws. It is to prevent the passage of tyrannical laws that sever the activities of the government from public audit. Somehow, we've lost sight of that simple purpose, and have taken to treating the Constitution as some sort of rights-dispensing machine, because it's easier to have the courts declare our pet cause to be a "right", than it is to convince 50% + 1 of our fellow citizens to vote for it.

To the extent that we treat the Constitution in that cavalier way, we move closer to a non-democratic form of government where public policy is decided by whatever 5 out of 9 robed lawyers believe at a particular moment. And whatever those 5 lawyers believe, we'd better reconcile ourselves to it, because their opinions cannot be trumped by the regular political process. Now, maybe that wouldn't be bad if all nine justices were the perfect incarnation of Plato's philosopher-kings, but they aren't. And once they've decided, the only way to overturn it is by amending the Constitution. And we've only been able to do that 27 times in more than 2 centuries. And 10 of those were passed immediately after ratification.  

Style evolves

Well, today has been a big day of change for the blog. Not only did I convert the DIV tags to tables, but totally changed the display, so it more closely matches the rest of the site. Along with some stylistic changes.

And the comments are fixed, too.

A bad week for Democrats

(Review) It's been a bad week for Democrats, as John Podhoretz points out.

Worst of all, for the Democrats, has been the economic news, with some economists predicting 7% GDP growth by the end of the year. And, with initial claims for unemployment coming in under 400k yet again, the signs are that job creation is moving back on track.

They're running out of sticks with which to beat the Bush Administration. 

Increasingly polarized

(Review) Daniel Henninger writes in the Wall Street Journal that much of America's increasingly polarized political culture is the fault of a judiciary run amok.

In some ways, America may now be closer to the England of the Stuarts, rife with religious and political animosity, than to the intentions at Philadelphia in 1789. If not, it is sliding toward reflexive strife.

I agree with the argument that this war of the cultures dates to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. The history of the cultural tensions that came afterward is familiar to everyone, even people merely upset at "what's gone wrong with the country."

Beneath this history lies another argument, with which I agree, that the country's judges the past 30 years have made much law touching people's deepest beliefs about the ordering of public and private life, which previously was the first responsibility of elected legislatures. So internalized has the courts' legislative primacy become that seminars are now held to argue whether liberal or conservative judges are the more activist.

When the founders set up the American system of government, their purpose was not to have the courts become a superlegislature with the power to veto the will of the people.

The founders created a strict set of political freedoms that the government was forbidden to touch. In cases where the government encroached upon these freedoms, the courts could declare the government's actions to be unconstitutional. The Constitution secures political rights, and those most closely related to them.

The basic idea behind this principle was that if the political system was open and free, the public could order their lives through the legislature in whatever ways seemed right to them. This leaves huge swathes of public policy to the discretion of the people, and it should leave judges completely out of the picture.

Clearly, with the Federal judges keen to rule on any number of propositions that appear nowhere in the constitution, such as abortion or homosexual marriage.

But those are issues that legislatures are supposed to handle, not judges. The whole "culture war" environment we are experiencing in America is a direct result of the judiciary meddling in legislative matters. As Henninger points out:

I think many people who don't get paid for waging politics are becoming quite frustrated with dysfunctional legislatures that are now polarized--as in Congress or in California--essentially along the cultural faultlines created by 30 years of allowing judges to pre-empt the broader community's ability to discover, or re-examine, its social beliefs. These legislators have become little more than clerks to judges and the complainants in their courts--the law as not much more than a brief. When this happens, citizens lose their status as voters or electors and become mere courtroom spectators. How can this be good?

Continuing to use the courts in this way--the ACLU boasting it will get a court to overthrow a law passed by Congress or any legislature--and then demanding that large portions of American society simply shut up and swallow it is a recipe for a kind of war much more serious than the mere chattering crossfire of talk shows.

The reason that Judicial nominations have become rife with character assassination and political infighting is that judges now matter in a far deeper way than they should. The judiciary has become a fount of "rights" and a means of implementing public policy that would never be approved by legislatures.

Nothing has done more damage to modern constitutional jurisprudence than the "right to privacy". This term appears nowhere in the Constitution, and the only way the Supreme Court could assert the existence of such a right was to talk about the "penumbras" and "emanations" that flow from the Bill of Rights.

Once you've got your penumbras and emanations goin' on, you can find a right to anything in the constitution. Or, you can find a right that prevents the people, through their legislatures, from setting public policy.

"You don't like abortion? Well, it's a right, so suck it up, Cotton Mather. Have a problem with homosexual marriage? Well, it's a right, so try to wrap your narrow little mind around it anyway. Oh, you think affirmative action is a form of constitutionally barred racial preference? Ooh, sorry, there, Simon Legree, wrong answer. You want to ban illegal immigrants from receiving welfare benefits? Nope, they got a right to 'em, Nazi-boy. And we're judges, so you can just eat it, 'cause what we say goes."

We are creating a system where the country is run by an unelected judicial oligarchy. And we're paying the price for it in increasing frustration with the political system, and more divisive politics.

The IE Display problem

(Review) A big thank you to Michael Williams for pointing me to a quick link that contains a solution for the DIV tag display problem that IE6 users experience. It has fixed up the display problem on the blog page (although I'm still having trouble getting it to work reliably with the comments, mainly because of the difficulty of getting DIV tags and form fields to cohabit peacefully)

But it's a fairly quick fix, and it works without having to go through the tedium of converting all your DIV tags to TD tags inside a table.

Web Templates

In case you were wondering why blogging was a little light today, I spent much of the day working on a selection of new web site templates. If, you'd like to take a peek at them, you can find them here, here, and here.

They're only images at this point, rather than actual pages, so they run about 179k apiece. So, for you dial-up people, a few seconds of patience will be required.