Believe it or not, Paris Hilton has responded to the John McCain ad.

How low can this campaign go?

While I was watching the Gulf, CBS reports the real violent weather was in the Midwest: Tornadoes Rip Through Chicago

(CBS/AP) Severe thunderstorms plowed across the Midwest during the night, ripping roofs from buildings, chasing people to shelter and blacking out thousands of homes and businesses. One death was blamed on the storms.

At least three tornadoes struck the Chicago area, reports CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds. One of those hit Griffith, Ind. with a force that left homeowner Jeff Jelensick in disbelief.

“This was my son’s room, no roof there either,” Jelensick said. “It hit everywhere on this house. It’s amazing.”

Gusts over 90 miles an hour – stronger than winds generated by tropical storm Edouard – tore into a nearby shopping center, lifting off roofs and turning businesses inside out, Reynolds reports. One fatality was reported in northwest Indiana from a falling tree.

Let’s see – This is all normal; there aren’t any changes; you’re exaggerating. Oh, yes: it’s all right because Al Gore still needs to be on diet.

The BBC reports on arrests in a credit card theft ring

The US authorities have charged 11 people in connection with the theft of credit-card details in the country’s largest-ever identity theft case.

They are accused of stealing more than 40m credit and debit card numbers before selling the information.
…

Three of those charged are US citizens. The others come from Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus and China.

The 11 suspects are alleged to have illegally obtained card numbers, account information and password details by driving around neighbourhoods and hacking into wireless equipment.
…

The accused targeted at least nine retail chains, prosecutors allege.

Those affected were TJX Corporation – which operates the TJ Maxx chain of shops – BJ’s Wholesale Club, Barnes and Noble, Sports Authority, Boston Market, Office Max, Dave and Busters, DSW shoe stores and Forever 21.

This is what happens when you tell communists about capitalism. My possible identity theft exposure was due to one of the many government employees who can’t seem to keep track of their laptops.

I don’t use IE for a number of reasons, beyond the simple fact that it is a piece of MS garbage, but other people do, so I started looking behind the curtain with the Sitemeter problem.

The thing is, I use Sitemeter, and my site was visible using IE7, so it wasn’t just a Sitemeter problem, it was a design problem. The reason my site was visible is because the Sitemeter code was stuck at the bottom of the page, after all of the formatting, and outside any subsections [div] on the page. That’s where they tell you to put it:

Position the cursor in your page where you’d like the counter to go. A good place is at the bottom of the page right before the </BODY>tag.

According to their explanation on their blog for the IE problem:

The error occured when the SiteMeter tag was not a direct child of the body tag (e.g. if the tag was within a table or div).

During my testing I noticed that IE screws up my page, ignoring my Cascading Style Sheet [CSS] on the sidebars, and generally makes a mess of things.  Guess what, I have two little JavaScript routines to count down the number of days until the Shrubbery leaves office, and the number of days Osama has been free.  When I removed those from the sidebar, IE started following the CSS directives.

My conclusion is that IE doesn’t handle JavaScript well when it is in a table or div.  I didn’t change anything, IE changed something.

As of 4PM CDT, Edouard has been downgraded to a tropical depression, with winds of 35 mph, located 35 miles North-Northeast of Houston, Texas.

Position: 30.0 N 94.8 W. [1 PM CDT]
Movement: West-Northwest [300°] near 10 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 50 mph.
Wind Gusts: 70 mph.
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 70 miles.
Minimum central pressure: 999 mb.

It is currently 35 miles East of Houston, Texas.

Edouard made landfall at 1200 UTC [8 AM CDT] in the McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge on the Upper Texas coast between High Island and Sabine Pass with maximum winds of about 55 kt [65 mph].