With the nation's trade deficit soaring, Congress wants more U.S. small businesses to get in the global economic game.

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed a bill to create a permanent small business division within the federal Export-Import Bank, a quasi-independent government agency that helps finance U.S. exports and overseas purchases. A separate office to assist socially and economically disadvantaged small businesses would also be created within the division.

House Small Business Committee Chairman Donald Manzullo, R-Ill., a cosponsor of the bill, said an amendment he drafted would give small business specialists within each bank division more power to approve loans, guarantees, and insurance up to $10 million. In addition, the bill improves the Export-Import Bank's ability to delegate loan authority to private banks for medium-term transactions.

Late last month, the high court, on a 5-3 vote (Chief Justice John Roberts did not participate), ruled that the president could not, of his sole authority, put detainees at Guantanamo Bay on trial before a military tribunal. The court found that the effort to do so violated both international law and federal statutes, a stinging rejection of the White House's attempt to expand executive authority.

This week, as a direct result of that ruling, the White House conceded what it has refused to concede for years: that the prisoners at Guantanamo are protected by the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

I could care less about the specifics of the court's ruling. It is the fact that somebody finally told Bush no. In so doing, the court reaffirms that which never should have been in question: even presidents have to play by the rules.

It's an elemental truth, but one that has been under assault and in doubt ever since Team Bush came to office. The most glaring example, of course, is its conduct of the War on Terror, where the president has claimed for himself the virtually unfettered right to surveil and detain in violation of established law and custom. The electorate, cowed to silence by fear, watches complacently. Anyone who does dare raise a question or, God forbid, an objection, is shouted down by the president's catch-all excuse for excess: Sept. 11.

It's not just the president's disdain for rules. It's, everything. It's his intrusion into the Terri Schiavo affair, trampling spousal rights and separation of powers. It's the administration's habit of quashing scientific reports that conflict with political needs, walking all over the public's right to know.

It's Bush's Education Department paying a supposed journalist, columnist Armstrong Williams, to say good things about the No Child Left Behind law, stomping basic tenets of journalistic ethics and federal law. It's his administration's habit of providing "news" videos to broadcast outlets, which air them without revealing that the "reporter" works for the White House, thereby violating those same ethics and laws.

This man, who evidently believes he can do what he wants when he wants because the rules were written for someone else. Has got to be stopped, and the first step is to take away the Republican Majority in both houses. Bring reality back to Washington.

It's time to say NO.

Democrats on Capitol Hill released a report claiming that at least $12 billion in federal contracts earmarked for small businesses actually ended up in the hands of major corporations, including Microsoft and large defense contractors.

In one of his last acts in office, former SBA administrator Hector Barreto claimed last month that the agency had exceeded its 23 percent goal for small business contract awards by 2.4 percentage points. But the Democrats' report says the real figure is 21.6 percent. That means the SBA missed its target for the sixth straight year.

Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., the House Small Business Committee's ranking Democrat, says she will ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate.

SIMPSON, IL July 21, 2006 -- USLINX.com, a global Internet company, launched a new search engine Friday, claiming it is a faster and easier way for users to find what they are searching for on the Internet.

Building on the back-end technological improvements in relevancy and comprehensiveness while leveraging the assets of major search networks, the new search engine provides a better search experience in a cleaner, easy-to-use interface and faster ways to find relevant information, USLINX said.

"USLINX's goal is to provide the highest quality search experience on the Internet," said Ron McBride, chief executive officer of USLINX. “The new search engine marks the next step in building an integrated search platform that leverages the most relevant, comprehensive content from across the Web”, he said.

"In the last years we have used others search engines, and have tried to understand what our users are looking for in a search experience and these latest improvements to Clik-N-Search’s Search are focused on providing the key features that our users want," McBride said.

”We believe USLINX's new search engine, which combines Google's, Yahoo's, DMOZ, and MSN’s Indexes, will provide customized services that will make Clik-N-Search, one of the world's greatest online search engines.” He said.

”According to Search Engine Watch, an industry newsletter, Google handles an average of 112 million searches a day and Yahoo handles about 42 million, shucks we are just babies along side these elephants”, McBride continued.

At present, USLINX uses on its portal a search engine it licensed and co-branded with DMOZ. To reduce its dependence on others, USLINX had this search engine created in Israel, by a specialist. USLINX is expected to incorporate its 21 divisions into its search engine by year's end.

USLINX's new search engine is immediately available at http://www.uslinx.com/websearch. USLINX is configured to provide the results in a way that brings you the #1 Yahoo Result when searching for a keyword or phrase as Clik-N-Search’s #1 result, #1 on Google as its number two result, #1 on DMOZ as its number three result, and #1 on MSN for its number four result, then repeats, with Yahoo number two as USLINX number 5 result, and so on and so forth.

In contrast to the cluttered search pages of MSN and Yahoo (although the new look of Yahoo is much simpler now), USLINX opted for the simple look ala Google. But you can’t get much plainer than USLINX has done. And it does give you the results, numbered for easy reverence.

A Search for “Yahoo Search Engine” returned the following:
Results 1 - 10 of about 148,700,000 for Yahoo Search Engine.
Someone said it takes 5 seconds to read a result from a search. At the rate USLINX’s Clik-N-Search returns, results it would take you, 23 years, 6 months, 3 days, 1 hour, 1 minute, 1.8 seconds to read all the results from this one search. That’s 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for over 23 ½ years to read all the results for a search “Yahoo Search Engine”.

About USLINX.com

www.USLINX.com is "Where you go when you need to Know" for Internet information related to e-business, online marketing and emerging technologies. USLINX.com gathers e-business information from around the world and all over the net, bringing sources, reports, and daily articles to its visitors, as well as offering unique shopping experiences.

Media Contact:
Marie McBride
Public Relations Manager
(618) 695-2763
Corporate Communications

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I thought I was pretty hip when it came to Html then along comes php, ok it looks easy enough just open and close tags, right.

Wrong, it is a bit more complicated than that, first I attempted to develop a crawler that would garner results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Microsoft, and DMOZ. Did that, but when I tried to get the script to work on my server it didn't happen.

Anyway still working at it, maybe some day soon it will just start working, think if I prayed to the programming god it would work.

Well now I have decided to revamp the entire site to get a uniform look from all the divisions. And that makes me sick to think about.

Not going to do it, nope, going to let the boys in India handle it. I am just now learning to outsource, a bit slow but by golly I get there. I hope.

If someone came along with $250,000 right now, tonight I would probably sell out and say to Heck with it. Well maybe not.

After 8 years you would think even and old head like me would learn something, huh?

Really I have, now I can turn on a computer. Inside joke, I attended a Jr. College Course on Computers a few years back, and the instructor said the first day, that "this week we are going to learn to turn on your computer and about sign in". Took me about 1 minute of burning before I got up and walked out. Shucks I been playing with computers since 1982 when I got hold of the old ZX81 by Timex, and the same year grabbed a ZX1000 by the combined Timex-Sinclair, and its been a learning experience ever since.

Ok enough rambling, have to get back to work. Yesterday was a 21 hour marathon,and today is shaping up to be at least 18-19 hours.

So til later.

Ron
USLINX.com