Dickie's Quickies

Google Blog Search is out! It's got a clean interface and fast results. They've only been indexing since the end of July, so results reflect the last month and a half of blog material. Pretty nice.

The BBC is reporting today that retail sales for August were down - way down. They were heading that way before Katrina hit. Gasoline prices are the primary suspect. Anyone who has contact with someone involved in the retail world could have relayed this tale. The economy is not as strong as our leaders would like us to believe.

However, House Majority Whip Tom Delay would like you to believe that U.S. leaders in Congress have done a great job! Declaring in the Washington Times that Republicans have done so well at cutting spending that they have achieved an "ongoing victory" (nonsensical term) and that there is no more fat to trim from the budget! Fiscal conservatives should be feeling their brains explode when reading Delay's comments. I'll let the article speak for itself:

"This is hardly a well-oiled machine," said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican. "There's a lot of fat to trim. ... I wonder if we've been serving in the same Congress."
American Conservative Union Chairman David A. Keene said federal spending already was "spiraling out of control" before Katrina, and conservatives are "increasingly losing faith in the president and the Republican leadership in Congress."
"Excluding military and homeland security, American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression," he said.

That's right, dear readers. The country traded big government Democrats for big budget Republicans and found that we're in worse financial shape for it.

Since we're spending money left and right anyhow and since the war in Iraq is going so well (not to mention Afghanistan), some US leaders, according to the Washington Post, are putting on a little slide show aimed at convincing allies that we should have an excursion into Iran. If you'll recall, dear reader, the Iraq excursion's failure to find so-called "weapons of mass destruction" has been blamed on faulty intelligence at the CIA (which is code for cooked intelligence). This time, rather than continue to tick the CIA off, administration officials have dispensed with the intelligence community altogether. Choice quote:

The presentation has not been vetted through standard U.S. intelligence channels because it does not include secret material. One U.S. official involved in the briefing said the intelligence community had nothing to do with the presentation and "probably would have disavowed some of it because it draws conclusions that aren't strictly supported by the facts."