Barack Obama is now the president of the United States of America.

I thought this was an interesting article on the plane that crashed in the Hudson River.  I never thought that birds could take a plane down.

Safety investigators are going back over radar data to see if there were any readings that might have been birds around the time US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Peter Knudson said Sunday that preliminary indications from investigators’ playback of the departure controller’s radar screen “did not show any targets” that might be birds.

“There are other ways to get that information, however,” Knudson said. “We are going to go and get all the electronic data necessary to get a complete picture of what was on his screen. It’s possible there was more being displayed than we initially understood. We just don’t know definitively at this point _ we don’t know exactly what was shown on that radar screen.”

Barrett Byrnes, who spent 35 years as an air traffic controller and worked at John F. Kennedy International Airport before retiring a few months ago, said controllers at LaGuardia and New York Terminal Radar Approach Control in Westbury, N.Y. told him that there was a radar “return” at some point during takeoff of Flight 1549. He said the “return” was not passed along to the pilots of Flight 1549 because it was unidentified, as are many radar returns or blips.

“I was told there was raw data that came back with associated stuff, but they couldn’t differentiate whether it was birds or not,” said Byrnes, who added that he last spoke to some of the controllers on Saturday.

He said the radar returns, unless they are planes with transponders, are difficult to identify and sometimes are nothing at all. He said controllers wouldn’t necessarily pass along information about a radar return unless there was something specific that they could identify.

“If you have pilot reports that say a flock of birds is north of a bridge, you pass that along to everybody, but if you don’t have those pilot reports and are just getting unreliable information as far as radar returns, then you could be using information that nothing exists there,” Byrnes said.

Moments after takeoff from LaGuardia on Thursday, US Airways Capt. Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger reported a double bird strike _ that the Airbus 320 had ingested birds in both engines _ and had lost all power. Unable to return to LaGuardia or make a landing at nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, Sullenberger glided the airliner to a landing in the Hudson River.

Aviation safety experts said the radar used by air traffic controllers is designed to pinpoint and track airplanes made of metal and equipped with transponders that report altitude and identification of the aircraft. They said the flesh and feathers of small birds rarely registers on radar, while a large bird or a group of birds flying closely together may show up as a small blip that to the controller looks the same as any number of possible “targets.”

“There have been many attempts to get a good radar to read birds, but we have not been successful at getting one that can read birds reliably,” said former NTSB board member John Goglia. “It’s just like trying to read a human being. The right range of frequencies is needed _ you don’t always have it.”

Even if a controller sees a blip that might be a bird and passes that information along to a flight crew, there’s not much a pilot who has just taken off can do about it, Goglia said. With the aircraft’s nose is tilted up for a climb, horizontal visibility is limited and the pilot would probably be unable to see if he was headed toward a large bird or group of birds, he said.

“Even if he looks out the window he may look in the wrong direction, and if even if he looks in right direction he might not see (the birds),” Goglia said. “There are a million variables here and none of them good.”

Byrnes noted that even if a controller had a rough idea of what an object on the radar display was, if it doesn’t have a transponder you wouldn’t know its altitude or how fast it was traveling.

“Basically, radar is unreliable as far as birds to begin with,” Byrnes said.

It is only a day away.  Tomorrow night, there will be a new president of the United States of America.  President-Elect, Barack Obama is, as many people call him, a rock star.  Tens of thousands of people are coming to his inauguration.  Infact on Sunday, thousands of people went to the Lincoln Memorial concert to celebrate Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Barack Obama has become one of the most popular president-elects.  He is perhaps, the most popular president-elect.  People love him.  The question is: will people still love him after he becomes president?  Will he be able to keep all of his campaign promises?  Barack Obama has already gotten involved on several issues, even though he isn’t the president yet.  He said he wants to “hit the ground running,” lets just hope he doesn’t hit the ground too hard.

I found this article quite interesting.

American troops in Iraq will be allowed to drink beer without fear of court-martial for this year’s Super Bowl _ an exception to a strict military ban on drinking alcohol in combat zones.

In what is sure to be a major morale boost, the top U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. Raymond Odierno issued a waiver Wednesday paving the way for troops to participate in the popular American football tradition.

Super Bowl XLIII will kick off on Feb. 1 in Tampa, Florida, but it will be 2 a.m. in Baghdad when the live broadcast starts in Iraq. Troops will gather in dining halls on military bases nationwide to watch the game.

A copy of the waiver said the consumption of alcoholic beverages will be limited to Feb. 1-2 and service members can only have two, 12-ounce beers each.

Odierno also appeared to acknowledge the sensitivity of drinking alcohol in an Islamic country, particularly considering the game falls during a holy period for Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslims.

The waiver orders commanders to “keep in mind all host nation laws and customs regarding alcohol consumption” and “to exercise discretion and good judgment in enforcing these guidelines and restrictions.”

U.S. troops have been banned from drinking, possessing or selling alcoholic beverages under a general order that also bans them from possessing pornography and other activities. They can face a reduction in pay or rank or even a court-martial if they violate the rule.

The Washington Post reported that several service members said the only other time the ban was lifted was in 2005, for troops operating under the Baghdad command.

Drinking alcohol isn’t illegal in Iraq but is banned under Islam, and extremists have frequently targeted liquor stores.

The exemption comes as the U.S. military faces stricter Iraqi oversight under a new security agreement that took effect on Jan. 1.

Violence has declined dramatically over the past year, and the Americans are involved in less combat, focusing more on their training and advisory roles.

The Minnesota Senate race has still not come to an end.  It has now been 2 months since the elections, but we still don’t know the winner. Unfortunately, it is even farther away from voters and into lawyers hands.

The dispute about this is because Republican Norm Coleman filed a lawsuit on Tuesday challenging Democrat Al Franken’s recount victory.

“We are filing this contest to make absolutely sure every valid vote was counted and no one’s was counted more than anyone else’s,” he said at a Capitol news conference filled with cheering supporters.

“Democracy is not a machine,” Coleman said. “Sometimes it’s messy and inconvenient, and reaching the best conclusion is never quick because speed is not the first objective, fairness is.”

Gov. Rod Blagjevich tried doing something totally out of the ordinary.  He tried to sell the vacant Senate seat, left by President Elect Barack Obama, to the highest bidder.  After this was discovered, he abruptly tapped Attorney General Roland Burris to fill his spot.

People are now trying to keep Burris from taking this spot because of the controversy surrounding Blagjevich.  Blagjevich says that he is not going to give up his fight for this seat.  However, he was initially rejected because his certificate of appointment was missing Jesse White’s signature.  It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

I though this was pretty interesting statistics.  56% of women voters voted for Obama/Biden, while only 43% voted for McCain/Palin.  At first glance, it might not look like Palin helped out McCain win women’s votes, but she did help him out a lot.  McCain actually beat Obama among white women voters with 53% of the votes over Obama’s 46%.  This helped him win 39% of the votes.

I think that McCain would have lost the women’s votes without Palin being his running mate.  If McCain hadn’t chosen Palin as his running mate, he would have lost the election by even more.  McCain had absolutely no chance of winning the election before chosing his running mate, but once he chose Palin, he actually had a chance.

So America is finally getting a new leader. Sen. Obama had promised change, and apparently a good part of America wanted the change he wanted. It now remains to be seen if they quite understood the change they voted for.

McCain has 145

Is the new president.