RWC Unfiltered 11-28-11

• Saturday Airstrike Leaves Pakistan-U. S. Relations in Tatters                                                     
  
• US Stock Market Nervous Thankless After Thanksgiving
• Stock Market Nervous As Israel Preparing to Destroy Iran Nuke Factory
• U. S. - Russian Carriers Head for Same “Pond”
• Iran, Hizbullah preparing for ‘final confrontation’ with U.S. and allies
• Obama Excluded God From Thanksgiving Message
• Stephen Hawking Loses Black Hole Bet
• ClimateGate Redux: More Damning Emails Released
• Russia Beats War Drums Louder Exploits Obama Weakness
• Company Says No Hiring Until Obama Gone
• Russian Newscaster Give Obama “The Finger”
• Blue Collars Leaving Obama
• Arizona Raising Money To Build Fence That Feds Won’t
• Numbers Say Life Likely Elsewhere
• Recovery Awaits Obama Ousting
• Libyan Weapons Still Flowing To Enemy Regimes
  
• Neither Washington nor Obama Are Firsts

A NATO airstrike into Pakistan killed two dozen Paki soldiers and has set off the  most vile protest against the West and the U. S. in particular.

Sources in Kabul and Karachi contend what happened Saturday wasNATO and Afghan forces on a nighttime operation Saturday came under fire from across the border in Pakistan before they called in an air strike on two Pakistani military border posts that left 25 soldiers dead and the U.S.’s relations with Pakistan in tatters, according to Afghan and Western officials’ version of events.

Pakistan’s army reacted angrily, calling the “unprovoked” raid on the border posts an “irresponsible act.” The military denied firing on NATO forces and questioned why the coalition undertook a sustained two-hour attack on well-known border positions, involving helicopters and fighter jets, which also injured 25 other soldiers.

So far no video of the attack - counter-attack has emerged and may never.

The Muslim Brotherhood turned a prominent Cairo mosque into the site of a hateful anti-Israel rally in Egypt Friday, with an estimate of thousands of participants chanting “Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, judgement day has come” and vowing “one day we shall kill all the Jews.”

Stocks closed in negative territory in thin, shortened trading Friday as investors were reluctant to go long ahead of the weekend and amid ongoing worries over the euro zone.

The Dow and S&P posted their worst Thanksgiving week since the Great Depression on a percentage basis.

If you feel dizzy maybe you should afterall you’re spinning around the earth at about 1,000 miles per hour and Earth is zipping around the Sun at nearly 65.000 miles per hour and the sun and all planets are racing around the milky way gallaxy at around 56,000 miles -per hour and the Milky way is hurtling along at almost 70,000 miles per hour.

There are continuing signs that Israel is preparing to deal a military strike against Iran, an action that Washington fears might be the first step in a new regional conflict that would embroil the United States.

Israel and the U.S. agree on intelligence assessments that Iran has the technical capability to produce material for a nuclear bomb in a relatively short period of time.

That assessment is what has raised the stake for the Israelis, who believe that the time is short for them to take military action if they hope to put off the Iranian nuclear program for two or three years. The Israelis, however, do not believe that military action would permanently cripple Teheran’s program.

The key concern for U.S. officials is that Iran is prepared to conduct attacks on U.S. forces in the region, most likely through conventional missile strikes, if a conflict breaks out after a military strike.

“This will not be like Syria,” said one official, referring to the surgical Israeli air strike at al Kabir, the nuclear facility that was being built with North Korean assistance.

There are no signs of an imminent Israeli attack on Iran and Obama has pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on any strikes. Netanyahu says Israel can’t risk persuasion and sanctions failing and must protect itself.

However, in the coming months, as U.S. troops exit Iraq, Israel will have more freedom of action to overfly Iraq enroute to an Iranian strike.

Another possibility, say U.S. officials, is that recent Israel reports of impending military action are part of a military posturing ploy to gain more international support, especially from Russia and China, for tougher economic sanctions on Iran. Both say they will not support stiffer sanctions.

Sanctions under consideration include financial controls on Iran’s Central Bank, which would prohibit international financial institutions that want to work with U.S. banks from doing business with Iran.

Other sanctions likely would include measures aimed at blocking Iran’s import of refined fuel. Russia nor China support neither.

Israeli radio reported Nov. 13 that Netanyahu believes Iran is closer to getting a nuclear weapon than previously thought. The comments were made prior to a cabinet session on the recent IAEA report outlining Iran’s nuclear arms work for the first time.

“Today, the cabinet will receive a briefing on the IAEA report. This is a comprehensive document that strengthens the claims by leading countries in the world and Israel that Iran is systematically developing nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said.

“Any responsible government in the world needs to draw the obvious conclusions from the IAEA report. The international community must stop Iran’s race to arm itself with nuclear weapons, a race that endangers the peace of the entire world.”

Meanwhile, Former IAEA chief inspector Olli Heinonen told a German newspaper that he believes Iran will be able to build a nuclear bomb by 2013. Israel’s former Mossad director, Meir Dagan, has estimated that it would 2015 before Iran has a bomb.

“There are still many unknown elements,” Heinonen told Financial Times Deutschland. Among other things, Iran not only needs highly enriched uranium but must also be able to build a functioning warhead and a carrier missile system. “This will not be the case before 2013, probably even later,” he said.

A mysterious explosion leveled a Hizbullah weapons warehouse in Lebanon last week. Mossad and the CIA top the list of suspects. Hizbullah is believed to have more that 50,000 missiles mostly of Russian and Chinese origins supplied by Iran. It is not known what was destroyed or how many were killed and injured. Isreal nor the U. S. are talking.

In a dangerous sign of whithering U. S. - Russian relations is the build-up of rival US and Russian air carrier armadas in Syrian waters - ranged against and in support of Bashar Assad, Military sources report. The USS George H.W. Bush arrived Wednesday, Nov. 23, with 70 fighter-bombers and 8 guided missile cruisers, destroyers. and attack subs lurking nearby Russia’s only air carrier the Admiral Kuznetsov is due in mid-week to boost the three Russian warships already anchored off the Syrian port of Tartus where Russia is building a major naval base,

Deep water sailors deride the Mediterranean Sea as a “pond.” Whether that’s correct or not when you put warshjips in close proximity risks of confrontation increase.

The whole thing is yet another sign of Obama;s failed Rodney King - like foreign policy,

BARACK OBAMA is our 44th president, but there actually have only been 43 presidents: Cleveland was elected for two nonconsecutive terms and is counted twice, as our 22nd and 24th president.

Sensing Obama weaknesses Iran is working with proxies in Bahrain, Gaza Strip, Iraq, Lebanon, Kuwait and other countries to undermine any U.S.-led effort to destroy its nuclear weapons infrastructure.

“From Iran’s standpoint, a head-on confrontation with the United States and Israel would serve its purposes in the region and build its image as an actor that stands firm against the Western powers and does not submit to pressure,” says a new report from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

“If there still was any chance of Teheran agreeing to concessions in its sporadic talks with the West about its nuclear program, the Middle Eastern turmoil has now made a compromise all but impossible,” said the report, “Iran Signals Its Readiness for a Final Confrontation.”

[On Nov. 19, Iran announced a four-day military exercise that would include air, naval and ground forces. The military said the exercise was meant to test command and control amid foreign threats to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.]

Authored by retired Israeli Lt. Col. Michael Segall, the report said Iran would continue to develop its military amid Western demands to halt uranium enrichment and to dismantle nuclear weapons. Segall asserted that Iran, following one of the harshest International Atomic Energy Agency reports, has sought to intimidate the Middle East and its Western allies.

“The current round of the conflict between Iran and the United States and Israel over Iran’s military nuclear program should be seen in a much wider context, one that centers on shaping a new landscape in the Middle East,” Segall wrote.

“Iran views itself as ‘the next big thing’ in the region and behaves accordingly - at the moment with no significant challenge or response from the United States and the West.”

Iran has been bolstering its proxies throughout the Middle East, including Hamas, Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad. The report said Teheran, aided by China and Russia, has concluded that threats made by Israeli and Obama  are empty.

“Iran continues to project military, political, and economic power in the region, and sees the Israeli and American focus on possibly attacking it as aimed at undermining its rising status in the changing Middle East and also as manifesting the West’s loss of its traditional mainstays of power in the region,” the report said.

“Iran no longer fears openly acknowledging that it has built capabilities for reacting to an attack - including the Palestinian organizations in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon - and depicts them as part of its defensive strategy.

VICE PRESIDENTS were originally the presidential candidates receiving the second-largest number of electoral votes. The Twelfth Amendment, passed in 1804, changed the system so that the electoral college voted separately for president and vice president. The presidential candidate, however, gradually gained power over the nominating convention to choose their own running mate.

In what I think almost all Americans would call “odd,” Obama delivered his weekly radio address on Thanksgiving with a speech entitled: “On Thanksgiving, Grateful for the Men and Women Who Defend Our Country.”

In the text of his speech, he referred to Thanksgiving as a “celebration of community”. and excluded any mention of God.

Holy cow! Is that one screwed up view or what?

Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.

Over three decades ago, Stephen Hawking placed - and eventually lost - a bet against the existence of a black hole in Cygnus X-1. Today, astronomers are confident the Cygnus X-1 system contains a black hole, and with these latest studies they have remarkably precise values of its mass, spin, and distance from Earth. With these key pieces of information, the history of the black hole has been reconstructed.

“This new information gives us strong clues about how the black hole was born, what it weighed and how fast it was spinning,” said author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass. “This is exciting because not much is known about the birth of black holes.”

Reid led one of three papers - all appearing in the November 10th issue of The Astrophysical Journal - describing these new results on Cygnus X-1. The other papers were led by Jerome Orosz from San Diego State University and Lijun Gou, also from CfA.

Cygnus X-1 is a so-called stellar-mass black hole, a class of black holes that comes from the collapse of a massive star. The black hole is in close orbit with a massive, blue companion star.

Using X-ray data from Chandra, the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, and the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics, a team of scientists was able to determine the spin of Cygnus X-1 with unprecedented accuracy, showing that the black hole is spinning at very close to its maximum rate. Its event horizon - the point of no return for material falling towards a black hole - is spinning around more than 800 times a second.

An independent study that compared the evolutionary history of the companion star with theoretical models indicates that the black hole was born some 6 million years ago. In this relatively short time (in astronomical terms), the black hole could not have pulled in enough gas to ramp up its spin very much. The implication is that Cygnus X-1 was likely born spinning very quickly.

Using optical observations of the companion star and its motion around its unseen companion, the team made the most precise determination ever for the mass of Cygnus X-1, of 14.8 times the mass of the Sun. It was likely to have been almost this massive at birth, because of lack of time for it to grow appreciably.

“We now know that Cygnus X-1 is one of the most massive stellar black holes in the Galaxy,” said Orosz. “And, it’s spinning as fast as any black hole we’ve ever seen.”

Knowledge of the mass, spin and charge gives a complete description of a black hole, according to the so-called “No Hair” theorem. This theory postulates that all other information aside from these parameters is lost for eternity behind the event horizon. The charge for an astronomical black hole is expected to be almost zero, so only the mass and spin are needed.

“It is amazing to me that we have a complete description of this asteroid-sized object that is thousands of light years away,” said Gou. “This means astronomers have a more complete understanding of this black hole than any other in our Galaxy.”

The team also announced that they have made the most accurate distance estimate yet of Cygnus X-1 using the National Radio Observatory’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The new distance is about 6,070 light years from Earth. This accurate distance was a crucial ingredient for making the precise mass and spin determinations.

The radio observations also measured the motion of Cygnus X-1 through space, and this was combined with its measured velocity to give the three-dimensional velocity and position of the black hole.

This work showed that Cygnus X-1 is moving very slowly with respect to the Milky Way, implying it did not receive a large “kick” at birth. This supports an earlier conjecture that Cygnus X-1 was not born in a supernova, but instead may have resulted from the dark collapse of a progenitor star without an explosion. The progenitor of Cygnus X-1 was likely an extremely massive star, which initially had a mass greater than about 100 times the sun before losing it in a vigorous stellar wind.

In 1974, soon after Cygnus X-1 became a good candidate for a black hole, Stephen Hawking placed a bet with fellow astrophysicist Kip Thorne, a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, that Cygnus X-1 did not contain a black hole. This was treated as an insurance policy by Hawking, who had done a lot of work on black holes and general relativity.

By 1990, however, much more work on Cygnus X-1 had strengthened the evidence for it being a black hole. With the help of family, nurses, and friends, Hawking broke into Thorne’s office, found the framed bet, and conceded.

“For forty years, Cygnus X-1 has been the iconic example of a black hole. However, despite Hawking’s concession, I have never been completely convinced that it really does contain a black hole - until now,” said Thorne. “The data and modeling described in these three papers at last provide a completely definitive description of this binary system.”

The debate and good-natured bet is entirely esoteric. Cygnus ‘ is several thousand light-years away, near the “heart” of Cygnus, the swan, two stars are locked in a gravitational embrace. One star is a blue supergiant, known as HDE 226868. It is about 30 times as massive as the Sun and 400,000 times brighter. The other star is 5 to 10 times the mass of the Sun, but it’s extremely small. The object must be the collapsed core of a star. Its mass is too great to be a white dwarf or a neutron star, though, so it must be a black hole — the corpse of a star that once resembled the supergiant.

The system is called Cygnus X-1, indicating it was the first source of X-rays discovered in the constellation Cygnus. Discovered by the Uhuru X-ray satellite in the early 1970s, it was also one of the first suspected black holes.

Black Holes are so dense, and produce such intense gravity, that even light can not escape. Theoretical physicists predict that there are situations under which light can escape (which is called Hawking radiation).

In the weeks leading up to a climate conference, Big Climate likes to flood the media with scare stories about all the bad things that will happen if the world’s leaders fail to fund more climate science on emissions.

Big Climate has been playing the same game for years, and every year is the last chance to save the planet from a harmless trace gas essential to life on Earth. Durban is this year’s last chance, in 2009 it was Copenhagen, 2008 was Poland, in 2007 Bali, and in 2006 Nairobi.

Next week, the COP17 conference begins in Durban. There were already low to no expectations of a deal. The fragile economies of most of the western world means fake problems like the weather will be put on the back burner, probably forever. But the release of 5,000 more emails in Climategate 2 has derailed even this weak meeting of climate minds.

So far, some embarrassing finds have been mined from the emails, but (as of time of writing) no blockbuster quote like the iconic ‘hide the decline’ has popped up. But Big Climate is mad as hell that the emails were released, and their fury is proof they didn’t learn a thing after the original Climategate debacle.

Phil Jones, the head of the motley CRU, reacted as if it was 2009 all over again:

The British climatologist ensnared in a new email leak has taken his case to the press, arguing that he and his colleagues’ comments have again been taken out of context.

Jones said Wednesday the emails were again being “cherry-picked” and explained away many of the messages.

Michael ‘Stick’ Mann figures it’s all a plot by Big Oil:

He said, the people behind the release were “agents doing the dirty bidding of the fossil fuel industry know they can’t contest the fundamental science of human-caused climate change. So they have instead turned to smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails in their effort to try to confuse the public about the science and thereby forestall any action to combat this critical threat. Its right out of the tried-and-true playbook of climate change denial.”

Never mind that behavior like trumpeting research to an eager press but refusing to share data and emails is right out of the scientific fraud playbook.

In the UK, Big Science circles the wagons rather than even consider that there may be something rotten at the core of politicized climate science:

Dr Simon Lewis, Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds, said it was all about politics.

“This latest email leak, again on the eve of important international climate talks, is about politics. Yet the shadowy, undemocratic group trying to influence these international talks will fail. I sat through two weeks of talks in Copenhagen after the first email release and heard them mentioned only once. This new leak will have a similarly limited impact. Governments know that climate science reports signed off by over 190 countries, each with their own scientists, cannot be unduly influenced by a single scientist or a small group. These emails are irrelevant.”

Dr. Lewis may recall that Copenhagen was supposed to be the last chance for the world to reach an agreement on climate policy. COP15 failed dismally, in no small part because of the revelations of Climategate. That he only heard Climategate mentioned once at Copenhagen reveals more about the ivory tower inhabited by climate scientists than he realizes, it’s not something to brag about.

The uncomfortable truth for Lewis, Mann, Jones et al is that climate scientists behaved badly, were caught, and then exposed. If they’d been less petty and arrogant and complied with legal FOIA requests, or made data freely available, Climategate 1 & 2 would never have happened. But that would have required them to behave like scientists, not activists, and that seems to be asking far too much of the people running climate science.

There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar

After deploying three warships in Syrian waters, Moscow continues to beat war drums against the United States and Israel, followed closely by Tehran. Wednesday, Nov. 23, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced he had ordered “the armed forces to develop measures to ensure we can destroy the command and control systems” of the planned US missile-defense system in Europe. Those systems also control Israel’s missile defenses against Iranian, Syria and Hizballah missiles and the X-Band radar station in the Israeli Negev.

The Russian also threatened to cancel the new START agreement clearly having decided Obama is simply to weak and indecisive to stop the former Soviet’s new aggressive strategy.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

A west Georgia business owner is stirring up controversy with signs he posted on his company’s trucks, for all to see as the trucks roll up and down roads, highways and interstates:

“New Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone.”

“Can’t afford it,” explained the employer, Bill Looman, Tuesday evening. “I’ve got people that I want to hire now, but I just can’t afford it. And I don’t foresee that I’ll be able to afford it unless some things change in D.C.”

Looman’s company is U.S. Cranes, LLC. He said he put up the signs, and first posted pictures of the signs on his personal Facebook page, six months ago, and he said he received mostly positive reaction from people, “about 20-to-one positive.”

But for some reason, one of the photos went viral on the Internet on Monday.

The inauguration of Andrew Johnson as Abraham Lincoln’s vice-president in 1865 was marred  by the fact that Johnson was incredibly drunk. He’d been downing whiskey in an effort to medicate himself for typhoid fever (that was his excuse, anyway) and was so far gone by the time he was sworn in that he slurred his oaths, and had to abandon his attempts to swear in new senators.

Online footage of the incident, which occurred earlier this month during an afternoon news bulletin on the privately held REN TV channel, is being avidly viewed in both Russia and the United States.

In the footage, Tatyana Limanova, an award-winning senior newsreader at the channel, can be seen briskly reading out an item about how Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has just assumed the rotating chairmanship of the Asia Pacific Cooperation organisation.

She is then heard to say that the post “has (previously) been held by Barack Obama” before mechanically and unambiguously raising her left arm and showing the camera her raised middle finger in an offensive gesture that is sometimes known as “flipping the bird.”

The Secret Service has codenames for the president, vice-president and their family members. Ronald Reagan was ‘Rawhide’, George H. W. Bush was ‘Timberwolf’, Bill Clinton was ‘Eagle’, George W. Bush was ‘Trailblazer’ and Barack Obama is ‘Renegade’.

Obama’s support among blue-collar Democrats has slipped, with half saying they’d like to see someone else head the ticket in 2012. However, the president’s overall approval rating remains steady, hovering in the mid-40 percent since June, a new CNN/ORC International poll shows.

Even though it is unlikely that any serious Democratic challenger to Obama will emerge, 26 percent of Democrats said they would prefer another nominee, an eight-point jump since October. Regardless, 72 percent of Democrats still support Obama, according to the results of the Nov. 18-20 poll of 1,019 adults.

“The biggest change comes among white Democrats with no college education, a group typically considered the core of the party’s blue-collar constituency,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “Half of all white Democrats with no college education say they don’t want President Obama heading their party’s ticket next year.”

Obama’s appeal to blue-collar whites has been limited. During the Democratic primaries, they threw their support to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton. In the general election, they backed Sen. John McCain by an 18-point margin, CNN reported.

Neutron stars are so dense, that a soup can full of neutron star material would have more mass than the Moon.

Newt Ginrrich argued for incentives foreudicated immigrants during last week’s GOP debates.

Looks like he is right. Native-born and foreign-born people in the United States are just as likely to have a college degree, but more foreign-born are engineers, officials say.

The analysis, based on 2010 American Community Survey estimates, found 48.5 million, or 28 percent, of the 170.7 million native-born population age 25 and older, and 9.1 million, or 27 percent, of the 33.6 million foreign-born population age 25 and older, had a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Thirty-three percent of native-born residents had a degree in a science or engineering field, while 46 percent of those who are foreign-born had a degree in science or engineering. The difference was also pronounced in other degree fields, such as computers, mathematics and statistics, the report said.

The country of birth with the largest number of science and engineering degree holders was India with 747,000, or 18 percent of the foreign-born population with science and engineering degrees, followed by China with 516,000, or 12 percent. Other country-of-birth groups with more than 100,000 science and engineering degrees were the Philippines, South Korea, Mexico, Vietnam, Canada and Iran, the report said.

The native-born population includes anyone who was a U.S. citizen at birth — born in the United States, Puerto Rico, a U.S. island area (U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa or the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands) or abroad of a U.S. citizen parent or parents, the census said.

The foreign-born population includes anyone who was not a U.S. citizen at birth, including those who have become U.S. citizens through naturalization.

In my generation Sputnik sparked tens of thousands of youngsters who jammed science classrooms. Native-born and foreign-born people in the United States are just as likely to have a college degree, but more foreign-born are engineers, officials say.

The analysis, based on 2010 American Community Survey estimates, found 48.5 million, or 28 percent, of the 170.7 million native-born population age 25 and older, and 9.1 million, or 27 percent, of the 33.6 million foreign-born population age 25 and older, had a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Thirty-three percent of native-born residents had a degree in a science or engineering field, while 46 percent of those who are foreign-born had a degree in science or engineering. The difference was also pronounced in other degree fields, such as computers, mathematics and statistics, the report said.

The country of birth with the largest number of science and engineering degree holders was India with 747,000, or 18 percent of the foreign-born population with science and engineering degrees, followed by China with 516,000, or 12 percent. Other country-of-birth groups with more than 100,000 science and engineering degrees were the Philippines, South Korea, Mexico, Vietnam, Canada and Iran, the report said.

The native-born population includes anyone who was a U.S. citizen at birth — born in the United States, Puerto Rico, a U.S. island area (U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa or the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands) or abroad of a U.S. citizen parent or parents, the census said.

The foreign-born population includes anyone who was not a U.S. citizen at birth, including those who have become U.S. citizens through naturalization.

The less time I have to work with, the more things I get done.

Arizona is taking on immigration once again, with lawmakers collecting donations from the public to put a fence along every inch of the state’s border with Mexico. It is an unprecedented effort by a state that is the busiest U.S. gateway for both illegal immigrants and drugs.

The idea came from state Senator Steve Smith, a Republican who says people from across the nation have donated about $255,000 to the project since the state in July launched a website that urges visitors to “show the world the resolve and the can-do spirit of the American people.”

Smith acknowledges he has a long way to go. The $255,000 will barely cover a half mile of fencing. Smith estimates that the total supplies alone will cost $34 million, or about $426,000 a mile.

The fence is Arizona’s latest attempt to force a debate on whether the U.S. government is doing enough to stop illegal immigration. A judge suspended key provisions of the state’s contentious immigration bill, and Gov. Jan Brewer is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court to get them reinstated. Brewer also signed the fencing bill.

Thomas Jefferson invented the coat hanger

Our Milky Way Galaxy contains 200-600 billion stars. The galaxy is estimated to contain 50 billion planets, 500 million of which could be located in the habitable zone of their parent star.

Depending on your calculations there are several billion galaxies time 500 million planets in the so-called goldilocks zone were life, as we know it can exists. Apply your freshman statistics and it is virtually impossible that life does not exist elsewhere.

Turms out Bill Clinton was not the first draft dodger to serve as President. Grover Cleveland was a draft dodger. He hired someone to enter the service in his place. He was ridiculed by his political opponent, James Blaine, but it was soon discovered that Blaine had done the same thing himself!

The U.S. economy will embark on the road to recovery once President Barack Obama is voted out of the White House, says billionaire investor and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone.

“If we change the faces in the White House, we’re on the road to recovery,” Langone tells CNBC.

“I believe it’s that simple: we need leadership, we need cheerleading, we need encouragement,” he told CNBC.

“We need businessmen and fat cats to feel like they’re doing something good, not that they’re villains and not that they’re criminals. America’s best days are ahead.”

The U.S. needs leadership committed to cutting back on spending,

THE MOST COMMON religious affiliation among U. S. presidents has been Episcopalian, followed by Presbyterian.

NATO as well as the interim government in Tripoli have failed to stop the flow of weapons from Libya. They said that weapons from the arsenal of the late ruler Col. Moammar Gadhafi were streaming to such countries as Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger and Tunisia.

“There is close cooperation between regional arms smugglers operated by Al Qaida to remove as many weapons as possible from Libya,” a North African official said.

Niger has reported convoys of Libyan weapons entering the country. On Nov. 9, the Niger Defense Ministry said the army intercepted a weapons convoy that left Libya for Mali. A Niger soldier was killed and four others were injured in a clash three days earlier.

The Libyan convoy, comprised of at least six pickup trucks, included a range of weapons and munitions. The trucks were said to be carrying 12.7-mm and 14.5-mm machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and ammunition.

Officials said in many cases weapons have been smuggled by former aides of Gadhafi, including military commanders, through the Sahara Desert. The convoys use satellite phones to evade military patrols along the borders with Libya’s neighbors.

Tunisia has also reported clashes with arms smugglers from Libya. The smugglers, many of them believed to be former Gadhafi mercenaries from Mali, were said to have been linked with Al Qaida Organization in the Islamic Maghreb.

AQIM has claimed in the past to procure weapons from Libya. A senior commander, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, told a newspaper in Mauritania that AQIM was taking advantage of the chaos in Libya to smuggle out weapons from the former Gadhafi regime.

“It is totally natural that under such conditions we benefited from Libyan weapons,” Belmokhtar, also known as Khaled Abu Al Abass, told Nouakchott Infos.

THE TERM “First Lady” was used first in 1849 when President Zachary Taylor called Dolley Madison “First Lady” at her state funeral.  It gained popularity in 1877 when used in reference to Lucy Ware Webb Hayes. Most First Ladies, including Jackie Kennedy, are said to have hated the label.

Technically George Washington was not the first President nor is Obama the first black to hold that office The first President, John Hanson, was Maryland’s representative at the Continental Congress. On November 5, 1781, Hanson, who is considered a black man because of his Moorish background, was elected by the Constitutional Congress to the office of “President of the United States in Congress Assembled.” He served for one year and was followed by 6 other Presidents before Washington was elected.