Cynthia McKinney was born March 17, 1955, in Atlanta, Georgia. She was the daughter of Billy McKinney a former Georgia State Representative and one of Atlanta’s first Black law enforcement officers. She earned a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California, and a Masters of Art in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

She is a drafted nominee of the Green Party, which is probably best-known to Americans as the party of former Presidential candidate Ralph Nader, and indeed, she was slated for Vice President as Nader’s running mate in 2000.

Her career in politics had a very unique start, when in 1986, her father in the Georgia House of Representatives submitted her name as a write-in candidate for the Georgia State House. Despite the fact that she wasn’t even living in the United States at the time, but in Jamaica, she got 40% of the popular vote anyway. This inspired her to run for the Georgia State House again in 1988, where she was present in the United States this time, and she was elected, making it the first time a father and daughter had served in the State House of Georgia at the same time.

Her next move was to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992, and she was elected to represent the 11th District of Georgia, which covers the territory between Atlanta and Georgia. She was re-elected in 1994. In 1995, the districts were redrawn under her protest, citing racial motives, and she became the Representative of the 4th district instead. She was to be re-elected to this position in 1996, 1998 and 2000.

She lost the 2002 election to DeKalb County Judge Denise Majette. She protested the results of the election, claiming that vengeful Republicans had rigged the election as retaliation for her anti-Bush administration views, her allegations of possible voter fraud in Florida in the 2000 Presidential Election, her controversial statements regarding Bush’s involvement in 9/11, and her opposition to aid to Israel. Some voters lodged a formal suit on her behalf, supporting her claims, but the case was dismissed from lack of evidence.

During her “exile” from office, she because an outspoken protester against the Bush administration, and the “white, rich Democratic boys club wanted her to stay on the back of the bus.”

Surprisingly after these bizarre events in 2002, she regained the position as the 4th district Representative again in 2004, but would lose it for the final time in 2006. During her second stay in office, she was one of the thirty-one members of Congress to make a formal protest over the alleged vote-rigging that kept incumbent George Bush in the Oval Office. In 2005, also in office, she held the most prominent briefing on Capitol Hill for the investigation into the events surrounding the 9/11 attacks. She also submitted the “MLK Records Act”, which would release all records surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King into the public record. These records are currently sealed as of 1978 and are not due to be declassified until 2028. A Senate version of the bill has been sponsored since by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hillary Clinton.

Cynthia McKinney has spear-headed much of the protest against government corruption, incompetency, cover-up, and civil liberties violations. Her laundry list of injustices she wants to correct goes on and on, and extend to calling for Presidential impeachment. While there is some support for her claims, and indeed overwhelming evidence in many places, her manner of speaking out with much passion and anger has alienated those who would otherwise agree with her in some circles. She is highly confrontational.

In any case, Cynthia McKinney has responded to the draft movement by announcing her candidacy for the Presidency, under the Green party. She speaks for many Americans who have lost faith and hope in their government, and she is neither the first nor the loudest to have pointed out how out-of-control the United States government appears and how it seems to be sinking into corruption.

She can count on some support from both African-American and women voters, as well as the beleaguered Green party, and she just may unite the various groups which have never ceased to protest since the day Bush took office. Seeing as how Bush polls as one of the least popular Presidents ever, that could turn into a lot of votes.

One of the founding principles of our system of government is ?one man, one vote.? The implication is that every citizen gets one vote in each election and that each vote will have the same potential impact on the outcome of the election as any other person?s vote. The implication is also that, in a perfect world, no citizen will ever be denied his or her right to that vote and that all will be able to and will willingly engage in the privilege of voting for their elected officials freely, openly and eagerly.

Now, right away we can think of exceptions to how this principle works out in reality that might cause us to doubt the validity of the ?one man, one vote? system. But we should not let that happen. Because despite these kinks in the system, the democracy of the election system is still fundamentally intact.

When this thing that has often been called ?The Great American Experiment? got underway, our system of voting, elections and the rule of the people was virtually untried at a national scale such as it was envisioned by the founding fathers. Much of the language that is so poetic in our cornerstone documents such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence read like philosophical treatises rather than documents grounded in a hard fought awareness of reality.

But in a way, that?s a good thing. Yes, the authors of these documents were philosophers of their time. And yes, what they were describing in their vision of how this great new country would function was theoretical and based on political theory drawn from historical sources rather than immediate historical precedent. But we only have to look at the outcome to admire that it?s a good thing that the founding fathers were wiser than they were practical.

We as a people were not too small to live up to the high expectations of our founding fathers. Over the decades, amendments to the constitution were put in place, legal precedents were made and social attitudes changed so that more and more of the nation?s citizenry gained the same rights that all should have, to be able to vote in the elections of their country. Some of those landmark moments in history included?

* The fifteenth amendment which granted voting rights to African Americans.
* The fourteenth amendment which guaranteed equal protection of all citizens under the law.
* The nineteenth amendment which guaranteed voting rights for women.
* The civil rights act of 1964 which put further enforcement around these previous laws and amendments to assure equal treatment of all so access to the government is truly a right of all citizens.

Since these improvements to the original founding documents were put in place, phenomenal changes have taken place that provide concrete proof that the vision of the founding fathers was indeed something that could be a reality and not just the philosophical musings of an educated few.

One of the most noticeable social changes that has come along with the legal recognition of the rights of minorities and women to participate in the system is that the composition of the government has changed dramatically and that for the better. The three branches of government today would be virtually unrecognizable in the narrow world view that prevailed when the nation was born. But today it is common in any state in the union to see black mayors, women in congressional seats or in the governor?s mansions handling those responsibilities with the same wisdom and good judgment that male leaders tried to exhibit in previous decades.

These changes have had a positive effect not only on the fairness of how the government works but in the sense of enfranchisement all peoples feel for the affairs of the nation. Indeed, because we now see women, Hispanics, African Americans and people of all color and persuasion serving honorably in leadership, our policies are more equitable and we are much closer to having a government that really does represent the population of the nation.

Now we stand at a time when we could easily see a woman or an African American in the highest office in the land, the Presidency of the United States. And if that happens, we will see one more institution conform to the vision of the founding fathers where every citizen can participate at any level just as every citizen gets one vote.

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Christopher Dodd was born May 27, 1944, in Willimantic, Connecticut. He graduated Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Maryland, and from Providence College with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1966. Following this, he served two years in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. He then served in the U.S. Army Reserve until 1975. During his service, he also earned a Juris Doctor degree at the University of Louisville. In 1973, he was admitted to the Connecticut bar, and became a practicing lawyer.

His career turned to politics when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1975, and he served as Connecticut’s second congressional district Representative until 1981, being re-elected twice in the process. Christopher Dodd was one of the group which the media referred to as “Watergate Babies”; Democratic Senators and Representatives who were voted in in the post-Watergate aftermath of Nixon’s impeachment. Amongst his accomplishments in the House, he served on the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Christopher Dodd was then elected from the House to the Senate in 1980 as the Senator from Connecticut, which made him the youngest ever Connecticut Senator. He was subsequently re-elected in 1986, 1992, 1998, and 2004, making him the first Connecticut Senator to serve five consecutive terms. He was also nominated to be the Senate Minority Leader in the 109th session of Congress, but declined the position and has also announced that he will not seek a sixth term as Senator.

The reason for turning down these opportunities became clear when he announced his run for the Presidency in January of 2007.

During his time as Senator, Christopher Dodd has chaired the Committee on Rules and Administration and the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. He also served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1994. He has also maintained an active link to the Peace Corps, and has lent his support to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, the No Child Left Behind bill, and the national Head Start program. He received the Edmund S. Muskie Distinguished Public Service Award for his foreign affairs work.

During his Senate career, he has also spoken out from time to time on various issues. These include the need to investigate civil-rights violations, the future of the Peace Corps, concern over torture, war crimes, and terrorism. Like many contenders for the Presidency in 2008, he opposes the Iraq war.

Christopher Dodd has formed a position as a highly moderate Democrat. While he has put in the expected performance of a political career, he has done little to attract sharp attention to himself and has not gone out of his way to attach himself to any particular issue nor has he done anything too controversial. He might be seen as a modern-day Calvin Coolidge, being somewhat taciturn. When interviewed about his consideration of running for President, he responded “It’s an itch. Could grow. Could disappear.” His pace is described as “carefully measured”.

In spite of this, he has been a frequent fixture on television shows. Since 2000, he has appeared on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”, “The Daily Show”, “Face the Nation”, “Hardball with Chris Matthews”, “Larry King Live”, “The Al Franken Show”, “Meet the Press”, “NBC Nightly News”, “The Colbert Report”, and several other news shows. he has received endorsements from the Kennedy family and the International Association of Fire Fighters.

Christopher Dodd has in fact admitted that he has allowed his bid for President to lapse behind the front-runners, but expressed some optimism that he will draw support anyway due his stance on issues.

The news stories in the last few months have included some pretty alarming stories about bad products that have come to us from China. And we in the west do look with disgust at failures of a government to assure that products produced by merchants are safe for consumers. This is because our government maintains a high level of control, testing, and monitoring of products to assure that the consumers of these products are protected and consumers can buy them with confidence.

Of course, this is not to say that problems with consumer protection have been eliminated. But when a product is found to be unsafe, we have a sophisticated system of recalls and alerts that go out over our media. In this way, that the damage and danger from inferior product is vastly minimized from what it might have been.

Consumer rights and protection are an important area of focus for manufacturers and merchants. These laws have a high level of importance for merchants and that drives up quality control and inspection even before the government or legal systems get involved. That is because the outcome of a recall or product failure, especially if that failure leads to injury or death of a consumer, can be devastating both to the individual merchant or company involved and to the market it serves that placing a high priority on quality is as much about market survival as it is about ethical behavior by companies.

What can we as consumers expect in the way of our rights and the protections we deserve as being part of this economy? It breaks down to what we consider to be the basics of the contract that is implied when we give someone money for a product or service?

* We expect to be able to use the goods safely with no possibility of immediate harm or long term illness as result of using the product.
* We expect the product to perform according to reasonable expectations based on what the product was promoted to do both on the package and in advertisements.
* We expect to pay what the product is advertised to cost. We do not accept changes in price after that price is advertised or surprise costs to be added on that we weren?t expecting.
* If a product fails to deliver the service it was advertised to deliver, or is found to be flawed in any way, we expect the merchant to refund or replace the product promptly and courteously.
* In the case of food, medicines or other consumables, we expect the product to be made of the highest levels of quality and to be reasonably fresh and usable.
* We expect the merchants involved in the sale of the product to stand behind the product with guarantees from the retail merchant all the way to the manufacturer.

We have not come up with this list of rights and protections on our own. These are the minimum standards prescribed by our laws to assure that the consuming public can trade with merchant in any kind of product and service and be treated with the same minimum levels of professionalism and quality assurance.

From the merchant?s point of view, you might think these high standards of consumer rights and protections would be a burden. But in fact, these laws protect both the consumer and the merchant. That is because these laws make it possible for the buying public to engage in commerce with any merchant that is authorized to do business with confidence.

Consumer protection laws make an active marketplace possible which benefits both consumers and merchants equally. So complying with consumer protection laws is not just essential from a legal point of view. It makes good sense for merchants to comply fully and perform above expectations in terms of their ability to deliver quality product to their customers. It just makes good business sense.

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Bill Richardson was born November 15, 1947, in Pasadena, California. He was raised in Mexico City (his mother was from there) until age 13, then attended a Boston-area preparatory school. In high school at Middlesex School in Concord, he joined the baseball team and was the pitcher. Embracing the dream of a professional baseball career, he went on to play at Tufts University. However, his arm developed trouble, ending his baseball career. At the University, he majored in French and political science, and went on to earn a master’s degree from Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

He entered politics immediately after college. Starting out as an assistant to Congressman Bradford Morse from Massachusetts, he moved on to the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During the Nixon administration, he worked for the Henry Kissinger State Department. Moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was elected to the House of Representatives as New Mexico’s 3rd district Representative in 1982.

He was to stay on in this position until 1997. During this time, he was very active in foreign interests, visiting Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, Peru, India, North Korea, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Sudan. He also chaired the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Native American Affairs in 1993, where he sponsored bills including the Indian Tribal Justice Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments, the American Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act, the American Indian Agricultural Resource Management Act, the Indian Dams Safety Act, the Tribal Self-Governance Act, the Indian Tribal Jurisdiction Bill, and the Jicarilla Apache Tribe Water Rights Settlement Act.

In 1997, then-President Bill Clinton appointed him to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He represented the United States in various UN proceedings regarding Palestinian and Israeli interests. In 1998, he was re-appointed as the U.S. Secretary of Energy, which he held for the remainder of Bill Clinton’s term. In 1998, he created the Director for Native American Affairs position and oversaw many sweeping policy changes with American Natives. He temporarily left politics by stepping down from this position in 2001.

Bill Richardson then worked a series of positions in the private sector, amongst them adjunct professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a lecturer at the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West. He was also on the board of directors for companies in the energy field, including Valero Energy Corporation and Diamond Offshore Drilling. He was also awarded a United States Institute of Peace Senior Fellowship.

After the brief time off from politics, he was elected governor of New Mexico in November 2002, surprisingly becoming that state’s first Hispanic Governor. In this office, he made sweeping improvements to the fiscal system. He also started the policy to award $400,000 in life insurance coverage for New Mexico National Guardsmen who serve on active duty, a policy which was to be later taken up by 35 other states. He also worked to build up the state’s infrastructure, in ways such as putting in a new rail line.

In a good pitch for progressives, he has championed the cause of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual rights , by adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the official civil rights category of New Mexico. He also signed a bill to legalize marijuana for medical reasons, and responded to a question of whether this move would hurt his chances for the Presidency with the famous quote, “It doesn’t matter, it was the right thing to do.” And he is pro-choice.

His accomplishments to stimulate the economy of New Mexico, including a plan to establish a space tourism industry, have been so successful that “Forbes” magazine rated Albuquerque, New Mexico the best city in the U.S. for business and careers, and the Cato Institute has given him credit as one of the most fiscally responsible Democratic governors in the nation.

Bill Richardson has announced his candidacy for President in 2008. Out of all the Democratic and even Libertarian and Green candidates in 2008, he is the only possible candidate whom can be called “100% Liberal”. In fact, he is shooting for the highest praise amongst Democrats, the “Progressive”.

It is hard to believe that Bill Richardson has not swept the Democratic vote already. He has proven himself in policies pertaining to economy, foreign relations, civil rights and liberties, racial relations, tribal relations, education, and fiscal policy. He is indeed an as-yet-undiscovered diamond to the Liberal Democrats, but time will tell if he did, indeed, damage his chances as President by “doing the right thing”, that is, by being too Liberal to attract Conservative voters.

Barack Obama was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His childhood is marked with extreme conflict and struggle. The son of a Caucasian mother from Wichita, Kansas and a Kenyan father from Nyanza Province, Kenya, his parents divorced when he was just two years old. His father was later to die in an automobile accident when he was 21 years old, and meanwhile his mother remarried and the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1967, where he attended public school. Then he returned to Hawaii Punahou School until his graduation in 1979. He has many times expressed his difficulty in dealing with his multi-cultural, multi-national, and broken-home upbringing. His mother was also later to die of cancer in 1995, compounding his feelings of social isolation.

He first attended Occidental College for two years before transferring to Columbia University. He majored in political science and specialized in international relations, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983. He eventually ended up in Chicago working as a community organizer, while also entering Harvard Law School by 1988. He graduated magna cum laude with a Juris Doctor degree in 1991.

He began practicing law of a sort from 1993 to 1996, by directing a voter registration drive, and joining a law firm where he took on cases involving community organizers, discrimination claims, and voting rights. In 1996 he began lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School about constitutional law, and he was also elected in that same year to the Illinois State Senate, representing the 13th district of south Chicago. He was to be re-elected to this position in 1998 and 2002.

Barack Obama’s work in the State Senate was diverse and active. He drafted or sponsored legislation on ethics and health care reform, a law enhancing tax credits for low-income workers, welfare reform, and increasing subsidies for child care. He also introduced legislation to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations, and a law to monitor racial profiling by police. He also got an endorsement from the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police, for being immensely helpful in working with police organizations on death penalty reform.

He eventually dropped out of the State Senate to seek election to the United States Senate in 2003. He is well-known for a keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, in which he shared some background of his family, spoke on the government’s role in citizen’s lives, questioned the ethics of President Bush’s war in Iraq, and ended with a plea for national unity. This speech earned him new fame, allowing his to make an early impression on many voters. From this speech, he launched his bid for U. S. Senate.

He won the position of the U. S. Senator from Illinois by a landslide vote that was the largest electoral victory in Illinois history. In the Senate, he sponsored 152 resolutions and bills brought before the 109th Congress in 2005 and 2006, and he co-sponsored another 427. A great deal of this had to do with immigration policy and reform, including the Secure Fence Act and the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act. Two more initiatives he introduced were one to regulating military weapons, and one to create a web access point run by the Office of Management and Budget, which lists all organizations receiving Federal funds. He also enacted the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act.

Barack Obama has announced his candidacy for United States President as of February of 2007. He bases much of his platform on duty to the American people as a public servant and the uniting of government co-operation across party lines. Being a younger candidate, he is the first Presidential candidate to focus on at least bringing some kind of regulation to the Internet, by making a stand for net neutrality and the right of all users to have democratic access to the Internet. He has demonstrated remarkable interest in technology issues, and has even met with companies like Google to discuss possible policy. He also has plans for early childhood education, math and science education.

Barack Obama is a revolutionary candidate in many ways. He is a rapid departure from the so-called “Good Old Boys” network of Caucasian oil billionaires and cronies. He is a centrist Democrat, taking a moderate-to-hard left Liberal stance while proposing that he can unite the government’s two parties to work together. This means that he intends to pull the right wing over to his side, rather than try to please everybody by walking the line in between. Count on Barack Obama to also connect well with younger voters and “Generation Y”.

?Transparency? is a term that gets used on television a lot as something desirable, particularly in government terms to require that that our elected officials are being open and honest.. What transparency means is that there is nothing hidden and the people ?employing? the elected official have complete knowledge of what is going on at all times.

Sometimes we think that even in the world of business, ?transparency? would be a good policy as well. Very often the consumer world gets suspicious that businesses are not doing business in an honest and forthright fashion. But it is not uncommon for a business to have a need to sustain a certain level of secrecy about their products, their marketing and their business plans. This is not always because the business is crooked. It is just a fact of life in the business world and one that has given us a legal framework for trade secrets and confidentiality agreements of various sorts.

What would be the circumstances that you would want to take advantage of the legal status of trade secrets to keep the internal operations of your business a secret? Well, the most common rational for utilizing legal trade secret protection is to retain the marketing advantage that you might have to stay one step ahead of your competition. The world of business can be a cut throat environment to be sure. If one competitor learns of the secrets of how the competition makes a better product, utilizes a superior distribution or marketing plan or has a organizational philosophy that gives them the edge, the competition is more than happy to exploit that knowledge to capture business away. So it?s in the best interest of any business to protect their advantages from becoming well known to make sure they can capitalize on their hard earned edge in a competitive market as they deserve to do.

Trade secrets generally fall into either the ?technical? or ?business? related categories. Technical trade secrets, as the name implies, are discoveries or new ways of doing things to create something new. This would include the technical plans or specifications for a protected product or new design, the methods you have designed for manufacturing a breakthrough technology, notes and insider design documentation on failures in testing that would tip off competition on how you innovated this new product.

Business trade secrets are just as valuable because they include exclusive management and organizational methods that make you more profitable, marketing plans that would give your competition a heads up on ?where you are going to hit them?, information about your customers and details about your employees and specialized talent that you retain to make your business run better than the competition.

There is a lot of ?corporate espionage? between companies to crack the secrecy of another company to gain a competitive advantage. But as a new business just putting together plans for security, there are a few things you can do to legally protect yourself. A common practice for businesses in need of trade secret protection is to have their business partners all sign what is called a ?Nondisclosure Agreement? which basically requires that anything your partners learn about your business will remain a trade secret even if the partner relationship does not continue. This is a legally binding document you can use if that partner uses or leaks your trade secrets and you lose business or market advantage from it.

Many companies require similar kinds of documents from employees and even add a ?Non-compete? agreement to make sure an employee or partner doesn?t use trade secret information to compete for business from them. Your lawyer can help you decide what is the best way to protect your business and how to use these documents wisely.

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No one can deny that Barack Obama is a fresh breeze blowing though the political landscape. In a country where every President has been a Caucasian European, he is a mixed-race candidate. When most Presidents lately tend to be on the old side, he is young. He has an advantage of experience in foreign countries, a patch-work of cultures and places in his background. He can blend in anywhere, identify with anybody, and connect with both sides across almost any chasm. So what kind of President is he going to make?

Upon being sworn into office as Illinois Senator in 2005, his first move was to recruit Pete Rouse as his Chief of Staff. Since Rouse was the former chief of staff to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, this was hailed as a smart move. He has sat so far on the Foreign Relations Committee, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, as well as being a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

He has been a very live wire in his position, having sponsored 152 bills and resolutions brought before Congress, and cosponsored another 427. He has been at the forefront of issues relating to border security and immigration reform. He has sponsored the “Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act”, which was introduced by Senator John McCain, demonstrating that he can work across party lines. He also partnered with two Republican Senators, Richard Lugar and Tom Coburn, on two bills which bear his name today.

As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has made official trips to Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, the Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. He is extremely good at diplomacy. After meeting with U.S. military members in Kuwait and Iraq in January 2006, he also visited Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. He has worked to encourage peace in the Middle East. He also made a special tour of South Africa, Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Chad, making speeches denouncing ethnic rivalries and corruption in Kenya.

He has also made some bold steps for campaign finance reform, especially denouncing situations in which a public servant would feel indebted to a lobbyist. In these times of grave concern over the increasing control that big corporations and monopolies have over our government, voters respond well to this message. He worked with other Democratic Senators after this to tighten regulations on what public officials can do on the taxpayer’s dollar, and passed a bill to criminalize deceptive practices in federal elections.

He has also championed some environment and energy causes, passing a climate change bill to reduce greenhouse gasses, again with Senator John McCain, and promoting a bill for liquefied coal production. He has also introduced a bill, the “Iraq War De-Escalation Act,” which proposes to cap troop levels in Iraq, begin phased redeployment, and remove all combat brigades from Iraq before April 2008. This is something he can point to, to say, “Look, all the candidates promise an end to the Iraq War, I actually did something about it.” He has also introduced legislation to prevent nuclear terrorism, showing that he is still keeping national security in mind.

Obama has perhaps shined best in being progressively pro-Internet. Now, when it comes to technology, the United States has moved forward while its government seems to be stuck in the Stone Age. Amidst paranoia about “hackers” used by officials who don’t even show a clear understanding of the definition of the word, the complete inability to manage the monopoly behemoth that Microsoft has become, meaningless and destructive software patents that are rubber-stamped without even being read, and such ignorant statements as when United States Senator Ted Stevens dismissed the Internet as nothing but a “series of tubes”, the voters who are technology professionals and avid Internet users have a very good reason to believe that they might be members of some foreign country. It is no exaggeration to say that trying to get government officials to understand computing is like trying to explain rocket science to a cave man.

Enter stage left, Obama! He has met with executives at Google, has pledged to appoint a Chief Technology Officer to oversee the U.S. government’s management of IT resources, has a commitment to net neutrality legislation, has said “once providers start to privilege some applications or web sites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out, and we all lose.”, and to address the critical state of science education in America, he has put forward a plan for investments in early childhood education, math and science education, and expanded summer learning opportunities.

There is no doubt that Obama has the technology vote locked up. Any candidate who can actually mouth the words “open document format” will make IT professionals everywhere swoon. And likewise, he has some support from the non-white voter, and has captured the attention of the young voters like no other. He is a fresh thinker for a new generation of voters. Whether that’s enough to get elected remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that he is in touch with today’s issues.

A common plot of Hollywood thrillers is the ?Don?t Answer the Phone? device. In this kind of movie, the babysitter is aware that there is a maniac about to come to kill her or the children. The big moment comes when she gets a phone call from the police who say ?The calls are coming from inside the house!? Pretty scary stuff.

But we have a modern day version of ?the maniac is inside the house?. The maniacs are actually hiding in the house but not in the closet, not in the basement, not in the attic but in the computer! And it isn?t just happening to an occasional unfortunate victim. These kinds of crimes are happening to thousands of people every day, people like you and me. It?s called cyber crime and it?s an epidemic that law enforcement is putting all the skill and detective work they can muster to try to control.

When you hear a phrase like ?cyber crime?, it makes you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator as a heartless android out to create chaos. But cyber criminals are far more elusive than Arnold. They could be any one in your neighborhood or halfway around the world. They don?t need a key to your back door or a tunnel under your house to get in. Cyber criminals can take up residence inside our computers and quietly commit crimes as we sit there enjoying our YouTube selections or having an IM chat with Aunt Edna.

The problem is not that our legal system has not done a good job of defining crimes committed using the internet as crimes. The legal community has all the laws on the books that they need to stop these criminals. The problem comes with finding the criminals and even know when a crime is being committed. But despite the elusive nature of cyber criminals, some of the kinds of crimes that can be committed directly over the internet are pretty scary including?

* Identity theft.
* Fraud.
* Embezzling hundreds, maybe thousands from your bank account.
* Hijacking an elderly person’s Social Security checks.
* Cyber seduction of youth and even children.
* Unauthorized access to your financial information which they can sell to other cyber criminals.
* The downloading of computer viruses and other destructive software that can damage your computer.
* Cyber terrorism.

Amazingly, most of this kind of crime can be happening inside your computer without you ever knowing it is there. The key to success for cyber criminals are these little programs sometimes called ?spybots?. A spybot is a tiny program that can take up residence in your computer by hiding in your internet system with cookies and other content that you download when you are surfing the web. These programs can then capture and record your keystrokes and send them back to the cyber crimanl who can capture your secure information from that data. Or they can watch your cyber surfing and learn where you go to help cyber criminals figure out better ways to commit their crimes.

Cyber crime is something we hope our law enforcement professionals will eventually learn how to stop. But because cyber criminals can be anywhere in the world, stay on the run and even change electronic locations of their ?headquarters? without ever betraying their physical location or who they are, it?s a amazingly difficult job for our law informant professionals to learn how to find these criminals and to capture them and put them away.

We can help by being ever vigilant about our computers. There are programs we can install that can ?lock the front door? of our computers. The two top names in this kind of software are Norton and McAfee but there are dozens more that can do the job just as well. The good news is that these programs can simultaneously watch our emails, monitor for spybots and keep our computer clean of viruses and other internet surprises that can cause so much damage.

So just as we work with neighborhood watch and put locks on our doors even though there are police in our neighborhoods, we have to view cyber crime as a problem that everybody has to work together to stop. By making sure your computer is protected, you take one more victim out of the cycle. And that helps everybody in our quest for a safer internet.

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Alan Keyes was born August 7, 1950, in a naval hospital in Long Island, New York. Being the son of a U.S. Army sergeant, he spent much of his childhood traveling from place to place including Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Virginia and Italy. After having graduated high school, he attended Cornell University where he studied political philosophy under the influential Allan Bloom, whom he identifies as a major mentor. He then left to participate in a foreign exchange study program, where he spent a year in Paris, France. Returning to America, he renewed his studies at Harvard University, where he completed his B.A. degree in government affairs by 1972.

As he was completing his doctoral studies, he joined the United States Department of State, acting as an assistant to UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. He was assigned to the consulate in Mumbai, India, in 1979, and stayed a year before moving on to work at the embassy in Zimbabwe. By 1981, he was a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in Washington, DC.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan appointed Keyes to the United Nations as a fully-ranked ambassador. He stayed in this position four years until he was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, and served jointly on the staff of the National Security Council, until 1987. During this time, he was a staunch supporter of Ronald Reagan and Conservative politics, and was a highly-favored staff member to Ronald reagan, who was fond of deploying him on errands.

In 1988, he was drafted by the Maryland Republican Party to run for the United States Senate. At the fundraiser for this Senate campaign, President Reagan gave a speech praising Keyes for the fine job he’d done, and calling him a “stout-hearted defender of a strong America”. Despite glowing praise from a popular Republican President, he failed to defeat the incumbent Paul Sarbanes for the Senate seat. He ran again four years later for the U.S. Senator from Maryland, and again was defeated by a Democrat, this time Barbara Mikulski.

Raising his sights in 1996, he ran for the Republican nomination for the Presidential election. However, he only drew 3% of the vote in the primaries, coming in fifth behind Lamar Alexander, Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan, and Bob Dole. Again in 2000, he sought the Republican nomination for President. Here his run was a bit more polished. He drew 14% of the vote, finishing third, and stayed on to debate with both George Bush and John McCain, in which he showed favorable poll results. However, he did not move up any further in the 2000 Presidential election.

Alan Keyes has contributed to some interesting incidents in his years of political involvement. A staunch Republican who is as anti-civil-liberty as just about any candidate can get, he rubbed a few of the people he met the wrong way in his days as an ambassador. During his first Presidential run in 1996, there was an incident where he allegedly tried to force his way into a debate to which he was not invited, and was briefly detained by Atlanta police. During the 2000 campaign, Keyes jumped into a mosh pit of youths body-surfing to music at a nightclub, apparently at the behest of Michael Moore, host of the “The Awful Truth” TV show, and his daughter. Finally, there was some controversy over the fact that he had thrown his daughter out and disowned her, upon learning that she was a lesbian.

Alan Keyes has been drafted by a grass-roots movement and has joined the race for the 2008 United States Presidential Election. As is usual for a draft pick, he has been very late in joining the race. He did just make it into the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on December 12, 2007, but is not expected to have made much progress in winning the vote.

Alan Keyes is running with a slogan “renew America”. In a nutshell, he is anti-choice, anti-civil-rights, pro-corporation, pro-death-penalty, pro-drug-prohibition, pro-school-prayer, pro-school-voucher, anti-Kyoto, anti-environmental-regulation, pro-religion, pro-war, anti-free-trade, anti-gun-control, anti-euthanasia, pro-PATRIOT-act, anti-immigration, anti-gay, anti-income-tax, anti-technology, anti-welfare. Other positions and views may be extrapolated from this highly generalized paragraph.