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.

While Al Gore is not currently in the race for the Presidency in 2008, there is an active and vocal draft movement to convince him to run. The speculation is that he’s waiting to see how Hillary Clinton’s campaign does, and if it looks like it’s wavering and he could do better, he can then enter. Late entry won’t hurt a high-profile candidate like Al Gore; he’s had 8 years as Vice President and a second career as an environmental activist, even producing his own movie about global warming, so he’s so much in the spotlight that he can hop in at any point and not be behind. there’s also some talk that he might become a Green party candidate; certainly his ideas fit nicely with the party’s. Hence, he’s worth including.

Al Gore was born March 31, 1948 in Washington, D.C. He was likely to aim for politics since birth, having been the son of Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., the Representative and Senator from Tennessee, and a mother who was one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt University Law School. Growing up, he would spend most of the year in Washington with his parents, and every summer would return to Tennessee to work on the family farm growing hay and tobacco and raising cattle. He graduated from St. Albans School and went on to attend Harvard College. He graduated Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government in 1969.

The same year he graduated, he enlisted in the United States Army. Even though he opposed the Vietnam war at the time, he felt that it was his duty to serve in the military nonetheless. Although his tour looked to be off to a cushy start with his assignment as a military journalist writing for “The Army Flier”, he was eventually shipped to the front lines in 1971. After just five months, he received a non-essential personnel honorable discharge due to his unit standing down, and returned to his studies, this time to Vanderbilt University for one year to finish out the terms of a scholarship.

He then spent five years as a reporter for “The Tennessean”, engaging in a little investigative reporting which led to the arrest of some corrupt local councilmen.

Al Gore’s first entry into politics came when Congressman Joe L. Evins retired from Tennessee’s 4th district, leaving an open seat which he ran for. He was elected to this position, and won re-elections for Tennessee Representative 1978, 1980, and 1982. During his time in Congress, he served on the committees for Armed Services, Commerce, Science and Transportation, Joint Committee on Printing, Joint Economic Committee, and Rules and Administration. He also chaired the committees on Surface Transportation and the National Ocean Policy Study.

His most prominent act was when he introduced the Gore Bill, also known as the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. This was the critical turning point of technology legislation; it bridged the way from the Federal ARPANET to the modern Internet and eventually the World Wide Web. However, this is the bill which political commentators have since never ceased to jeeringly refer to as “when Al Gore created the Internet”.

In a very real sense, this legislation actually did establish the modern web technology as we know it. It led to the development of the National Information Infrastructure, the creation of the high-speed fiber optic network which we have installed today, and gave us the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which hired the programmers to develop the Mosaic project, headed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. Since Netscape’s Mosaic spun off the Spyglass browser to sell to Microsoft, which it then developed into Internet Explorer, and Netscape also released Netscape Navigator, which went open source and became Mozilla which then in turn released Firefox and Thunderbird, and also since Netscape went on to become AOL, the America On-Line company, this act is in fact directly responsible for 99% of the programs we use to browse the web today. The Gore Bill, in a single act of legislation, gave us the wire in the ground, the network to run on that wire, and the software to use the network. If that isn’t “taking the initiative in creating the Internet”, then nobody can lay claim to doing better.

In 1984, the Tennessee Senate seat became vacant when Republican Majority Leader Howard Baker stepped down. Gore ran for and was elected to this office as well, and was to remain there until becoming the Vice President in 1993.

During his time as Senator, Gore twice attempted to get the U.S. government to pull the plug on support to Saddam Hussein, citing Hussein’s use of poison gas, support of terrorism, and his burgeoning nuclear program, but was opposed both times by the Reagan and Bush administrations. The fact that he was to later see the developments of the Iraq war unfold under his protest must have been traumatic.

Be that as it may, he of course went on to serve as Vice President under the Clinton administration for eight years. He has since run for and been defeated for President in 2000, and has since been an activist for environmentalist causes. Regardless of whether he answers the draft for 2008 or sits it out a bit longer, American politics has not heard the last of Al Gore.

If you did a survey of the top ten most distrusted professions, right up there next to lawyers and politicians would be bankers. It?s amazing that we have such a negative view of the banks in light of the fact that almost everyone uses a bank.

Have you ever wondered how banks make money? In the last few years, it seems that every bank in town advertises ?totally free checking?. Offering these fees for free is so common that most of us have probably forgotten when we paid a little fee each month for these services. Competition has driven banks to give away checking. So you would think that has hurt their bottom lines.

But it hasn?t. Banks of all the business institutions are doing great, even in a day and age of exploding costs and dwindling personal savings. So how do they do it? Well, banks do make money off of our money. When you put $1000 in the bank, we might like the idea that our money is in a vault waiting until we start using it. But the reality is that the bank immediately loans that money out and makes interest on those loans. That is one way that banks make money and it?s completely legal as well.

But despite the demise of checking fees, banks make a ton of money off of bank charges that they can still legally charge. One of those fees is the cost of printing checks. If you have ever ordered checks from your bank, you will see a pretty impressive charge for those checks show up on your next bank statement. But one thing they don?t tell you is that they don?t have a monopoly on printing checks. There are plenty of perfectly good services in the world that will print up checks for your checking account for a much reduced fee. As long as those blank numbers along the bottom are readable by a machine and are correct, the check is legal. So save yourself some money and don?t order checks from the bank.

But one charge that always seems over the top is the overdraft charge the bank imposes each time one of your checks bounces. It seems that these fees are extraordinarily excessive. Many times the bank will charge you as much as $35 or more for each bounced check.

Amazingly, these charges are perfectly legal. The law says they are allowed to charge you enough to cover their costs for covering and processing the returned check. So that might include notifying you, returning the check to the person you wrote it to and the necessary account management. How do we know that the huge tab they charge is not more than they need for their costs? We don?t. And as consumers there isn?t any way to fight back, short of not using the bank at all which isn?t realistic.

So how can we protect ourselves against excessive bank charges? One way is to find a bank that will set up a line of credit that will kick in and put the funds in your account from a bank loan if you overdraw. It?s all done by computers so the costs of notification are eliminated. And generally the charge is much less for this service, perhaps $5-$10 for as many checks they have to cover in a day rather than $35 per check.

Your checks don?t bounce so you don?t have problems with who you are trying to pay. And it?s a much easier way to protect your bank account than letting the banks hit you for those out of control overdraft charges just when you need extra fees the least.

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