Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.

Constance Frye Martinson (born April 11, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American writer and television personality. Since its 1979 debut, she has hosted the syndicated television show Connie Martinson Talks Books, which airs on public television.  She is married to American film director Leslie H. Martinson. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she writes a column for the Beverly Hills Courier.

Martinson graduated in 1953 from Wellesley College in Massachusetts with a bachelor of arts degree and was awarded the Davenport Prize for speech and literature. She worked as an editor for Writer magazine in Boston before moving to Los Angeles with her husband, film and television director Leslie Martinson. Prior to parlaying her love of literature into a self-financed half-hour television series on books, she was involved in public relations for the Coro Foundation and taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Judaism.

The Connie Martinson Talks Books Collection, now donated to Claremont Graduate University, consists of nearly 3,000 television interviews (L.A. CityView Channel 35, Government-access television cable TV and PBS in New York) with authors of fiction and nonfiction taped over the last 30 years. Included in the collection are interviews with Maya Angelou, Ray Bradbury, Al Gore, Rosa Parks, Gore Vidal, Studs Terkel, and Joyce Carol Oates. One of her most famous interviews took place in 1995 when she interviewed a then little-known author and future President of the United States named Barack Obama about his first book, Dreams From My Father. Interviews with a diverse group of best-selling authors include Matthew Pearl, Cathy Scott, Ved Mehta, Roger Cohen, and Vincent Bugliosi.

Glenn Edward Lee Beck (born February 10, 1964) is an American conservative radio host, vlogger, author, entrepreneur, political commentator and former television host. He hosts the Glenn Beck Program, a nationally syndicated talk-radio show that airs throughout the United States on Premiere Radio Networks. He formerly hosted the Glenn Beck television program, which ran from January 2006 to October 2008 on HLN and from January 2009 to June 2011 on the Fox News Channel. Beck has authored six New York Times–bestselling books. Beck is the founder and CEO of Mercury Radio Arts, a multimedia production company through which he produces content for radio, television, publishing, the stage, and the Internet. It was announced on April 6, 2011, that Beck would "transition off of his daily program" on Fox News later in the year but would team with Fox to "produce a slate of projects for FOX News Channel and FOX News' digital properties". Beck's last daily show on the network was June 30, 2011. In 2012, The Hollywood Reporter named Beck on its Digital Power Fifty list.

Trevor Loudon is a New Zealand political activist who was vice president of the ACT New Zealand Party from 2006 to 2008. He has been involved in politics in Christchurch for many years, most notably the Campaign for a Soviet Free New Zealand a group which published dossiers on people involved in the anti-nuclear movement, declaring them to be communists and "connecting the dots" between them and their supposed Soviet masters.

He describes himself as "[Believing] in freedom with responsibility, not freedom from responsibility. My ideal society is one in which government is slashed to the bone and people are free to reach their potential." In addition to his libertarian economic views he is strongly anti-communist, in a 2006 post to his blog (see below) he stated "Socialism, is in short a manifestation of mental illness or major character deficiency." he has also stated a belief that communists are responsible for "supplying much of the world's illegal drugs," although he supports drug legalization (while being personally against drug use). He is a self-described "student" of the Zenith Applied Philosophy, an offshoot of Scientology. In 2006 he wrote on his blog "I have studied at Z.A.P. from 1976 to 1982, 1986/7 and 1999 to current. I am enjoying my studies immensely at the moment and plan to continue indefinitely."

Kadir Nelson is an award-winning African American artist, illustrator and author. His work is focused on African American culture and history.

Nelson was born in Washington D.C., attended Crawford High School in San Diego, California, and graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

Nelson has done illustration work for Sports Illustrated, Coca-Cola,The New York Times, Major League Baseball, and the United States Postal Service, among others.

Nelson has had exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States and the world, including the Museum of Tolerance and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences^{[citation needed]} in Los Angeles, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History^{[citation needed]} in Detroit, the Anacostia Museum^{[citation needed]} in Washington, D.C., the Society of Illustrators and the Studio Museum in Harlem^{[citation needed]} in New York, the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery^{[citation needed]} in Bristol, England, The Yokohama Citizens’ Gallery^{[citation needed]} in Yokohama, Japan and the Tijuana Cultural Center^{[citation needed]} in Tijuana, Mexico.