Raymond Louis "Ray" McKinney (born June 20, 1962) is a mechanical services manager from Savannah, Georgia, and was the Republican nominee for U.S. Congress from Georgia's 12th District in 2010. He was a candidate for U.S. President in the 2008 Republican primary, but withdrew on November 14, 2007.

McKinney was born June 20, 1962 in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Effingham County Public High School, where he was voted "most likely to become a nuclear scientist", McKinney had two years of Gulfstream Aerospace machinist training, two years Tool and Die, CFS machinist training, and (through 1990) two years at Savannah for Electro-Mechanical Engineering. He has been in the industry for the last 23 years. McKinney is currently a nuclear services manager for Continental Field Systems in Savannah. He and his wife Lisa live in Lyons on the McKinney family farm.

When asked about his educational and work experience, McKinney had this to say about his choice of career:

I think I prefer the term "machinist" above all but my wife thinks I put myself down by saying that. It is the proudest part of my skill set though. Her point is that people respect higher education and by telling people that I am a machinist that they have a lower opinion of who I am. Actually, I am quite proud of it.

Dale Peterson (born November 20, 1944) is an American author who writes about scientific and natural history subjects.

Dale Alfred Peterson was born and raised in Corning, New York, a small town known for glass manufacturing in western New York State. He graduated from the University of Rochester in 1967 (BA in English and Psychology), then began graduate studies at Stanford University, first in the writing program under Wallace Stegner, later in the English Department. Stanford awarded him a Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1977.[1]

The Vietnam War caused a break in graduate studies, however. As a conscientious objector, Peterson was assigned to alternative service in 1971 at a large U.S. Veterans Administration hospital, working as an attendant on a lock-up ward for severely disturbed or mentally ill patients, many of them diagnosed as schizophrenic. He wrote a novel loosely based on his experiences, which was never published, and began work on a non-fiction treatment of the social and psychological experiences of the mentally ill. That study became an insider’s history of mental illness based on autobiographical accounts of madness written during the nearly five and a half centuries between 1436 and 1976: published at last as A Mad People’s History of Madness (1982).[2]

Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is an American politician and activist. McKinney was a member of the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives. In 2008, the Green Party of the United States nominated McKinney for President of the United States. She was the first African-American woman to have represented Georgia in the House.

In the 1992 election, McKinney was elected in the newly re-created 11th District, and was re-elected in 1994. When her district was redrawn and renumbered due to the Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Miller v. Johnson, McKinney was easily elected from the new 4th District in the 1996 election, and was re-elected twice without substantive opposition.

McKinney was defeated by Denise Majette in the 2002 Democratic primary. Some people believe she was defeated because of Republican crossover voting in Georgia's open primary election, which permits anyone from any party to vote in any party primary and "usually rewards moderate candidates and penalizes those outside the mainstream." Others believe that her defeat was due to her "her controversial profile, which included support for Arab causes and a suggestion that Bush knew in advance of the September 11 attacks."

Raymond McGovern (born 1939) is a retired CIA officer turned political activist. McGovern was a Federal employee under seven U.S. presidents over 27 years, presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House for many of them.

McGovern has been an outspoken commentator on intelligence-related issues since the late 1990s. He was heavily critical of the government's handling of the Wen Ho Lee case in 2000. In 2002 he was publicly critical of President George W. Bush's use of government intelligence in the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

In 2003, together with other former CIA employees, McGovern founded the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity or VIPS. The organization is dedicated to analyzing and criticizing the use of intelligence, specifically relating to the War in Iraq. In January 2006, McGovern began speaking out on behalf of the anti-war group Not in Our Name. According to the group's press release, McGovern served symbolic "war crimes indictments" on the Bush White House from a "people's tribunal."