Congressional Elections - Who's Good for IT Folks?

rlp asks: "Most of the articles appearing in Slashdot's new political section pertain to the U.S. Presidential election. However, most of the political issues facing American IT people are issues that are dealt with (or more often caused by) Congress. Therefore, my question is: who are the heroes and villains (for U.S. IT people) in Congress that are running for office this year? How does your local Congresscritter (or the person running against them) feel about copyrights, privacy, data security, H1-B, outsourcing, software patents, Open Source, tech education, R&D funding, anti-trust, etc?"

Past performance is no guarantee of future results

[ubiquitin]

But it might help get an idea of where people stand:

www.vote-smart.org [vote-smart.org] lets you look up the voting records of Concresscritters.

Re:Nobody to vote for

[TheCarp]

Naturalised citizens are here because they chose to be, people born here are here because of accident of birth and either never had the ambition, means, or desire to go anywhere else.

WHat does this have to do with being "geek friendly"? Nothing at all.

Is there something wrong with people who have come to our country from somewhere else and found enough love for the place to go through the process and take the oath to become a citizen?

If the country and even the district is now their home, why should they not involve themselves in the government there. It is their home. Or do we lose all right to participate (which is more than the vast majority of peopl ein the district do I imagine, born there or not) in the community and the government?

Should they just be dowtrodden outsiders, taking it as its given to them and liking it?

-Steve

Depends....

[sfjoe]

Depends on your definition of "IT folks". If you mean shareholders and senior management of technology-related companies, then anyone in their wholly-owned subsidiary known as the US Congress is good for IT folks.
If, on the other hand, you mean people who work for a living, I can't think of a single person who supports us.

Find out who's padding their pockets...

[Kevin Burtch]

http://www.opensecrets.org/ [opensecrets.org] is a great place to find out what organizations and industries are giving the most $$ to each candidate.

There's a lot more content than that there, check it out.

Pork for IT

[Brandybuck]

This shouldn't be about Pork for IT. It should be about common sense. Stop whining about what your congressman is going to do for your iPod, and start looking at what he or she stands for as a WHOLE. Yes, we probably all want our jobs back from Bangalore. But at any cost?

I want my congressmen to be operating under the premise that government exists solely to protect the lives, liberties and properties of its citizens, that government is the servant of the people and not its master, and that honest (and genuine) free trade is the best foreign policy. I don't expect any candidate to be perfect, but one who made the previous the foundation of his platform and could demonstrate he was serious about it, would have vote.

Re: Troll Feeding

[Keebler71]

That is ridiculous. First off, your link assumes that current economic prosperity is somehow causally linked to who the president currently is. I think it would be more realistic to speculate that economic change has a lot of inertia and attibute econimic prosperity to previous administrations/congresses. What that time constant is I have no idea. Along those lines, I would much rather see the same data correlated to who is control of the congress, state legislatures and governors,... all of who probably have more of a real impact on the economy than a sitting president.