"Help! Help! This stranger is not my father!" was the cry of nearly 40 children at summer camp last month.

The children were safe, but the scene is a normal, almost weekly event for Cindy Richard, an AmeriCorps member at the American Red Cross in Moline. She was teaching children the "Stranger Danger" program so they would know how to protect themselves from people who might be trying to abduct them.

Richard helps teach health and safety to both children and adults in the Quad Cities area, on topics ranging from weather safety to HIV/AIDS to first aid.

She's scheduled to end her service in October. So are 23 other AmeriCorps members in the Iowa Quad Cities.

Democratic state treasurer candidate Alexi Giannoulias has a new poll that shows he has an 11-point lead over his Republican opponent, state Senator Christine Radogno.

Giannoulias has struggled since shortly before the spring primary. Reporters started looking into his family's bank business, and came up with ties to some seriously shady mobsters. Things went downhill fast.

But all the bad publicity hasn't helped Radogno, a moderate, well-liked Republican legislator from the suburbs who had been considered by some to be the Republican with the best chance of winning a statewide race this November.

Rod Blagojevich and Judy Baar Topinka don’t agree on much, but their campaigns concurred last week that Governor Blagojevich is leading in the polls.

The Blagojevich campaign says its latest poll shows the Democratic governor leading the Republican treasurer 47-31 – a seriously large advantage. Topinka’s campaign has Blagojevich ahead 44-37 – a far narrower margin.

Meanwhile, the latest poll from an independent source, The Rasmussen Report, had Blagojevich leading 45-34, which is about right in the middle of the two candidates’ poll results. Still, Topinka’s polling during the spring primary matched up almost exactly with the Chicago Tribune polls, which turned out to be pretty accurate come primary day.

"I've researched this pretty carefully," confided a very high-level Blagojevich administration official this spring over late-night cocktails. "For any of this to be illegal, somebody has to profit. There has to be money involved."

The official was responding to my questions about the swirling allegations of state contracts and jobs handed out to political insiders. Since there was no personal profit, nobody was in any serious legal danger, he claimed.

This month's verdict in Robert Sorich's trial, however, proved that person to be dead wrong.