"Fortune 535" relies on the personal financial disclosure database at OpenSecrets.org and archive, but since that data only dates back to 1995, we dug through the archives of the Library of Congress Law Library to retrieve personal financial reports (required by law since 1978), that were previously only available on paper. We made available PDFs of these first personal financial disclosure reports filed by lawmakers, as part of Sunlight's goal to make more government information publicly accessible on the Internet.
For each of the 535 members of Congress, there are 535 individual stories told through stock portfolios, rental houses, mortgages, student loans and ownership of stock in multi-million dollar corporations. The data we reveal should certainly raise questions for citizens and journalists to ask about the rising and declining fortunes of their elected officials.
Grover Norquist on the The Colbert Report to talk up Leave Us Alone. Funny stuff.
3. Beg for help: The Republican infrastructure is crumbling. Making matters worse, Democrats are erecting a pretty impressive network of donors, think tanks and activist groups that is exploiting the GOP’s structural weakness. The GOP “needs to realize what the opposition is and how formidable it is,” said former GOP leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas). “The Democratic Party is organized chaos, but it is so much better than what we are doing.” It will take no less than three to five years to fix, smart Republicans estimate.
For now, Republicans need their rich backers to crack open their wallets. Democrats such as George Soros are so much more willing than rich Republicans to fund get-out-the-vote operations and clever negative campaigns. The GOP needs to somehow cajole its big donors to fork over millions of dollars to counter Democrats and then achieve a competitive edge.
It needs to be smart while spending it, too. Influential Republicans feel the party must fortify intellectual think tanks, establish new activist groups and get a clue about using the Internet to rally its forces. The GOP also needs to fund programs to train young Republican candidates and activists.
“There is an entire infrastructure that needs to be thought through, and it seems to me no one is interested in building that,” said former Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.).
Readers of this blog have no need for another example of how much the Internet is changing political campaigns. The extent, however, that a candidates "Internet Reputation" affects their election is ultimately unmeasurable and as a result, overlooked.
That includes the candidate's Wikipedia profile. According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is the 8th most visited website in the US.
With some help from a friend (cough- William Beutler- cough) with greater expertise regarding Wikipedia, I recently acquired some Wikipedia statistics from the month of February for every Congressman in my home state of Indiana.
Note that 5th District Congressman Dan Burton's profile saw an additional 17,500 views in February from January, a two-day spike as a result of the Clemens hearings.
For more even more enlightening detail, I pulled the chart below of Burton's Wikipedia traffic in the month of April. In April, Burton's Primary campaign was in full swing (election was May 5). The two big spikes came on April 14th and April 28th. On the 14th, Burton's opponent began his TV campaign. On the 28th, the Indianapolis Star ran an editorial about the race critical of Burton.
Sometimes a candidate can generate a buzz offline with a good Internet operation. But also, candidates need to keep in mind that they will generate online activity by offline actions. Offline campaign activities like direct mail blitzes, TV stories, and campaign commercials will result in additional searches on popular search engines like Google and Yahoo- both of which generally give Wikipedia top billing. You need to make sure that your voters are finding positive information.
The critical elements
1) Email communications (the most important and powerful tool)
2) Your website: enabling people to do things and attracting new supporters
3) Expertise: develop it or hire it - but don't ignore it
4) Campaigning actions: you need things for people to do
Beyond the essentials
5) Tracking and Analysis: knowing what works, what doesn't work and why
6) Time: having the time, effort and focus to deliver a campaigning action
7) Budget: to spend on creative content, promotion and/or external help
8) Plan: how your online contributes to your offline
9) Feedback channels: listening to supporters and learning how to engage them
In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?
Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.
Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to:
* Communicate with their friends
* See which of their friends are online and view their profile pictures
* Set their statuses
Users can securely authenticate and authorize applications to connect to Chat on their behalf and send messages to their friends just like they can on Facebook.
Based on a few recent experiences regarding the YouTube community, and specifically how the tool could help increase citizen participation in our upcoming general election debates, this post seeks to encourage the Commission on Presidential Debates -- the Old Guards if you will -- to truly embrace the Internet in at least one of its three scheduled debates.
Let's dig in...
This past Friday the Republican National Committee launched CanWeAsk.com - a platform which provides the RNC a powerful partisan tool to help it better engage Barack Obama early, often and dynamically. Of note, all lasers are trained solely on Barack, not Hillary. Natch.
The CanWeAsk.com platform provides both a place for the distribution of the RNC's opposition research against Barack (videos with scary audio over grainy black and white photos) but it also serves as a valuable utility for citizens to participate and ask Barack some very real questions. Snaps to the RNC for deploying the site before the Dems thought of it.
As you might expect, I joined the effort by asking Barack a question about health care. Disclosure, so you know, I've been working and focusing on the issue a lot with a few clients concerned about our health care system being run by the same folks responsible for the U.S. Post Office - bureaucrats.
For those on their blackberry or working sans audio at work, here's the description/text of the video:
As a Republican and an employer who provides health care benefits to my employees, I have a question for Barack Obama.
You've proposed a health care plan run by the government. Won't the addition of a new government-run health care program resembling Medicare be a dis-incentive for employers to continue to offer health care coverage to their employees? Won't less competition only increase the cost of care, leaving the government trying to figure out how to cover the bill?
The coolest thing about this experience was that my video was featured on the FRONT-PAGE of YouTube.com this past weekend (or at least that's what two individual people have told me after stumbling upon my video). The video now has over 26k views and 335 comments.
Perspective: This video did not star a dancing cat or the Star Wars kid; it was a question to Barack Obama about a niche issue that could affect small businessmen throughout the nation. And the question wasn't being asked by Brit Hume or Charlie Gibson; it was being asked by a regular citizen.
In my mind, the popularity of the video underscores the notion that citizens are interested in being a real part of the democratic process beyond just casting their vote in November. It is my belief that only a true embrace of the Internet will increase citizen participation.
Internet Plays Valuable Role In Increasing Democracy, Freedom
As perhaps one of the only people who attended both the Democratic and Republican YouTube debates on my own dime, it is clear to me that citizens need to continue to be a part of the debate structure.
While I was extremely pleased to see Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin join efforts to help promote and announce an informal "Presidential forum" with YouTube this fall, that doesn't go far enough.
As a citizen, I have the right to insist that my candidates for President interact with me and answer the questions I have about their positions on the issues I care about. Like most Americans, I rely on the participatory power of the Internet to communicate with public officials. That is why I believe that the Commission on Presidential Debates needs to fully embrace the Internet in one of its three-scheduled *official* debates.
It Might Happen: Commission Opens Door To Possibility
The second departure from past CPD formats will be the introduction of internet access to the presidential town meeting debate. Questions solicited by Internet will be included with those from citizens on the stage with the candidates.
Unfortunately, a true embrace of the Internet by the Commission is suspect.
In fact, as Politics Magazine reported on Friday, the Commission's executive director struck quite a snarky tone toward a format resembling the YouTube debate by cracking a (funny?) zinger:
"It's a matter of figuring out which [interactive] elements are helpful to viewers and actually add something to the discussion and which elements are just distracting. We're not Entertainment Tonight."
I actually had to Google "Entertainment Tonight" to try and figure out what she meant. Even after reading it's Wikipedia entry I don't really "get" how a YouTube debate equates to the "most popular and longest-running entertainment news program."
For sure, the YouTube debates were massively popular with the American public. In fact, the Republican Presidential debate was the most-viewed primary debate ever. That's a whole heckuva lot of people interested in a Republican discussion and that's good news to me as a Republican. And it's also good news for democracy.
Look, I don't know Janet Brown or anyone on the Commission. I doubt any of them are on Facebook, LinkedIn or have ever submitted a YouTube video. That's cool with me. Different strokes for different folks.
However, the fate of what could be a ground-breaking experiment in democracy should not fall at the hands of these few. If the Commission is serious about using the Internet and finding a good format -- they should surround themselves with folks who "get" it. I'm happy to be one voice - and perhaps writing this note serves as my contribution to the effort; but I can also think of dozens of people from both the Right and Left who could offer valuable contributions to the discussion.
Most of the other contributors took the topic seriously and offered solid feedback; but not NBC News' Tom Brokaw. Instead of thinking beyond the box and adding value to the discussion, Brokaw embraced an elitist tone and sarcastic attitude which is likely dominant in editorial rooms across the country.
"If this is truly the campaign of the new media, candidates should be required to answer questions only on their cellphone, BlackBerry or other personal digital assistant, so we can size up their personal text message codes, ring tones and thumb-typing skills.
"The questioners could be sweaty fat guys muscling people aside as they get off airplanes, shouting loudly into cellphones: 'Rudy, I just landed. Can we talk?' 'Hillary! Hey! Mike here! Can you hear me? Hello? Hello?"
The ironic thing is that Brokaw was attempting to be humorous and sarcastic; he failed at both and instead stuck his elitist finger in the eyes of participatory democracy. That being said, he actually does have a good point if you boil out the BS. Citizens should be able to participate in the democratic process where ever, whenever, and how ever they want. After all, this is America.
Brokaw may speak for a number of different "generations," and I respect his contributions to his industry, but he doesn't speak for me or my generation.
Personally I don't think folks sitting in editorial news rooms sipping iced latte’s represent my perspective very well; (I prefer iced coffee instead.) I doubt they represent "your" perspective either.
The Old Guards who cloak their elitism and misinformation with sarcastic humor have their foot pressed firmly on the neck of the Revolution and it's time we breathe freedom.
Like you, I am optimistic in my belief that the Internet could serve a valuable role in increasing citizen participation in the Presidential debates. Unfortunately, even for an optimist like me, the signs are not looking very good for those being engineered by the Old Guards.
This is the first step, but I can't do it alone. A bipartisan coalition of concerned citizens could help convince the Commission to embrace the Internet for a debate and I look forward to working with you to do just that. Stay tuned.
Due to some technical difficulties I only caught the last part of today's bloggers briefing, which meant missing most of Rep. Kevin Brady's remarks on the recently launched House GOP’s Fiscal Integrity Task Force. No worries though, David will have some exclusive coverage of FIT Force later this week here at TechRepublican.
1) Why does he think cap and trade will reduce energy costs? All the evidence from Europe goes against this plan.
1) The world has not warmed since 2001, but his plan is based on faulty science models that assumed it would, how does he defend that?
Mary Katherine Ham noted that she though the environment was an issue conservatives need to have a better stance on, and wondered what a conservative message on the environment ought to sound like.
Conservatives need to push for the central role of free-markets and property rights.
The passenger pigeon went extinct because no one owned it. The wood duck is doing fine because sportsmen have a vested interest in conserving it.
Also, the role of stewardship is a conservative notion. As conservatives, we're traditionalists and protecting the environment means being a good steward of God's creation. If we can work to combine free-markets and the idea of stewardship we'll have a strong environmental policy that actually works.
What we have to avoid though, is to just adopt the lefts' environmental policy because it has immense costs associated with it.
If you're left craving more environmental reading, check out Heritage's research paper analyzing the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill and the economic impact it would have on America.
Nevertheless, Barr is is setting up the infrastructure to try to siphon off some of that Paulite passion.
He's hired Terra Eclipse, a Santa Cruz, California-based web design and consulting shop that designed the Paul campaign web site. And in an April appearance on Fox News, Barr pointed to Ron Paul's support base as a reason for his confidence that he'll find enough money to finance a sustainable campaign.
"There is a large body of folks out there that fall into the independent movement in the center," he said during that interview. "[There are] a lot of young people who are willing to give in large numbers small, reasonable amounts of money to support a true independent voice and choice."
But Yelp has thrived. In March, it had 3.3 million users, according to Comscore, up 87 percent from a year ago. Citysearch still towers above it with 16.2 million users.
What Yelp did differently than these others, as Jeremy Stoppelman, the site’s co-founder and chief executive describes it, was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers. It didn’t try to pay for reviews, as some sites have. It didn’t subordinate the users’ contributions to professional reviews, as on Citysearch, or to directory information, as on yellow-pages sites.
Instead, it structured the site to motivate people through the praise and attention that their reviews receive from others. “Yelp is about the reviewing experience,” Mr. Stoppelman said. “It is like a blog with a little bit of structure.”
"Will [the commission] embrace it or will they shun it?" wonders Republican web consultant David All, one of a group of Internet consultants who pressured Republican hopefuls to take part in this year's CNN-YouTube debate. At the very least, All says, the forum could force the commission into the 21st century, something critics say it has resisted for far too long.
The Commission's Executive Director Janet Brown told Politics magazine that the commission is debating format changes that will introduce some new interactive elements to this year's official debates. While Brown wouldn't comment on the proposed YouTube-Google forum, she did say the changes to the commission's format are forthcoming and will strike a balance between involving more citizens in the process and maintaining the appropriate tone for a presidential debate.
"It's a matter of figuring out which [interactive] elements are helpful to viewers and actually add something to the discussion and which elements are just distracting," Brown says. "We're not Entertainment Tonight," she adds.
President George W. Bush tomorrow will sit down for his first ever on camera interview exclusively for an online audience. Days after first daughter Jenna walked down the aisle, POLITICO's Mike Allen will go behind the scenes of the White House to capture the president's thinking in a historic interview for Politico and Yahoo.com.
"This is an area ... where John McCain differs pretty substantially from the (Bush) administration," said McCain's chief surrogate and economic adviser Carly Fiorina on Sunday political talk show "This Week with George Stephanopoulos. "I think what John McCain has always said, whether it's the cap and trade legislation that he has supported and sponsored with Joe Lieberman, or this current bill, what he has always said is that the United States must take a leadership role in addressing climate change and global warming."
"We must apply some of the disciplines of the private marketplace to spur innovation in this area as well as to incent companies to do better," she added.
The move marks a shift toward a general election messaging strategy as McCain speaks on a subject that's important to suburban swing voters -- although polls consistently show that the environment ranks near the bottom of voters' list of concerns generally, trailing their worries about the economy, the war in Iraq, terrorism, healthcare, education and illegal immigration.
"Marketing in higher education is really at a crossroads," said Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. "Those that don't engage and manage social media are going to be left behind."
Universities are moving onto social media including Facebook, iTunesU and YouTube "because they know that's where students are nowadays," said David Hawkins of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. "To not have a presence in those areas means risking being left behind in the student conversation of this generation."
But like a parent trying to seem cool, sometimes the efforts are painful to watch. "The last thing someone on YouTube wants to see is a provost explaining the academic offerings at an institution," Hawkins said.
Friend Connect is a tool which enables any website owner to add some code to their site and get a number of social features. You know, all that stuff you usually can’t be bothered to install plugins for: user registration, invites, members gallery, reviews, message posting, and - most importantly - third party OpenSocial apps.
In practice, this means that anyone will be able to log in, for example, with their OpenID on some blog, and converse with their Gtalk, Facbeook, or Plaxo friends. The web as a platform, it’s finally happening, folks.
This past Friday, the RNC launched CanWeAsk.com -- an extremely clever deployment of YouTube to effectively hammer Barrack Obama by blending the RNC's opposition research team with real questions submitted by real citizens.
While the RNC got it right they made a key mistake by not buying the domain CanWeAsk.org.
Of note, Hillary Clinton made a kinda similar mistake by not buying the domain HilaryHub.com for her uber-popular site HillaryHub.com. Yep, I own it. However, given the state of the race and her chances of being the nominee, I'll likely never do anything fun with it. Oh well, I've spent more money on a cab to get brunch than what it costs to buy a domain.
Anyway, the silly Democrats who bought the .org URL have launched a little note as a placeholder for the site which contains a spelling mistake by using the word "loose" when they meant "lose."
Given the fact that today is Sunday, I imagine we'll have to wait until Monday for the DNC to start working (again). Just saying...
UPDATE 5/12, 10:28 AM (post-Radiohead): As two tipsters have pointed out (MB and CS), our little prankster has updated the page but continues to use the wrong form of "your"/"you're."
BTW - In general, overuse of the exclamation point makes me nauseous. This is no exception.
After a staff shake-up earlier this year, Freedom's Watch has become far more active in day-to-day politics, sending reporters several e-mails a day that attack Democratic leaders.
The group has taken a broader role in electoral politics: In recent months, Freedom's Watch ran ads boosting Republican Bob Latta, who won a special election for an open congressional seat from Ohio; ran $560,000 in ads attacking Democrat Don Cazayoux, who won a congressional seat from Louisiana last weekend; and is airing an ad in Mississippi's open congressional district, which holds a special election Tuesday.
To counterattack, the DCCC sent 20,000 pieces of mail in Louisiana's 6th Congressional District to Republican and independent households tying the Republican candidate, Woody Jenkins, to Mr. Adelson.
Altogether, Obama's campaign has taken in an unprecedented $226 million, most of it contributed online. His donor base is larger than the one the Democratic National Committee had for the 2000 election.
These are hardly political fat cats. Ninety percent of his donors give $100 or less, and 41 percent have given $25 or less, according to the Obama campaign. Overall, he has raised 45 percent of his money in small contributions. Hillary Rodham Clinton's figure is 30 percent, Republican John McCain's is 23 percent.
...
Obama, a magnet for younger voters, is cashing in on that phenomenon. Among small donors, students have given $303,000 to him, compared with less than $100,000 to Clinton and less than $20,000 to McCain.
Nearly one out of every five permission-based email messages sent to U.S.-based ISPs lands in the junk mail folder, according to the latest email deliverability study from Lyris, Inc. (http://www.lyris.com). Slightly more than 76 percent of invited email successfully makes it to the inbox.
Awhile back, Time Magazine published what they thought were the top 10 Senate races in the 2008 election: Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire. I completely agree with this assessment and if the GOP wants to at least have some voting muscle in the Senate, they need to win these races.
This isn’t new information, but for some reason it seems that these top three campaigns haven’t even moved into full gear yet, even though there is only a little more than 6 months until the November election.
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here is just a glimpse into some of the things (primarily problems) I’ve noticed amongst the ‘top 3’ campaigns, focusing primarily on the Republican side.
I've argued before that social networking should be a feature, not a destination, and that the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites with social networking built in, such as the 220,000 niche networks hosted on the Ning platform.
It turns out that it's not just the experience that's better on the smaller, more focused sites: the economics work better there, too. Yesterday MySpace's parent company, News Corp, released quarterly financial results and although traffic was up on MySpace, they're having trouble making money.
While MoveOn promoted its TV spot contest last month, a conservative non-profit poised to spend big this election also ran a series of online display ads. Before Congressional hearings on the Iraq war earlier this month, the face of General David Petraeus, U.S. Commander in Iraq, appeared in ads on news sites including Politico.com, Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics. The ads quoted Newsweek and National Review, touting the general as "Man of the Year," and "Iraq's Repairman." Urging users to "Support General Petraeus," they linked to a YouTube video with the same message.
Though the group's VP for Communications Ed Patru acknowledged "Web ads can be a very effective way to reach an enormous number of readers for a fraction of what traditional advertising costs," Freedom's Watch spent far less on its recent ad efforts than it did on a similar Web and TV campaign in August 2007. "We spent $15M on TV" at that time, Patru told ClickZ News.
the Next Right
A new project from Soren Dayton, Jon Henke, and Patrick Ruffini. You can sign-up for email updates right now. From their about section:
The Next Right is the place for wired activists to build a new Republican Party and conservative movement. As a community-driven grassroots action website for the right, we'll feature in-depth political analysis, on-the-ground reports, and strategic discussion and debate.
1. Tell a story. If you want your audience to identify with your mission, you need a compelling story that connects your work to real people. If a story moves you, it will likely move others as well - and become the foundation for deeper involvement.
2. Keep the audience in mind. Are you trying to reach urban street youth or retired veterans? Tailor your messaging for a targeted audience and consider how you want it to feel before the camera starts rolling.
3. Make a clear call to action. You have their attention, now tell your viewers how you want them to engage, whether it's donating money, visiting a website or volunteering.
Conservative blogger Matt Naugle broke the story about the Ohio AG scandal. His reporting at the Right Angle Blog ultimately pushed the story into the mainstream Ohio papers. Naugle actually started covering this story back in 2007. This past weekend, it finally went national -- with some even speculating the tawdry scandal might impact the presidential election in Ohio ...
The Facebook profile redesign will have a big impact on the developer community. Developers will need to think long and hard about how to make their apps more valuable to users, specifically in the integration points that Facebook is providing. While much of the first year of the Facebook Platform has been about virality, it will be harder for purely “viral” apps that don’t provide much value to users to grow - the second year of the Facebook Platform will be about engagement.
Kicking profile boxes off the default view of the profile page will definitely make it harder for users to discover and re-engage with applications. Facebook must embark on a major user education campaign to help users understand the new tools they have to organize application content on their profile page (specifically, moving boxes between tabs and adding new app tabs) and share application content with their friends (specifically, the new feed publisher).
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