Do we have to rely on the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters to warn us of legislation that the Tea Party Caucus should be opposing on our behalf?  Because that’s exactly what happened recently on “patent reform” – the America Invents Act that Obama signed into law on Sept 16, the day after his big “Jobs” speech to the joint session of Congress.   The measure passed the House on June 23, and passed the Senate with a collegial vote of 89-9 on September 8.

Now I realize that many readers here may have a knee-jerk reaction similar to mine: that if Pelosi and Waters are against it, then I am surely for it.  Alas, in this instance, it turns out that Pelosi and Waters were right, and the Tea Party Caucus was wrong.  Why do I assert that the Tea Party Caucus and its leader Michele Bachmann were wrong when exactly half the caucus (including Bachmann herself) voted to defeat the measure?  Because they did not warn us of the dangers contained in the bill.

Credibility for the Tea Party Caucus is waning fast.   Even Politico notes that…

Only 15 of the 80 freshman House Republicans have signed up for Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party Caucus, accounting for a quarter of the 60 official tea party Republicans in the House . . . the full set of Tea Party Caucus members voted with the party position more often than folks who don’t identify with the group.

As Neil Stevens noted a couple of days ago, the legislation was a very bad idea.  Yet even Stevens failed to plumb the full depths to tell us just how bad this bill is.  Besides being a “jobs bill” for patent attorneys, the bill also has several measures that will very probably prove unconstitutional.

The poisonous part of the America Invents Act is Section 18 which erects a new protected class (Banks and Wall Street firms who must pay royalties on patented electronic payment processing technology).   This new protected class, if they have challenged a patent in court and lost, will now be able to return to the USPTO to get that same patent overturned or withdrawn.  After the patent holder has already won in court!

I think it’s bad policy (unconstitutional?) to allow the executive branch to overturn a high federal court.  And this measure only applies to patents issued to the electronic payments processing industry.  Talk about another payoff from Congress to Big Banks and Wall Street!  Allowing the executive branch to confiscate private property from the patent holder who thought he’d just had due process,  when a high federal court upheld his patent, sounds very much like something the constitution protects us from?  Something protecting us from the confiscation of our property without due process?  Or when due process in the courts succeeds in protecting the property for the owner, having the executive confiscate it anyway?

Yet while violating one clause of the fifth amendment, the bill attempts to satisfy the next clause “without just compensation” by appropriating taxpayer funds to make the violated patent-holder whole (the CBO scored this cost at $1 billion).   So the bailout for the Big Banks and Wall Street firms is not just the technology royalties they escape, but taxpayer funds required to pay the  inventor the settling damages.  Allowing the executive branch to overturn a high federal court sounds to me like a violation of the separation of powers doctrine.  So it looks to me like a “two-fer” for “unconstitutionality”.

And, of course, as the USPTO withdraws patents that the courts had just upheld, more high-paying jobs will be lost in the electronic payments processing industry, innovation and entrepreneurship will be stifled, causing even more jobs to disappear. (disclosure: I have worked and innovated in the electronic payment processing industry for 17 years.  I hold provisional patents, but not in that industry.)

How long will it take until such “protections” are extended from the Big Banks/Wall Street industries to other industries that can afford K Street lawyers?

Ms. Bachmann, thank you for your vote against this measure, but why didn’t you, or anybody in your caucus, sound a loud warning to the Tea Party that this measure was about to gain passage?  I know you are working hard to gain the Republican Presidential nomination, but if that that takes priority over helping to protect our constitution, then you have signaled to us something we desperately needed to know about you.  Thank you for that, at least.

Ms. Bachmann, if you wish to restore credibility to your Tea Party Caucus, then you can lead the fight to repeal  Section 18 of the America Invents Act.   One of the three major Tea Party planks is to vigorously observe the US Constitution.  We expect the Tea Party Caucus to warn us of measures that could prove unconstitutional, just as we expect our Senators to resist collegial votes on those same measures.

The full Tea Party Caucus vote roster on HR1249 is below:

Representative – HR 1249 Vote
Robert Aderholt (AL-4) n
Todd Akin (MO-2) n

Rodney Alexander (LA-5) y
Michele Bachmann (MN-6) n
Joe Barton (TX-6) y
Roscoe Bartlett (MD-6) n
Gus Bilirakis (FL-9) n
Rob Bishop (UT-1) n
Michael Burgess (TX-26) n
Paul Broun (GA-10) n
Dan Burton (IN-5) n
John Carter (TX-31) y
Howard Coble (NC-6) y
Mike Coffman (CO-6) n
Ander Crenshaw (FL-4) y
John Culberson (TX-7) y
John Fleming (LA-4) y
Trent Franks (AZ-2) n
Phil Gingrey (GA-11) ??
Louie Gohmert (TX-1) n
Tom Graves (GA-9) n
Ralph Hall (TX-4) y
Gregg Harper (MS-3) y
Wally Herger (CA-2) y
Pete Hoekstra (MI-2) ??
Lynn Jenkins (KS-2) y
Steve King (IA-5) y
Doug Lamborn (CO-5) n
Blaine Luetkemeyer (MO-9) y
Cynthia Lummis (WY) n
Kenny Marchant (TX-24) n
Tom McClintock (CA-4) n
Gary Miller (CA-42) y
Jerry Moran (KS-1) y
Sue Myrick (NC-9) y
Randy Neugebauer (TX-19) y
Mike Pence (IN-6) y
Ted Poe (TX-2) y
Tom Price (GA-6) y
Denny Rehberg (MT) n
Phil Roe (TN-1) y
Ed Royce (CA-40) n
Steve Scalise (LA-1) y
Pete Sessions (TX-32) y
John Shadegg (AZ-3) ??
Adrian Smith (NE-3) n
Lamar Smith (TX-21)  y
Cliff Stearns (FL-6) y
Todd Tiahrt (KS-4)  ??
Zach Wamp (TN-3) ??
Lynn Westmoreland (GA-3) y
Joe Wilson (SC-2) ??

Just when you thought it was safe to glance away from Congress for a moment, another poisonous issue raises its ugly head in the Senate.

And it’s on a very, very short fuse – September 6, to be exact, the very day the Senate returns from vacation.

Yes, we were wrong to think that just because Congress is on vacation that we were safe to check in with how the kids feel about going back to school, or work on that sorry household budget, or enjoy the staycation.   As if the administration and Congress had not soured the economy enough already, on the Senate’s very first day back in session, Harry Reid plans to make our challenged economy much, much worse.

The “America Invents Act” is more poison for the US economy
It’s known as  ”patent reform” (HR 1249/SB 23) and it’s anything but reform with it’s current Section 18 intact.  It’s a bald-faced sellout to Big Banking and Wall Street.  There are several difficulties with the bill, but the one that jumps out at me is the fact that it’s simply a major job-killer.   And for unconstitutionality, it’s a two-fer.

Target: Hold and Amend
Through the kind graces of Sen Tom Coburn (R  OK) the Senate version of the bill is currently on hold, but that won’t last when Reid moves for cloture.   We should vocally support Coburn in insisting that the bill be brought to the Senate floor in amendable fashion so Section 18 can be removed and the remaining act be given full public consideration, then passed.  As noted above, time is short, and this is our last chance.  The House version HR 1249 has already passed the US House.

Section 18 is the poison pill
Normally, when we speak of a poison pill, we think of an amendment to a bill that will prevent passage.   In this case, the poison is for property rights and job creation in the US.

Predictably, Sen. Chuck Schumer is the one who inserted the Section 18 language into the Senate version of the America Invents Act, and Harry Reid wants the Senate to pass the bill without knowing what’s in it, so he scheduled the bill to hit the floor in non-amendable fashion the day the Senate reconvenes.

Section 18 applies only to the electronic payment processing industry* and it gives the US Patent and  Trademark Office (USPTO) the authority to revoke patents it has granted in the past.  Under this measure, the USPTO can only reconsider patents that have been upheld in federal court when challenged.   If the America Invents Act passes with Section 18 intact, then expect to see big banks and Wall Street challenge issuance of patents to inventors to whom they currently must pay royalties.

There’s the pay-off for the banks and Wall Street: they get out of millions of dollars of royalties paid to inventors by getting Congress to confiscate the property rights of inventors and kill plenty of jobs in the process – after a court has confirmed the validity of the patent!

How does Section 18 kill jobs?
If inventive companies get their patents revoked by the USPTO,  then those companies lose their royalty revenues and go out of business and the corresponding  jobs disappear.   But it gets much worse.  Remember, this measure applies only to the electronic payment processing industry.  Can you think of any companies that process payments electronically?   Venture capitalists are simply balking now at investing in new companies with new payment technology because of  Section 18.  Those jobs may never appear, and are certainly being delayed.

But many venture capitalists aren’t just balking at investing in new electronic payment companies, they are also hesitating to invest in any new company that will rely on electronic payment processing to receive a major portion of its revenues.

When new companies don’t form, new jobs never appear.

Then there are many established companies that will almost certainly be threatened in one way or another if patents are revoked simply because Wall Street wants them revoked.  Paypal, for instance, holds at least 4 patents that I’m aware of.

Oh yeah, then there’s that bothersome Constitution thing…
As one might expect, Section 18 gives the bill some serious constitutional difficulty.

First there’s the simple concept of property rights.

The word “right” is used only once in the entire US Constitution.  That’s in Article 1, Section 8, paragraph 8 granting powers to Congress:

“to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

Section 18 allows the USPTO to withdraw or void a patent, without due process, even if a high federal court has examined the patent, confirmed it, and ordered transgressors to pay the patent-holder damages for unlicensed use of the intellectual property.

The second difficulty is the separation of powers issue (noted above) raised by allowing the executive branch to overrule the judicial branch.  Section 18 does not simply allow for the possibility of violation of the separation of powers, it requires it in every case.  The USPTO cannot consider a challenge to withdraw or void a patent unless that patent has already been challenged in court.

Violation of property rights, absence of due process, and violation of separation of powers is non-trivial in my world.

Politics is no predictor
Curiously enough, politics is no predictor of the position a given member of Congress is likely to take on Section 18.   Obama and Reid are for it, but Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and uberliberal Maxine Waters are against it.   The best predictor of a politician’s position on this issue is to look at campaign contributions. You can figure that one out.

Since we know that politics is no predictor on this issue, there’s nothing for it but for us to contact all our Senators and insist they they help Sen. Tom Coburn keep a hold on the bill until Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid agrees to allow the bill onto the Senate floor in an amendable form.  Then insist that the bill be considered in the full light of day, with full public disclosure, before passage.

Action Center Available
My good friends at TEAPAC – the Pasadena Patriots in CA have taken the lead on this issue.   They’ve erected a web site called jobsNOTbanks.com which contains on online petition you can sign and an online Action Center with a sample letter to help you contact your Senator.

If you are a new media/social media  type or a blogger, there’s help for you there, too.

Action Now
If we follow our normal drill of waiting until the Senate has been back in session for a couple of days before we check in on what they are doing, we’ll have already lost this battle, and that’s exactly the way Senator Harry Reid has planned it.

Spread the Word
The jobsNOTbanks.com Action Center also has tools to help you spread the word to your friends and this part is important: We only have 12 days to get the word out and get this travesty in the Senate stopped.   We’ll have to overcome the natural inertia activists usually feel when Congress is allegedly on vacation.

If we fail to slap ourselves out of our August angst for activism now, we’ll see more jobs disappear, far less investment in new jobs, and a Congress that feels safe in confiscating still more of our rights in order to reward still more big campaign contributors.

Join us.

Crossposted to save jobs and protect private property rights

*Disclosure:  I hold provisional patents, although not in the electronic payment processing industry.  I have been active in the payment processing industry, processing payments for more than 10,000 merchants for over 15 years.  I believe strongly in the value of intellectual property and the property rights of  inventors, artists and creators to enjoy the fruits of their creations.

The tech-savvy (and even the tech-curious) among you may wish to mark your agenda when you arrive in Charleston.

At 8:30am Saturday morning, American Majority Action will be offering a special training.  Yes, I know it’s early and you’ll be troubled to cut your partying early and be sure that you program your cell phone, the room alarm clock, and the hotel wake-up call system to be certain that you make this traning.

It’ll be worth it, I promise.  AMA trainings are always worthwhile, but this one has a little extra ooomph.

One of the things Drew Ryun will be delivering to you at the AMA training is a glimpse of the Political Gravity desktop/mobile voter database system.  Using advanced routing algorithms, Political Gravity will be able to map the most efficient precinct walk for you… right on your mobile device.   I’ve heard (but have not confirmed) that Political Gravity will be exhibiting at the RS Gathering, so you may wish to look around to see if you can spot a banner or booth in the hallway.

I had a chance to visit with the CEO of Political Gravity on Wednesday and we had an exciting conversation.

I’ve already gotten several emails asking where Political Gravity will fit in among rVotes, NationBuilder and the embarrassing wealth of good voter databases becoming available to aid the conservative effort.  Alas, I’ve had to conclude that we lack information and it’s too early to tell – we simply need a closer look.

But the fruit of conversations with many who have seen it and know its capabilities suggest that Political Gravity is well worth some very close study.

If you attend the AMA training session, you’ll know before I do.

Wish I could be there!

Remember the Dale Robertson guy with the N-word sign who is founder of teaparty.org (disavowed by most real tea party organizations)?  Well, he’s gone and done it again.  And I fell for it.

The days of knocking on doors, walking precincts and direct mail campaigning to efficiently gather voters may soon be dwarfed if the vision of a handful of Patriots comes to fruition.

(Yes, the email and the web site really say that.)  Now if you know me, you know that  I know a bit about about online electioneering and software meant for that purpose,  mobile, web  and desktop.

Heck ever since before the days of the GOP Tech Summit, the old Online Action Center project and the successful deployment of PROCINCT, I’ve been wanting to dwarf the days of knocking on doors and direct mail campaigning to efficiently gather voters, so when I got the email announcing UniTEA Mobile, why I sat right up on my hind legs and started panting, in spite of the poor choice of words, eager to begin the dwarfing process.

Because I was skeptical that a mobile app could enable me to influence voters I don’t know yet – all from the convenience of my mobile phone.  I wanted to be convinced.

Now I don’t know about Dale, but the reason I walk precincts and sweat over direct mail (and I’ve done lots of both) is to influence voters that I don’t already know.  That’s tough work.  But Dale seems to be promising that UniTEA will make the need for that go away, so I had to check it out.

Now I’ve done enough first-time releases of new software that I know it’s very, very easy to gush a little (or a lot) when releasing a promising, useful new app, and gush Dale and teaparty.org do.  So we can easily guess this is their first-ever app launch.  But sometimes ‘promising’ is entirely in the minds of the folks writing the ad copy.  It shows in lots of ways.

I assume that when Dale says things like…

they [UniTEA users] may determine the outcome of the next Presidential election

I could naturally conclude that voter influence activity is in there somewhere.  How would we (yes, I am now among the elite of those UniTEA users) determine the outcome of a presidential election without influencing voters – by knocking on doors, phone banking or sending direct mail?  UniTEA does not seem to provide the answer to that question, but they make the claim that those activities may no longer be required for victory.  For our side, I mean.

But it’s not.  Not a bit of it.  UniTEA Mobile only furnishes you with yet another channel you have have to check in with to be sure you’re in touch with other Tea Party folk.   Busy social media people don’t need yet another channel (that’s not aware of other channels) to constantly check.

And UniTEA does not let you join or login with Twitter or Facebook and is not at all Twitter or Facebook aware, so if you are going to invite people to download, install, join, and get connected with UniTEA, you’re going to have to pull up your email reader, select the friends you want to send to… well, you get the picture.

If it works on your phone, UniTEA might be a great, if labor-intensive, app for staying in touch with your Tea Party buds if you can get them to join, too.   I doubt if you are going to find the voters you need to reach in your precinct in there already as they are in an app like NationBuilder.  On my phone it crashed, locked up, and nothing worked very well, if it worked at all.  Both the app and the marketing for it are very poorly designed. I will not exhaust you with the exhaustive list of problems in using this app.

But what’s making me go ballistic right now is some of those marketing concepts they chose.  Those of us involved with getting folks into the streets to do GOTV work – many of us here – know just what a tough time we’ve had getting folks to get off their keyboards and out in the street.

This app and especially the ‘marketing’ for it does not help.  I’m inclined to place it in the ‘incalculable damage’ column.

My fear is that we will finally get folks off their keyboards and into the street, only to find them on their mobile device  ’determining the outcome of the next presidential election’…

…and not talking to a single voter.

Indeed, they will be sanctimoniously telling us they don’t need to walk because the days of knocking on doors, walking precincts and sweating over direct mail have been dwarfed.

None of us would have predicted it after Nov 2, 2010 when the vaunted red electoral tide stopped cold at the California border.   But time, a harsh economy, bad economic moves by the CA legislature, and some very hard work by highly committed California conservatives have made a real difference in a  CA D+12 district.

You may not be able to vote for this man, but when he arrives in Washington, he will be pleased to vote for you.

In California’s CD36 (Torrance), conservative GOP candidate Craig Huey has been locked in a harrowing struggle with Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, the politician famous for giving major LA city funds to gang members.  The special election is slated for July 12 to fill the seat Jane Harman vacated.

All polling and early returns are showing Huey and Hahn… literally tied.  Dead even.

This is a major achievement  for the Huey campaign and the LA County GOP in a county where Democrat voter registrations run 2.4:1 against Republicans.   As noted above, the Cook Index rates CD36 as D+12.  LA County GOP chair Jane Barnett challenged the other county chairs in CA to fill up buses to send to CD36 this coming Saturday, and so far, at least 5 buses full of GOP activists are headed to CD36 from various parts of the state to do their part in electing Craig Huey.

Party officials and political pundits all across the country are watching this race closely with great interest.  A Huey victory would be a harbinger of great things to come for conservatives in 2012 and a heartbreak morale-killer for Democrats.  Especially if this occurs, as it will, in California.

Harmon has engaged the liberal OFA activists nationwide to help her with contributions and online call center activity.  I get the local OFA emails, and each day their emails are sounding more shrill and discouraged.

Conservatives nationwide need to be doing the same thing for Craig Huey.  Please click one of the links below to donate or call voters, and give yourself the gift of handing a stunning defeat to the liberals.

We need to drop the final ax on their necks now.  We can strike a blow for conservatism and set liberals back on their heels a bit for 2012.

Donate or use the Huey Online Call Center to reach voters in CD36 now!  To use the Huey Online Call Center, just go to Huey’s web site and click ‘Make Calls Now for Craig’ in the  upper right.

Let’s stun the Democrats nationwide and sow despair among Democrat activists by getting Huey elected in CA’s CD36 next Tuesday.

UPDATE: Three years ago Janice Hahn cut short an interview with LA’s FOX 11 when they were getting too close to the truth about Hahn’s office funding ‘gang intervention’ work through criminally active ‘former’ gang members.

A few days ago, her legal team tried a ‘cease and desist’ order to suppress the following report.

This woman belongs nowhere near a Congresscritter’s office. Please click the links above to help ensure she stays a private citizen.

The pricing for campaign tech is in free-fall.   If we applied a sort of  pricing version of Moore’s Law to online campaign software, you’d have the picture.  Capabilites expand arithmetically, while the price drop is almost logarithmic.

That’s only a tiny exaggeration (mathematically) but better illustrated with a direct comparison: the same technology that gleaned Obama’s campaign web site 400,000 online volunteers and $750 million in contributions is now available to the tiniest county party or town council member campaign for as low as $19/month.

The short story is that with a new platform called NationBuilder, you can recruit activists online and build your volunteer base just like Obama did with his million-dollar web site in 2008 – but it will cost you much, much less.  You may have access to a great GOTV voter database such as rVotes or PROCINCT, but you need trusted volunteers to use those systems.

NationBuilder helps you build a ‘nation’ of trusted volunteers and gives you metrics on how much you can trust those volunteers!  The puzzle of where to get committed activists to can trust to allow into your valuable database is solved!

Just a couple of days ago, presidential candidate Herman Cain launched his newest volunteer recruiting web site on the NationBuilder platform: http://www.arealleader.com

Hi tech, low price: that’s right, I said as low as $19/month.   There is not a single county party or backwater mayoral campaign in the US that cannot afford that price tag.  But price is not the reason to give NationBuilder a serious look; the reason to consider NationBuilder is the functions it delivers.

I confess first, that probably due to my own awkwardness with words, I’ve have perhaps sown some confusion about the topic of the first article in this series regarding rVotes, and NationBuilder.  Let me see if I can dispel that confusion now.

Every campaign or party effort needs a web site; such an effort is crippled without a wholesale web presence that includes at web site, Facebook page and twitter feed.  rVotes does not provide web sites for campaigns or party efforts.  rVotes is a tool for managing, sharing, and using voter data/intelligence for call centers and precinct walk lists, micro-targeting robocalls and mailers, etc.  If you send your campaign web site visitors to rVotes for information on your party or candidacy, all your web site visitors will see is a login prompt for trusted volunteers, and not your candidate’s swanky picture or your positions on the issues.

To explain and promote your party or campaign message, you need a web site, and a well-equipped web site will be supplemented with a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, both of which are free.  That’s where NationBuilder comes in.   Since I tested NationBuilder by building the party web site for my own GOP district in LA County, I’ll be reviewing NationBuilder in the first person; explaining my requirements and how NationBuilder fulfills those requirements.

rVotes is for GOTV voter contact.  NationBuilder is for building your online presence and your volunteer base.

First Requirement: Be Socially Engaging
As a former new media director for a congressional campaign, I know the value of social networking, and I wish NationBuilder had been available during the last congressional campaign.  What is an ‘engaging’ web site?  It’s one that draws visitors in and gives them an immediate chance to participate in the conversation and use tools provided on the web site to let them speak and publicly offer their support for the cause or campaign.  Redstate.com is a perfect example – anybody can speak up and share their ideas at Redstate.com and the good ideas are crowdsourced for promotion to the Recommended Reading list.  This draws in even more readers and writers to participate in the community.

Let me pause here to say that while you personally may not find ‘social engagement’ online persuasive or compelling, the record of successful campaigns proves that millions of  activists – the people who get things done for campaigns – do find it compelling.   If you are planning a campaign that intends to be successful, you cannot overlook engaging online activists, and the opportunities to engage them.  Ignore or understaff/underfund social networking at your peril; the social engagement model was a major factor in Obama’s 2008 victory.

The simple 4 page campaign web site with a splash page, and issues page, a bio page, a contact page and a donate button is the first sign of a benighted campaign that will have a lot of negative inertia to overcome before victory is even remotely possible.

That’s step 1 of the social engagement model – but for a political web site, the opportunities for social engagement are much, much broader.

A good political web site will actively build and promote an audience, then engage that audience and move them rapidly toward becoming donors and volunteers in the cause.  How?  By starting with the basics: offer your web site visitor a chance to register to vote – right there on your web site.  That’s the first true ‘community service’ value-add you can offer, and it’s free to paste in to any page on your campaign web site.

Then offer your web site visitor an opportunity to join your site as a supporter.  Offer them a chance to volunteer, and have the web site automatically assign them a trusted senior volunteer ‘point person’ to personally guide the newcomer into effective participation as a volunteer.  Needless to say, in the background, a database is keeping track of all this activity.

Engage that new volunteer immediately into your cause with the most compelling online tool of all – the one used successfully (practically to the point of abuse) by Tea Party/912 organizations to identify and recruit activists (and potential donor list information!): the petition.   Engage further with polls and surveys, endorsements, action (non-financial) pledges, moneybombs that display pledge progress, discussion forums, suggestion boxes, event calendars with RSVPs (that allows the RSVPer to also volunteer at the event; NationBuilder’s event RSVP system will even count and display RSVPs from your campaign’s Facebook and Meetup pages).  Then maybe they are ready for the ‘Donate’ button!

There is a certain class of online activist, and they are plentiful, who will work hard to earn online ‘activism points’ for their activities and appear on published leaderboards.  At Heritage Action, they are called ‘personal impact’ points and they’re a reward for engaging in activities that advance the web site’s cause.  NationBuilder calls their point system ‘Political Capital’ and you can set up leaderboards to recognize activists successful in the activities you wish to reward, such as volunteer recruiting and fundraising.

Second Requirement: Equipped to Go Viral
All of the above activities count for a lot in any campaign or effort, but they mean a lot more to the success of your campaign if people are telling their friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter just what they are doing on your web site.  To give an oversimplified example, this means that the default, pre-prepared Facebook post or tweet should be different on your volunteer page and your donate page.  Instead of all your pre-prepared texts saying something like ‘Check out (link)’, your default tweet/facebook post on your volunteer page should say ‘I just volunteered at [campaign] why don’t you? [link]‘ while the default tweet/facebook post on your donate page should say something like ‘I just donated to [campaign] – you should, too! [link] — NationBuilder provides for this in a very well thought-out fashion.

The whole point of ‘social networking’ on political web sites is to induce your supporters and visitors to tweet and FB links to your site to their friends and follower, thus promoting your effort to new eyes and minds on the internet.  I still see far too many GOP web sites who think they have their social networking wired up nicely by offering the familiar FB and twitter buttons on their web sites that lead to… their own FB and Twitter pages!   These campaigns are tossing away the power of social networking (they ar not acquiringg links to their web sites) and proving they are ‘caught in the echo chamber’ by linking to their own content instead of helping others link to their web site’s effort, sharing it with their friends and followers, where ‘viral’ actually happens.

To say that NationBuilder’s social networking controls are lavish would be an understatement.  NationBuilder has even come up with a nice little dual-purpose control that allows your visitors to post to both Facebook and Twitter at once with a single click — this control appears strategically and automatically at critical times for the web site visitor who has just volunteered or just donated – the time when you most want them to be tweeting or FB’ing what they just did!

Finally, there is the ubiquitous yet essential social networking control, the ”Tell My Friends’ or ‘Spread the Word’ links and control that allow you to email a link to your friends.  And receive ‘Political Capital’ points for each friend who accepts the invitation and visits your site.

Third Requirement:  CRM for Voters
I want my web site system to be like a CRM system for voters.  I want a database in the back-end of my web site that knows who my voters are, recognizes them when they join my political web site, and helps me manage my relationship with them month in and month out.

Then when election time rolls around, I can export my value-added bits of my voter database from NationBuilder and import the value-added data I’ve built over time into rVotes or PDI.   NationBuilder provides the voter database.  Free.   Built right into your web site control panel/back office.   I have that complete voter CRM functionality built-in to my GOP district’s web site at http://49.nationbuilder.com

Fourth Requirement: Professional, Slick, Reliable
For the most part, everything you see on a NationBuilder web site, including those attractive visual sliders,  is set up by pointing, clicking and some typing.  There is no programming involved.  But if you want to be a programmer, NationBuilder doesn’t stop you as full access is granted to raw templates, etc.

But my requirement is the site has to look slick and professional, maintainable by non-consultants, and open to add in advanced controls that do require a programmer.  NationBuilder delivers superbly on all those areas.

Conclusion
I talk to campaign managers nearly every day who are not impressed with the idea of providing an ‘amusement park’ on their web sites, full of gew-gaws for their web site visitors to click on to do this or that.  Ironically, these are usually the same campaign managers who tell me that their biggest problem in the activism sphere is recruiting volunteers, then identifying the committed volunteers from among their many activists.   Even when one explains to them that all that clicking in that online ‘amusement park’ is activists self-identifying (and recording on the web site database) that they possess and will act on a high commitment level, they still don’t seem to get it.

Obama used his phenomenal OFA web site to win election in 2008, then to help pass Obamacare the following year.

If  technology derived from the same model is available now to the smallest campaign, shouldn’t we all be using it?

If we don’t and our opponents do, how much more money will the GOP have to raise to move closer to victory in the blue states?

It was a finish to an event worthy of the finest televangelist.

No exaggeration.

The first-ever PC Strategy breakout session at a major national event, last week’s RightOnline received such an enthusiastic response that the finish literally looked like a successful altar call at the end of a highly enegetic revival meeting.

It almost overshadowed the actual content of the tutorial.

The deans of Precinct Committeeman work,  ’Cold Warrior’ of AZ, Kirsten Lombard of WI, Jim Hahn of MN, John Fowler of TX and Loren Heal of IL all presented their takes on the ease and effectiveness of Precinct Committeeman work to take back our country and change our party.  Tireless activist Loren Heal blogs on Redstate about his own presentation at the breakout here.

Because of Youtube limitations, we have to present the entire session is segments of less that 10 minutes.  Loading 7 videos might take some time, hit refresh if they do not appear in a few seconds:

Finally, MN activist leader Walter Hudson’s (positive) assessment of the break-out session which he called the best of the bunch:

If you haven’t yet, log in to your frequent flyer account now and see if you have enough miles to get to Minneapolis, MN at the end of this coming week.

The revered RightOnline conference kicks off on Friday morning, and this year, has several “firsts”.

One can hardly prioritize one over the other, but perhaps most exciting for activists in these spaces who have been working hard to promote the “PC Strategy” is the fact that for the first time, RightOnline scheduled a break-out session at 10:30am on Friday, dedicated solely to getting the word out about becoming a Precinct Committeeman and begin the true conservative governance of the GOP.

For those who have been working hard in this corner of the activism sphere, it’s like a dream come true.  But it’s much more than that.   Activist silverback “ColdWarrior”, the dean of PC activism, will chair the break-out session and will give a polished presentation on the ‘How” of becoming a PC.  Better still, he will then moderate a panel of well-known PC activists who will share their stories of just how easy it is… not only to become a PC, but how easy it is to advance within the party to positions of real authority.

If you are a precinct activist and plan to be there – just don’t plan to attend the break-out – plan to help promote the event as well, so ColdWarrior has a room full to overflowing.

Have I convinced you yet to open a new browser and start checking into the free travel miles you have available?   Well, there’s more.

In many online venues, you’ve seen many of us singing hosannas about rVotes, the flagship GOTV web software/database that finally gives conservatives the electoral tools that the left has been using for nearly a decade.  rVotes will be exhibiting at RightOnline and several senior rVotes executives will be haunting the hallways waiting for you to introduce them to the opinion leaders, funders, and other leaders you know at the show.

Don’t be shy about making Steve Adler’s and John Fowler’s acquaintance, and introducing them to the influencers they need to meet to be introduced into our online world of right wing influence.

Whatever you do, don’t lure them in to any party rooms and ply them with booze; keep them sober so they can tell the rVotes story to everyone there!

Sure Cain, Bachmann, Pawlenty and many others will be there, but the real attraction will be to see each other, get further acquainted with rVotes, and attend the PC break-out session on Friday morning.

If you are serious about online activism tools, then clear the deck in your browser – all the links below open new tabs or windows so you don’t lose your place in this article.  You will want to study the history of rVotes and it’s promise to the conservative cause.

Always first where news on the best GOTV applications have come from (and are headed) Carol Greenberg and Anita Moncrief have been tracking with OFA ever since it became a serious threat during the 2008 elections.  Naturally enough, they have followed through and have kept us informed as the same class of applications has become available to conservative activists.  Carol is one of few conservatives who has seen both VoteBuilder and rVotes in operation and will attest to the fact they are near mirror images of each other.

World class activist “killer” application rVotes is headed for the battleground state of Ohio.

Carol first broke the release news at the end of last month,  (I wrote about it here)  and now rVotes will be available in her own home state of Ohio.

This means the “early adopter” presence of the killer app in one of our key battleground states and promises to put us on near-parity with our opponents in that state.

But it will do far, far more than that for the conservative cause.

If you recall, Ohio is the state where I called for a major effort to enroll new PCs in the Republican Party in John Boehner’s CD8.  The reason, of course was to create resistance in John Boehner’s CD8 to automatic pre-primary approval of Boehner as the district’s ‘automatic’ congressional candidate.  I’ve been hoping that such a threat would stiffen Boehner’s spine considerably in the budget negotiations.

Now such an initiative (and similar initiatives)  will only gain strength faster as Tea Party and similar groups will have access to rVotes.   The Tea Parties and similar groups will have access at no charge however Republican candidates above the mayoral level will be charged a nominal monthly fee much less than other database systems which can’t do anything near what Rvotes can.

Today a person familiar with the history of OFA/VAN told me that when first approached, the DNC wished death on the developers because implementation of VAN would mean considerable loss of centralized control of activists’ activities.  But the unexpected bonus that the DNC didn’t forsee was that it also networked ACORN, SEIU (and other unions) and Planned Parenthood into a common, shared database.

Even a good measure of the Democrats’ training videos will stand us in good stead as we learn to use rVotes effectively in our own areas.

Rejoice with me for Ohio, and start your own planning for how you will get rVotes in your own state.

Ron Robinson is founder and creator of PROCINCT, is a GOP official/activist in Los Angeles county, a new media & activist blogger and a businessman.