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Mitt Romney affirms 2nd Amendment does not cover rocket launchers
Still trying to wiggle into his new right-wing digs, Mitt Romney took a boldly awkward stand in response to Mike Huckabee questioning Romney’s commitment to the 2nd Amendment.
In an email to supporters, Romney affirmed his support of legally owned semi-automatic weapons like AK-47s. Mitt drew the line at “weapons of unusual lethality like grenades, rocket launchers, fully automatic firearms and what are legally known as destructive devices,” and would further oppose any new “exotic weapons.” Kinky.
Now the question is: Will Ron Paul say rocket launchers are protected under the 2nd Amendment?
New piece up on Huffington Post today
I wrote what ended up being a pretty difficult first piece of news for Huffington Post, but it was worth it. My story looking at a survey sent to Hillary Clinton’s email list was promoted to the front page of HuffPo for the morning and some of the afternoon, with a healthy handful of comments. It’s also up at TechPres.
Read “Clinton Polls Her Email List.”
Grading the Campaigns Email Campaigns
Email messages are the hallmark of online communications. Forgetting about Facebook applications and video mashups, email is the one tried and true avenue to communicate with constituents or customers. But if your inbox is as cluttered as mine, you know that it can take a lot to open an email from a presidential candidate who in all likelihood is asking you for money. So how close attention do the campaigns pay to making it easy to read their emails? TechPresident has already extensively covered the campaigns’ use of email, from Hillary’s handwritten notes to stripped-down, BlackBerry-style messages from the candidates. I took a closer look at the mechanics of each campaign’s email program and graded their performance based on accepted standards of email marketing. See who makes the grade.
This is posted on Tech President. Colin Delany has a great post that collects the recent flurry of attention around the candidates’ emails.
Is Rudy Giuliani violating the CAN-SPAM Act?
If you’re on Rudy Giuliani’s email list, be warned that you’re likely in it for the long haul. If you click on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of any of Giuliani’s emails, you’re brought to JoinRudy2008.com, his campaign’s website. There appears to be no other way to opt-out of Rudy’s emails, save for replying to the emails with removal requests. Aside from annoying, there is the chance that Giuliani’s emails are illegal under the CAN-SPAM Act, the federal law regulating unsolicited email communications. Let’s take a look at the letter of the law.
According to good old Wikipedia, commercial emails must meet several criteria to be compliant, including making options available for unsubscribing:
Unsubscribe Compliance:> A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
> Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
> Opt-out lists also known as suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.
At first blush, Giuliani is in clear violation for not having an “operable unsubscribe mechanism” in his emails. However, the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that enforces CAN-SPAM, provides for a few more options for unsubscribe compliance,:, including using a Reply-to email address to collect unsubscribe requests. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based
response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send
future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.
Unfortunately, because Giulaini’s emails are not explicitly offering a commercial service, his campaign is likely exempt from CAN-SPAM compliance as a political organization. (Religious organizations and “national security” messages are also exempt.) But just because his campaign doesn’t explicitly violate the law, it is still a bad practice to not give email subscribers a way out.
While loyal Rudy supporters are likely happy to receive Rudy’s emails for all of eternity, people who subscribed to the list to learn about the candidate or to otherwise observe do not have a direct way to unsubscribe.
This is something that the Giuliani campaign needs to fix by the next time it sends out an email, and it’s something the other campaigns should test so as to not fall into the same trap as Rudy.
Update: I posted this in the comments of my post on TechPresident
A couple of things.
I think a little bit more context is necessary – I apologize for not providing more in the initial post.
First, the person who first discovered this problem has repeatedly tried to unsubscribe from Giuliani’s emails without success – both through that unsubscribe link, by replying to the emails, and by calling the offices – to no avail. She is still on the list.
Second, just because you see a Lyris link doesn’t mean that you’re going to where you’re supposed to go. All email marketing applications – from lyrics to Convio to Constant Contact – offer clickthrough tracking for links in emails. The links are tracked by changing all of the URLs you make in a message to first hit a page set up by the company that tracks how many hits the page has, and then forwards you on to the actual page.
So even though it looks like a normal link an email, it’s actually just tracking the clicks without doing what it’s supposed to do. You can check this out with any of the candidates – all links on Joe Biden’s emails first go to a Get Active page (http://ga3.org…, etc.), for example, before forwarding on to Biden’s website.
I think Colin’s correct that this is a problem with the email template that has to be corrected, and not a malicious plot by the Giuliani campaign to trap email recipients forever. It is disconcerting that it is not a more obvious process to get out of the email list.
Nov 21, 09:34 AM / Comment [1]
Mitt Romney's Jewish-focused emails
A while back I signed up for every presidential candidate’s email list, and have since been flooded by email after email asking for money and everything else the campaigns think people should see.
Unique among the candidates is Mitt Romney’s sign up page, which offers the widest array of what I guess you can call “sub-groups” of special interests, including:
- African Americans
- Catholics
- Faith & Values
- Farm & Ranch
- High Tech
- Hispanics
- Jewish
- Law Enforcement
- Tax Cutters [ed: wtf is a tax cutter?]
- Veterans
- Women
- Students
I signed up for every single one. It’s not clear how they’re using these special interests, because I certainly haven’t got any “Farm & Ranch” emails. I have received an email invitation to Students for Romney; however, these groups could be used to suppress recipients of certain emails. (I’ll leave that up to the imagination of how that would work.)
But to the title of this post: I have received two emails to the Jewish-focused list. The first was sent for Rosh Hashanah:
As we approach the Jewish New Year, Ann and I wish you and your family a happy and healthy Rosh Hashanah. We hope with this new year that encouraging new strides are made to reach lasting peace and security for all Americans, as well as comfort for Jewish communities around the world. [...]I am sure that you agree that it is crucial that the United States remain a steadfast friend and ally of the State of Israel, the eternal homeland of the Jewish people, which stands as a true example of democracy in the Middle East and a force on the side of Western values and virtues in the global war against terrorism. [...]
L’Shanah Tovah Tikatevu,
Mitt
The second came tonight (from Romney for President, but the email is signed by former US Ambassador Mel Sembler), and is really kind of scary.
Subject: Romney Stands Against IranTo my fellow members of the Jewish Community, I feel compelled to update you on the recent action taken by Governor Mitt Romney. Governor Romney is a strong advocate for Israel and in turn, he considers one of the greatest challenges we face to be defeating radical Jihadists. Further, Governor Romney believes Iran’s regime under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has stated that Israel must be wiped off the map is at the heart of this challenge – a threat to Israel, the Middle East and ultimately the world.
President Ahmadinejad has been invited to address the UN General Assembly. Outraged by this invitation, Governor Romney wrote a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon urging him to revoke any invitation to President Ahmadinejad to address the UN General Assembly and instead hand him an indictment under the Genocide Convention.
[...] If the United Nations allows this address, Governor Romney wrote that “the United States must reconsider its level of support and funding for the United Nations as we look to rebuild and revitalize effective international partnerships to meet 21st century threats.”
Forgetting that there is an actual genocide happening and not a hypothetical one, all of this Republican chest-thumping about Iran is just insane! Our army is so overextended and the Republicans won’t even support letting them come home to rest!
Ugh. I’ll continue to monitor all the candidates’ emails for more micro-targetting and other stuff. I wanted to share this with the world in case you don’t see all of this that the candidates are sending to their ‘supporters.’
Sep 20, 08:18 PM / Comment [1]
John McCain's email strategy: questionably crazy, definitely anti-Hillary
I’m subscribed to a number of 2008 presidential candidates’ email lists to see how each is using to organize their online supporters. For the next 500 or so days, I’m going to follow and analyze the content, tactics, and strategy of the candidates’ use of email.
Today, June 30, is the end of the fundraising quarter. Every campaign has been ramping up their efforts to bring in money online. Barack Obama’s campaign smashed its goal of 250,000 donors for the year, and Hillary’s campaign just sent out an email stating a goal of raising $100,000 online in the last 24 hours before the end of the cycle.
But so far, the most curious campaign has come from John McCain.
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