Manning Centre for Building American Majority

Last month in Ottawa, PM Stephen Harper and House Leader Peter Van Loan quietly met with Scott Walker, the anti-SSM anti-abortion anti-union Wisconsin governor whose imminent 2016 Republican presidential candidacy is already teetering atop a pile of Koch Bros. dark money. 

When Glen McGregor reported on the meeting yesterday, PMO spokesey Stephen Lecce came out of his little spokesbox and said "These are not the droids you are looking for," and went back inside again. 

Harper and Walker have so much in common to talk about -  union-busting and voter suppression legislation, campaigning on transparency and creating jobs and being completely crap at both, support for tough-on-crime legislation, opposition to gun registration and minimum wage increases and clean energy jobs policies, budget crises due to corporate tax cuts, unfortunate appointments of people who become felons in office ... and the Koch-affiliated American Majority creating a "national farm team of conservative leaders" and "training them in guerilla internet tactics."

Wait. What? American Majority political training group is in Canada?

Why yes it is. On July 4 the Manning Centre for Building Democracy and American Majority sponsored a social media webinar from guns and jesus gal Aubrey Blankenship, communications director of American Majority, to "help you become a better voice for conservatism online."




I don't know what Aubrey's training session on how "to become a better Conservative online" entailed so instead here is one from American Majority's Austin James teaching Tea Party members to spam Amazon profiles of liberal books with negative comments and bad reviews. 



You can still catch another American Majority webinar at the Manning Centre on Aug 10 when Political Communications Expert Jess Nicholson will teach "Crafting Your Message—The art of getting to the heart".

Ok sure, I hear you thinking, but the Manning Centre sponsors tea party trainers all the time so who cares what dumbass shenanigans American Majority touts at the Manning Centre this year?

Well, because as of 2015, American Majority's Wisconsin chapter had trained 128 successful candidates for state or local office for Governor Scott Walker. 
128.  In just one state.

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NationBuilder - And you thought CIMS was scary

Ten years ago the Cons bought CIMS, their Constituent Information Management System, and began stuffing it with our phone numbers and adding smiley/frowny faces beside our names and whatever other info they could glean about us. The other parties had their own lesser versions. Most of us first took notice of CIMS when we learned it had been used to perpetrate election fiddling in the last election. 

Now all the parties, although perhaps not all the members, use the newer and snazzier US import NationBuilder instead. Touted as more peer-to-peer grassroots organizing than traditional top-down voter ID programs, NationBuilder "builds social-media matching into voter files so that simply knowing an email address will let the software connect a voter’s picture, bio, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn."

Perhaps we should have paid more attention to its actual name.

Here Mike Moschella, a VP at the US company, explains the five keys for its success :

• Full social media integration means going beyond adding a Facebook icon next to a voter’s name in the file. Field staff need to be alerted when voters engage on their websites or social media platforms

• Campaigns need to share more than address and phone data with their grassroots leaders. Precinct captains need bios, photos and other information gained from online interactions.

• Training is needed to understand this shift in how campaigns talk with voters. A neighborhood leader will need to do more than cut a walk list - we’re moving from riding horses to driving cars.

• Campaigns must shift focus toward capturing mobile numbers. Having an event? Text to RSVP. Petition? Text to sign. Survey? Text to reply.

• The party infrastructure and campaign need to be in sync and must engage in the same efforts year round. Finding this data won’t occur overnight.

In March 2014, Moschella spoke at the Manning Centre. Here's a story he told [37 minute mark of podcast - transcribed]:

"For the last five years before coming to NationBuilder I worked in foreign policy in National Security so I worked with efforts around the world...You do a whole lot of work on that global police thing ... So I did a lot of work on re-imagining what an American foreign policy - a really pro-democratic, pro-democracy platform - would look like in a changing world because all these things with social media started to, despite people not wanting them, seep into what other countries were doing.  ... 

In Venezuela we ran an opposition race for a guy named Capriles against Hugo Chavez's hand-picked dictator, and they took 8-million twitter records, targeted 2-million of those people, directly talked to them on twitter with their friends -people, one friend connected to another person - and asked them to consider the pro-democracy candidate and 500,000 of those people got involved in that campaign. They probably won but the dictatorship called it 49%. But now there's a real opposition movement that's fighting for freedom in a major country called Venezuela.

In Malaysia for the first time ever, people used geo-targeting from social media to figure out where supporters of an opposition movement were and hold rallies in those slums to ask people to fight for their freedom and they created actually the first field campaign ever using a thing called NationBuilder."

It's a very interesting lecture from a believer in "social media as the personal touch of community on a grand scale" because as he insisted : "people do what their friends do".

I can't do it justice because it reminded me of Amway and the first year people sell insurance : You sell it to your friends and it only works if they in turn sell it to their friends and the product is always you. So listen to it for yourself.

After his presentation, he took questions from the floor.
Con MP Stella Ambler wanted to know how she could find out how many of her 1389 Facebook followers were actually in her small suburban riding - "Is there a way to do that?" - while noting that "our privacy laws are different in this country". 

Moschella : 

"So here's the thing about Facebook. Any time anyone takes an action, FB has three types of actions - you can share something, you can comment on something, or you can like something. And actually the terms of service of FB dictates that when you take an action on FB, that's actually a public thing. Cool, huh? 

What that allows us to do is connect those actions into your NationBuilder database. So if your FB page is connected to your site which is connected to your backend database, then we can show you how to do this - it's like a two, three minute process to get going - literally all you need is a password. Then anytime somebody shares, comments, or likes a post, it will either a)create a profile for that person in your NationBuilder database so now you own that relationship, or b) find their existing profile if they're already in there and record that they have taken that action. 

When you know all the actions that people take, then you can do the next thing which is really key to your engagement which is actually quantifying that engagement. So what you would do in your campaign, is say, sharing something on FB is worth one point, commenting is worth two points, making a donation is worth 10 points. And when you have all this together, then you'll actually see that Edward is worth 20 points and Mike is worth 50 points. So then you can sort how valuable people are in your community and really smartly target them."

                                                                                     [snip] 

Ambler : 

"So .. texting. How do you ... you don't have their cell phone numbers. Their addresses aren't on there on their FB profiles. Sorry to get into the weeds like this..."

Answer from either Moschella or Mike Martens, director of the Manning Centre’s School of Practical Politics - I couldn't tell : 

"You create a data capture system that grabs their cell phones. It's not that hard to do. You have to get organizing to get more data and it's like a cycle - it's like a snowball effect - you have to start somewhere but if you do data capture well, you'll be able to get their cellphone. Mike is going to shut me up."

"Stella, you're a member of Parliament? So you use CIMS. CIMS has all the phone numbers. So the question is whether or not CIMS and NationBuilder can integrate and once the Party starts working with the Manning Centre, and we're working with them to do that, Manning Centre is working with NationBuilder to do training and we can start training on how CIMS and NationBuilder work in a legal way regarding the privacy thing. So somebody needs to figure that out. There are legal ways - I know some of them - but we're getting into some really fine- some of these things were answered in the morning. My point is not that we can't talk about them here except-"

Ambler :  "No, I'm just so pleased to know somebody is having that conversation."

Mike ... or perhaps Mike : 

"We're thinking about this, we're working on it. NationBuilder has some reallly neat - one thing that NationBuilder is really exciting is its text capability based on being in an event like this, telling everybody text me. Well as soon as they do that, guess what - you've got their cell phone number. So then you've got to think of creative events where then that kind of conversation can occur and that's a different kind of campaign than emailing. 

I guess my point is, Stella, that we are thinking that NationBuilder has solutions. We just need to figure out how the NationBuilder and CIMS systems, which currently the CIMS system is kind of closed, but you can export data out of CIMS, load it into NationBuilder, interact with people, and then load that data back into CIMS. So that's just very superficially how these things can work but there's probably even more open ways - things called APIs that interact two systems in a live manner that might be discovered but we'll have to work with NationBuilder to figure it out."

Mike Martens : "Folks, 30 seconds before Mark Steyn's session begins ..."

h/t to Port Moody/Coquitlam Election 2015, who wrote a post on Newclear's young Con contenders that I riffed on on Tuesday, and then he added a look at the NewClear/NationBuilder nexus to his post which has set me off again...

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Cons ban staff from testifying at committees

Obviously Con political staffers couldn't continue to rely a fire alarm going off every time they were summoned to testify before a parliamentary committee, so on Tuesday morning Government House leader Jay Hill will announce a new policy in the House of Commons exempting them from ever appearing at all.
[Jay Hill, amiable defender of the Cons 2007 manual on disrupting committees, once "lavished praise on the committee chairs who caused disruptions and admonished those who prefer to lead through consensus".]

"The Conservative cabinet has decided to ban its political staffers from appearing as witnesses before committees ....
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s director of communications, Dimitri Soudas, explained the new policy Sunday during an appearance on CTV’s Question Period.
“Ministers are the ones who are accountable and answer to Parliament,” said Mr. Soudas"

That would be the same Dimitri Soudas whose appearance before the House of Commons ethics committee was sadly pre-empted last Tuesday by a fire alarm bell going off just moments before he was due to testify about the government's crap handling of Access to Information requests.

Yes, it's only the ministers who are accountable to Parliament, but as Accidental Deliberations points out:

"The Cons' new policy is that all committee questions must be directed toward the lone group of people who can't be subpoenaed to testify."

Well, Steve has never been overly fond of either Parliament or its committees, has he?

We will of course still be hearing from government staffers through the Cons' new hasbara program for Facebook and message boards :

"The next time you post an opinion in an online forum or a Facebook group message board, don't be surprised if you get a rebuttal from a federal employee.

The government is looking for ways to monitor online chatter about political issues and correct what it perceives as misinformation.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has paid [Social Media Group] $75,000 "to monitor social activity and help identify ... areas where misinformation is being presented and repeated as fact," Simone MacAndrew, a department spokesperson, said in an email.

The firm alerts the government to questionable online comments and then employees in Foreign Affairs or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who have recently been trained in online posting, point the authors to information the government considers more accurate."

Foreign Affairs employees "recently trained in online posting ..."
Ho boy. Are they all gonna be called Bob from Burnaby or will we have to figure who the bots are for ourselves? Bot from Burnaby - coming soon to a Facebook page near you.
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h/t Waterbaby by email
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Harper's Big Live Late Pretaped Youtube Debut

So y'all recall the hype ...

Steve! Live and interactive and unrehearsed!

It's your interview with Steve! Ask him your questions and vote 'em up on youtube!

Steve will have no idea beforehand what wild questions will be thrown at him.

Pick a card, any card...

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So we all troop over to Kady's at CBC at the appointed hour to enjoy a little live blogging of this daring and unlikely foray into new media and we stare at a black screen for oh, an hour or so, waiting.

Steve appears to have prorogued youtube.

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Eventually word comes down from the google gods - It will not be interactive. It is already pretaped, transcripts will be delivered to the real media ahead of time, and Youtube of same to be trundled along some time later.

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When it finally arrives, it's a fireside chat beside a monitor instead of a fire, it's a townhall without people, it's question period without opposition. It is the perfect medium for Steve.

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Transcript and Youtube

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Steve reaches out to Youtube world

As PMO spokesthingey Dimitri Soudas pitches it somewhat awkwardly on YouTube :

Ask Your Questions to Prime Minister Harper

Submit your questions for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in his response to the Speech from the Throne and the recent budget. The Prime Minister will answer a selection of your top-voted questions in an exclusive YouTube interview next Tuesday March 16, 2010 at 7 p.m. ET.

It must have seemed like a pretty good idea at the time when they were kicking it around the PMO - avoiding reporters while controlling the message, getting down with the new social media, and reaching out directly to the demographic with a solid majority on Youtubeworld locked down - youth.

But as any working clown will tell you, teh youth are a very tough crowd. A sampling of questions submitted to Steve so far :

lol look at this talkcanada guy trying to be all formal and serious on a crap website

can you explain how selling our Natural Resources is good for Canadians

Check out the proper way to crush a beer can with ur head!!! It rulez

why is the quality of this video so shitty?

Mr Harper this a question regarding what has happened to the Afghan detainees. Currently by having retired Supreme Court Justice Iacobucci look into the documents, you have only created a smokescreen to hide behind. You have not chosen a sitting judge who would actually have power to do a proper inquiry. As well you are currently in violation of the Constitution by withholding these documents from parliament. When will you be releasing the documents regarding the Afghan detainees to parliament?

This guy sounds like he just gargled a bucket of cum

i gotta question,?? which u will never reply to, ... why the fuck do you lie stephen Harper??

WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO LEGALIZE WEED ?

He hasn't listened to Canada for a long time, I'm Surprised he wants to start now. :/

What did you do during the time Parliament was prorogued besides sitting next to Wayne Gretzky and coming up with a plan to change the national anthem?

What's with the low-quality vid and the script reading...

I agree that the stimulus package was a good oppurtunity to further our advancements in green energy, but due to your lack of intrest in said topic, my scrotum gets itchy when I engage in sexual intercourse with multiple women. is this because of your lack of intrest in energy efficiency? If so what steps will you take to ensure the cleanliness of my yambag? Will you tax it? WE NEED answers Mr. Harper!

legalize marijuana?

When will your government end the waste of corporate tax cuts? As well, when will post secondary education become a priority for your party?
Furthermore, why are your MP's so disrespectful to Canadians?

WHAT'S YOUR HAIR MADE OF?

Mr Prime Ribroast Minister, CAN I HAS CHEEZBURGAR?

Mr Harper, Will you please sing Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain" on live television?

Why have you not requested that the United States release Omar Khadr from the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp? He was just a child when he was arrested in Afganistan. His continuing detention puts Canada's image as a champion of human rights in jeopardy. (thumbs up if you want Mr. Harper to reply to this question.)

My question is how can you live with yourself?As far as being a leader that has plunged Canada into record debt with reckless spending and poor decision making, I cannot see a positive side to this Prime Minister. Absolutely shameful governing period.

legalize marijuana .

stephen harper - can you please quit your job

I couldn't be bothered putting down questions for that dud Harper

Jeez At least make it watchable. I mean it's not 2005 anymore. You are the government and you can't afford a freaking HD camera... sad

I think the prime minister should invest in a steady cam and a better mic for his youtube rep... c'mon...

fucking numpty

How can you possibly justify not legalizing marijuana?

Why are we "fighting" for peace (contradiction)? As a Canadian i hear that we are the peacemakers who care about all beings but yet we barely support those who are less fortunate. If Canada is known as the peacemakers of the world and have great alliances (U.S.A) than why do we waste our much needed money on weapons of war instead of food and shelter for the world?

why wont you legalize weed ?

How much did this little google propaganda exercise cost Canadians?Are cameras for various networks next to be invited in to parliament for your grand eminence to pretend you are addressing the populace when you are merely manipulating us?

testicals. that is all.

I think I have a way to cut the deficit ... stop making Canadians pay for your makeup PM. You want to look the way you do - do it on your own darn dime.

I find it amusing that marijuana is the topic of perhaps 30% of the questions (probably more) and is currently the top 3 asked question

What agreement we have with Israel? Will you send troops for Israel to attack Iran?

BORING

With crime at an all time low, why get tough on it, as well as building more prisons, shouldn't we build more schools and hospitals?Is there nothing to be learned from californias budgeting nightmare experience?

Harper, why have you continued to ignore your own Accountability Act?

why are you such an asshole on climate change?

Would you debate legalization of small quantities of marijuana considering:
A:Tax money saved w/reduced policing/incarceration/court costs
B:Tax Revenue increases. We're able to make wine/beer. 99% do not! Resulting taxation income is massive.
C:Drug cartels make Billion$! Then expand prostitution/guns/armed gangs
D:Create new job markets in these depressed times. Hemp is so useful/environmental.
Considering the facts, how can continued Fed Prohibition of marijuana be justified?

Why won't you call an impartial public inquiry into the Afghan detainee affair?

When will Canada take a leadership role in the world when it comes to the environment? I am sick and tired of the Prime Minister taking a supporting role on such an important issue affecting our lives. Stop using the economy to ignore such a pressing issue. Time is no longer on our side when it comes to this issue. Please act now!

I often hear of you dirty playbook tricks , can you share them with the rest of us to use !Help us all learn to be Cons !

Why bother? Harper prorogued parliament so he wouldn't have to listen to anyone else. What makes you think he's going to listen now?

Legalize marijuana.

Methinks Mr Soudas better get himself a coupla sockpuppets up there pretty damn quick or Steve will be spending next Tuesday night talking about legalizing weed, why Soudas' vid is so crap, and um, testicals.

h/t Kady, who has a couple of questions of her own about the appropriateness of Google gifting free Youtube facetime to Steve while registered as a federal lobby group.
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And here we go : Harper's Big Live Late Pretaped Youtube Debut
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Frank Luntz : Spinning a Global Language Dictionary

Republican shuckster Frank Luntz has taken time out from his busy schedule attacking Obama and his semi-somewhat-un-universal healthcare proposal in the US to put together a 116 page Global Language Dictionary of talking points to reshape public perception of Israel's carnage in Gaza side of the story on internet chat forums, blogs, Twitter and Facebook :

Be positive.
Turn the issue away from settlements and toward peace.
Invoke ethnic cleansing.
Don't mention religion or use biblical quotations.

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What a spectacularly awful idea.

Presumably intended for use in conjunction with Project Megaphone. and his "Israel Communication Priorities 2003", also for The Israel Project.

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Frank, you will recall, previously advised Steve on how to sell the ReformaTory brand to Canada and how to deny the existence of global warming sufficient to the task of forestalling government action on climate change on both sides of the border for years.

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Let's look at just one of Frank's talking points.

While "Invoke ethnic cleansing" would seem a very unlikely propaganda prospect given the circumstances, here Frank is reframing the issue regarding the prospect of Israelis having to give up (further?)settlements in the West Bank. The "best settlement argument", says Frank, is to make a parallel between the Arab communities in Israel and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank:

"The idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can’t be any Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea."

Wow.

OK, time to bring on the "Internet fighting team" !

This is the name given by the Israeli Foreign Ministry to a paid "team of students and demobilized soldiers who will work around the clock writing pro-Israeli responses on Internet websites all over the world, and on services like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube."

"They will punch a card," says Elan Shturman of the Foreign Ministry.

"Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the policy-explanation department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the Foreign Ministry developed."

Good to know. Thanks for the heads up. A little hard on the now-discredited people out there genuinely trying for honest debate, don't you think?

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So the next time Steve refers to his fellow Canadian parliamentarians as anti-Semitic for criticizing Israel, or Stockwell Day applauds what it pleases the Israeli government to call our Canada-Israel Homeland Security pact, or a sitting British MP is refused entry to Canada for delivering aid to Gaza, or a Star editor unfairly castigates one of her own columnists in public at the behest of the CJC, or a Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism blubbers on about "blood libel" and some new expanded definition of anti-Semitism, just ask them to point you instead to the relevant talking point in Frank's dictionary. It'll save a lot of your time.

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Yes, I'm ragging on about Israel a lot.

There seems to have been a sudden bump in officially sanctioned nonsense about Israel since we finalized that public security deal last year to protect the Canada-Israel border. *snerk*

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For a very good article on the alarming ties between Steve's government and Jewish lobbies and the Christian right in Canada, see retired B'nai Brith Chair and Concordia University History Professor Emeritus Stephen Scheinberg :

Partners for Imperium: B’nai Brith Canada and the Christian Right.

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