Mike Pence to try to beef up anemic fundraising in Utah swing
Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence arrives in Utah Thursday to raise campaign money for a GOP ticket that has struggled to draw dollars from the Beehive State as many major Utah donors have, thus far, been watching from the sidelines.
Pence, the governor of Indiana, is scheduled to speak at Sen. Mike Lee’s third annual Utah Solutions Summit about the role higher education can play in meeting the demands of the workforce. Lee was a backer of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and has not endorsed the Trump-Pence ticket. He — along with U.S. Rep. Mia Love, Gov. Gary Herbert and Lt. Gov Spencer Cox — did not join a letter signed by other Utah elected officials this week backing Trump’s policies.
At noon, Pence is scheduled to speak at a $10,000-per-person lunch hosted by Scott Keller, a prominent real estate investor and major bundler for Mitt Romney’s two presidential campaigns. Earlier in the campaign, Keller also hosted fundraisers for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and gave money to Cruz, Kasich, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.
He had not, as of the end of July, given money to Trump’s campaign. Read More…..
New .vote domain name meant to cut confusion
ChrisChristie.net is a website run by a certified mortgage planning specialist, not the governor of New Jersey.
CarlyFiorina.org doesn’t take you to the presidential hopeful, but instead says: “Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain. So I’m using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard.”
A lot of websites out there use candidates’ names. A lot of them aren’t associated with the candidates. One company is trying to make verifying the official site of a candidate easier by offering a new domain: “.VOTE”.
From TedCruz.ca to TaylorSwift.porn: How the golden age of domain-trolling was born
The 2016 race has scarcely begun, and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz already has an image problem.
Typing tedcruz.com into your URL bar returns a black page that says “SUPPORT PRESIDENT OBAMA” in unequivocal all-caps. Tedcruzforamerica.com redirects to Healthcare.gov. TedCruz.ca confirms that the U.S. senator from Texax was, indeed, born Canadian. Tedcruz2016.com is pretty harmless — a carousel of scenic photos, with the promise that a real site is “coming soon” — but its owner has nothing to do with the Cruz campaign, and who knows what he or she is actually up to.
Never fear, Cruz fans: Your champion did eventually find an open domain name, in the cold and less-trafficked waters of the .org domain.
But the fact that his trolls conquered so much ground speaks to how popular this type of Internet tomfoolery has recently become. And in two short months, it’s going to get even worse: That’s when three of the most controversial new top-level domains — .porn, .adult and .sucks — are released to a merciless public. Taylor Swift already snapped up Web addresses on those domains to make sure no one uses them against her.
But as ICANN, the group that oversees and regulates domains, continues to make more of them available, the Internet is only getting bigger and more troll-able. New domains — .singles, .holiday, .guitars, .buzz, .gripe — have rolled out almost every week since ICANN began this latest round of domain expansion in October 2013. If you’re trying to protect your brand or reputation, good luck: T. Swift may have taylorswift.porn, but that still leaves taylorswift.sexy and taylorswift.pizza.
What is domain trolling, exactly? And how is it even legal? Given the strong anti-impersonation protections that most social networks supply, the ability to register an entire Web site in someone else’s name seems kind of … medieval.
And yet, there’s very little stopping jokesters, investors or less scrupulous entrepreneurs from buying up desirable Web addresses and either holding them for ransom or using them to straight-up troll.
“You can register anything you want in a domain name,” sums up Karl Kronenberger, a partner at the Internet law firm Kronenberger Rosenfeld.
Ihatethewashingtonpost.com? Yep.
Caitlindewey.sucks? Unfortunately.
These rules can vary by domain, of course, since each domain is managed by a different company. (Monolith Registry, the company that manages .vote and .voto, bans deceptive names and swears to vet all site registrants diligently.) And, to be clear, a lot of so-called domainers have legitimate business motives: They buy, develop and “flip” domains the way you would any other asset.
Read the full story at the Washington Post.
How Hillary matches up with Republican candidates in Nevada
A recent poll, by dotVOTE (www.polls.vote) of 857 likely voters in Nevada, shows that Hillary has some work to do in the Silver State. Nevada, an early presidential primary state, has chosen the eventual president in every election going back to 1976, when Nevada voted for Gerald Ford in a narrow loss to Jimmy Carter.
The early survey has Hillary trailing 5 potential republican nominees. She trails Jeb Bush by 3, Scott Walker (the leading Republican candidate in Nevada) by 6, Marco Rubio by 9, Rand Paul by 5 and Ted Cruz by 5. But, with almost a quarter of all likely voters still undecided, these numbers could move quite a bit over the next year.
The poll was conducted the evening of April 15, by IRV technology from a random sample of voters. Geography, party and gender were weighted into the results to improve accuracy, and respondents were screened based on their intention to vote in the 2016 General Election. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.35%, with a 95% confidence interval.
Nevada Presidential head to head Results.
Chaffetz offers plenty of fight, frugality
Rep. Jason Chaffetz often leads the national GOP chorus bashing Hillary Clinton over the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, ripping federal funding for Planned Parenthood or pushing to impeach the IRS boss.
Despite such roles for the 49-year-old chairman of the often-in-the-spotlight House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Chaffetz still sleeps on a cot in his office to save money. (He’s on his second after the first broke in the middle of the night.)
He says it shows the fight, and frugality, that he hopes Utahns appreciate as he seeks a fifth term in Congress and faces challenger Chia-Chi Teng in the June 28 GOP primary.
“I want to make people proud,” he says. “I want them to understand how hard I’m working to do the right thing.” Read More……..
Do Utah Republicans think President Obama loves America?
Salt Lake City, UT – In a poll of 687 Active Republican by Silver Bullet, LLC voters in Utah 52.2% responded that they do not believe President Obama loves America while 25.8 of the respondents answered that they did believe Obama loves America. Early this week, a National Survey by You Gov of all voters found that 47% of Americans thought Obama loved America, 38% disagreed and 20% were not sure.
The Utah poll was conducted by IVR on Wednesday evening calling only recent voters registered with the Republican Party. The findings differed some from the poll conducted by YouGov which polled 236 Republicans, finding 69% believing that President Obama did not love America – compared to 52% in Utah.
The Utah poll also asked if the respondents thought that High School Students should be required to pass the same civics exam new citizens must pass to become American citizens. Of those polled 73% felt that High School students should be required to pass the Naturalization Civics Exam. The current bill, SB60 sponsored by Senator Howard Stephenson, would require such a law. The bill has passed the Senate and awaits a vote from the full body of the House before it can be signed into law.
The final question addressed the 2016 presidential nomination for the Republican Party. Jeb Bush leads the pack with 21.5%, Scott Walker is not far behind at 18% and no other candidate neared 10%, 29% of respondents are undecided on their choice for nomination.
Man on a mission: Chuck Warren aims to combat political cyber squatting with dotVOTE
In the political world, Chuck Warren is a warrior on a mission to combat cybers quatting – the purchasing of online domain names for profit, mischief, or worse.
Warren, a prolific fundraiser for Republican politicians and candidates, is managing director and partner at Monolith Registry, the registry for the .VOTE domain. He has partnered with www.afilias.info – the second-largest domain registry in the world – to create an online venue for real information about real candidates and elected officials.
“There are a lot of tricksters out there,” he said in a recent phone interview with MassLive / The Republican.
Warren’s banking on .VOTE and its Spanish cousin, .VOTO, to reduce domain name confusion by creating an easily recognizable Internet space where voters can find reliable information about candidates and politicians. The nonpartisan sites are available to all candidates from all political parties, according to Warren.
“Your name, your politics, your official .VOTE domain name,” the website says.
There are plenty of high-profile tales about politicians who don’t own the Internet domains bearing their own names, which has led all sorts of confusion and devilment.
Take the case of Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO. The website CarlyFiorina.org doesn’t take Internet users to her campaign website, but rather to a site that states: “Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain. So I’m using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard.”
To illustrate the point, the domain owner includes 30,000 frown-face symbols for the alleged number of people Fiorina laid off during her reign at HP.
Fiorina isn’t the only public figure to get cybersquatted. It’s also happened to Charlie Baker, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. And they’re just a few of the prominent politicians who’ve fallen victim to the high-tech phenomenon.
JebBushforPresident.com is a site pushing same-sex marriage issues, not the political record of the former Florida governor hoping to be our next president. And ChrisChristie.net is a site run by a certified mortgage planning specialist, not the New Jersey governor who’s also running for president.
“This problem is not limited to national candidates; local elected officials in Massachusetts have left themselves open to cybersquatting by not owning their own name,” said Rick Gorka, a communications consultant and former aide to Mitt Romney.
Gorka said .VOTE aims “to prevent cybersquatting by only allowing the real person to register their name. No one else would be permitted to do so.”
For better or worse, cybersquatting is part of the new political landscape, a form of social media warfare that can resemble a never-ending political attack ad. Until someone pulls the plug on a particular domain, that is.
“Both sides do it, of course,” Gorka said, referring to Democrats and Republicans. “It’s all fair game in the wild, wild west of online campaigning,” he added.
Meanwhile, Warren hopes .VOTE will become the online equivalent of “the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for political candidates,” he said. “Like the blue dot on Twitter,” he added. “We just released it a couple of months ago, so it’s going to take a couple of (election) cycles to catch on.”
The .VOTE domain is not just for politicians and political parties, however. States are also using the domain, including Alabama and Arizona, both of which have registered election websites with .VOTE.
“There’s a growing market,” Warren said.
Purchasing domain names is a key way for public figures to keep tabs on their public image, according to ABC News. For example, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg preemptively bought over 400 domain names related to his name, ranging from Mikebloomberg2013.nyc to Bloombergistooshort.nyc, ABC reports.