Yesterday we brought you news that Republican senator Marco Rubio had backed down from his support of PIPA, of which he was listed as a co-sponser. Now it seems that Orrin Hatch of Utah, also a co-sponsor, has joined the ranks of senators rushing to withdraw their support. Hatch made the following statement late yesterday:

After listening to the concerns on both sides of the debate over the Protect IP Act, it is simply not ready for prime time and both sides must continue working together to find a better path forward. Rushing something with such potential for far-reaching consequences is something I cannot support and that’s why I will not only vote against moving the bill forward next week but also remove my cosponsorship of the bill. Given the legitimate vocal concerns, it is imperative that we take a step back to allow everyone to come together and find a reasonable solution.

Though neither SOPA nor PIPA are quite dead yet, news like this is encouraging. Hopefully more senators will follow Hatch’s example.

Turns out, it was far less exciting.

The press release from Trojan Tree touting the newest release of “Obama Clock”, a giggling favorite in the conservative world, says that “a simple click on each countdown statistic calls forth a graphical depiction of the depressing trend in unemployment, gas prices, housing depreciation, and public debt over the entire Obama term.”

So, I popped over to the iTunes App Store to download the free version of the Obama Clock app to see what this was all about. The reviews of the app were not encouraging. They were divided between hardcore Republicans who approved of the spirit of the app and people who were disappointed with the app itself as less-than-functional or pandering for upgrades.

Upon firing it up, the first thing that happened was a pop-up ad that tried to up-sell me to the Deluxe version of the app for $1.99.

Turns out, you have to shell out that amount to actually see the “graphical depiction” they announced. After clicking [No Thanks], I landed on the main screen. Here there are statistics displayed that reportedly show:

* President Obama’s approval rating, as reported by Rasmussen Reports.

* Unemployment, from Dept. of Labor figures.

* Gas prices, US average.

* House prices, from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, averaging all transactions.

* Public debt. From Treasury.

* A countdown clock to Inauguration Day 2013

Todays numbers look like this:

The purpose of this app, according to their press release, is “to meaningfully influence the 2012 election”. Since it seems unlikely that a Democrat would care at all to buy the deluxe version of this app, and it seems to be mostly marketed toward the same Fox News viewers who bought it up last time, I am not sure how they intend to achieve any “meaningful” influence on the election. A preacher can’t fill a revival tent by firing up the choir.

Any serious person who wants to make the best informed decision about whom to vote for in November will look at the stories behind the numbers this “clock” displays. Where did those employment numbers come from? Who is doing anything about those numbers? Who is obstructing those efforts? What actually causes gasoline price increases? What were unemployment numbers under the previous Republican administration? How have they changed since then?

This looks like this is a cute little app designed to take money from die-hard Republicans. The information it displays is nothing you can’t find in a quick Google search for the rest of the country.

The idea of the Internet being the great equalizer for grass roots efforts taking on established, powerful entities appeals to people with a broad range of interests. We have seen the non-stop buzz for Paul’s campaign as the latest evidence of this.

According to analytics firm Compete, Paul supporters have demonstrated how effective online tools can be in assisting in organizing events and fundraising.

Compete’s Matt Pace said the campaign’s use of Meetup.com offered a "case study" on turning online activism into offline action. Paul’s 82,000+ Meetup members held nearly 21,000 events to build support and raise funds for him.

Compete measures a metric they call Candidate FaceTime to determine how much time a candidate receives in front of people online. It looks at the total hours voters spend with a candidate on the Internet each month.

As might be expected, Paul tops the list, as people spent over 252,000 hours with him in November 2007. Another Republican candidate, Mike Huckabee, surged to second place after a viral video featuring him and Chuck Norris grabbed over 1.2 million views since its debut.

"Huckabee is the only candidate, other than Paul, whose supporters are making heavy use of Meetup.com to rally support," said Pace.

CNN’s Election 2008 poll shows Huckabee’s offline momentum matching his online fame. He ranked behind only Rudy Giuliani in CNN’s latest poll. Paul rated sixth among Republican nominees.

Pace’s findings contradict what a recent analysis of Google Trends revealed.  They should, however, stack up well against David Utter’s article on the Republican field (since both used Compete statistics).

According to Compete, then, the campaign website with the most traffic belongs to Barack Obama; Obama’s site received 318,179 unique visitors in November.  Hillary Clinton’s website was the closest runner-up, but it got just 289,615 visitors.

Things looked even more dismal for John Edwards, whose site received only 136,002 unique visitors.  Pace got into the geographic distribution of visits, though, and wrote, “Edwards’ focus on Iowa, where polling shows him very competitive, is evident as he appears to be drawing a considerable following in Iowa to rival Obama and Clinton.”

Kucinich, Biden, Richardson, Dodd, and Gravel all trailed the top three candidates, and did so in that order.  Still, with the better part of a year left to go before the election, there’s plenty of time for any person to shake (or muck) things up.

We have fun playing with Compete and its ability to present snapshots of web traffic data that can be compared with each other. Since Doug Caverly looked at Democrats and Google Trends, I thought I’d check out the elephant side of the political circus.

The web traffic for Giuliani, Thompson, and Romney doesn’t look very exciting. Each of the trio tops 108,000 visitors by a small margin for November 2007. Thompson enjoyed a spike upon announcing his candidacy, but has since settled into the pack of web interest.

One might guess John McCain’s traffic would reflect a dropoff in interest as he has suffered from woeful fundraising and the need to make some cutbacks in his campaigning. One would guess correctly, as his visits in November hovered around 92,000.

Add up the monthly traffic for that foursome, and about 420,000 people have expressed interest in their campaigns. Then we have some fun and toss Ron Paul into the mix.

Paul’s site drew over 496,000 in November. His site traffic began to rise from June through September. After that, I’m surprised a Game Over sign didn’t light up on the other candidates’ sites, as about 350,000 visitors arrived at Paul’s site in October, on the way to November’s figure.

How that translates to the real world won’t even be hinted at until the primary season begins in 2008. The Republican machine could be astonished if Paul’s web interest converts into votes, but considering how McCain once challenged George W. Bush before being knocked back, Paul’s campaign may end up being noteworthy for its dynamic online activity.

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CNN will begin airing the YouTube Debate this evening, with questions coming from people submitting them on video via Google

Among the 5,000 citizen questions submitted – 2000 more than were submitted to the Democrat debates back in July – CNN’s selection committee is busy taking out the "gotcha questions" on more sensitive topics like abortion and gay marriage. About 40 will be asked tonight. 

What the questions lack in the gotcha factor, they may not make up for in, well, gravitas, either. Though CNN has called many of the questions "poignant," the clips that have been revealed so far in promos for tonight’s event – submitted from Uncle Sam, Abe Lincoln, our "founding fathers" in period wear, and another one from the snowman – reveal the sideshow drawbacks of an otherwise meaningful populist effort.

So it loses a bit of sobriety in exchange for a chance at real, (filtered) public interaction outside of Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s a start, in some direction, at least, as long as our potential leaders and facilitators know how to behave.

Which is debatable, too.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the moderator of tonight’s, well, show, was roundly criticized last time for not holding the candidates’ feet to the fire when they dodged questions or gave their standard not-an-answer answers to some tough questions. But perhaps the criticism that stung the most was the after-the-fact revelation that CNN jellyfished on the real most popular question about impeachment of President Bush.

(They said the most popular question submitted was about whether or not Schwarzenegger was really a cyborg, but that wasn’t really true.)  

So, will CNN allow the people to ask the real burning questions this time? Early indicators say ‘no.’ But maybe this time Cooper grew a set and practiced how to pin somebody down when they don’t have the respect necessary to give a straight answer to an honest question.

Then again, maybe them having to answer unfiltered or hardball questions will just scare them off. This is second scheduled debate after all but two of the GOP candidates bailed on the one slated for September. I guess you could say the people are just lucky they’re showing up.  

Steve Grove, head of News and Politics for YouTube is more assured than I am, so maybe we should end on his more positive note:

"The core concept behind these debates is to let real questions from real people drive the dialogue. The power of YouTube is that it lowers the barrier to entry to engage in the political process, and levels the platform for political discussion. It used to be that a voter had to live in Iowa, New Hampshire, or Florida to engage with the candidates at this stage of the campaign, but YouTube has broken down those barriers, and has brought more transparency and access to the political dialogue than ever before. We think that politics will never be the same (thankfully)."

Long after other major networks have relented and permitted the use of their debate videos, Fox News wants all the Republicans running for the Oval Office to stop using theirs.

It wasn’t always this way. Go back a week, where Talking Points Memo noted who received a cease and desist letter on video usage, and who didn’t. John McCain’s campaign got the copyright infringement letter; to McCain’s credit, his campaign declined that request.

Rudy Giuliani, a long-time friend of Fox executive Roger Ailes, had plenty of Fox material on his website. It didn’t seem like his campaign suffered from similar attention from Ailes’ legal people.

After that little conflict became more widely known, Fox told all of the Republicans not to use its videos. That garnered a response from MoveOn.org, reprising efforts in April of this year to have networks release Democratic debate videos for others to use.

“It is time that the presidential candidates from both parties stand with Senator McCain and defend his right to use this clip to advance his presidential campaign,” Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig said on his blog.

“Not because it is “fair use” (whether or not it is), but because presidential debates are precisely the sort of things that ought to be free of the insanely complex regulation of speech we call copyright law.”

“One way to solve this is for all the candidates to pledge that they will not appear on any network’s debate unless that network frees the footage for all candidates and citizens,” Jeff Jarvis said at PrezVid.com. “It is, after all, our election.”

Prominent conservative voices like RedState.com blogger Eric Erickson and former Republican FEC Chair Brad Smith have also challenged Fox over the use of debate videos.

Though Fox has partially pulled itself away from a perceived conflict of interest by extending its demands to all Republican candidates, their stance runs counter to their motto of “We Report. You Decide.” It looks like people have decided they want fair use of debate video.

Mitt Romney – Jumpcut Candidate Remix

Jumpcut, the video editing site Yahoo picked up last September, will host the Team Mitt contest. The promotion runs through September 17th.

“Governor Mitt Romney wants you to make his campaign

The new feature to the Hitwise Data Center measures which candidates are the most visited online and which candidates receive the highest volume of searches. The sample of Hitwise data is available to the public.

The top Republican candidate 2008 Web sites for the week ending August 4, 2007 were Ron Paul with a 44 percent share of the market, followed by Mitt Romney with 16 percent and Rudy Giuliani with 11 percent.

The most popular Democratic candidate 2008 Web sites for the same time period were Barack Obama with a 40 percent market share, trailing was Hilary Clinton at 24 percent and John Edwards with 18 percent.

The Hitwise Election 2008 data is based on online usage and search behavior of over 10 million U.S. Internet users who interact with more than 1 million Web sites across 160 industry categories. The data updates every Tuesday.

There are nine categories that the Hitwise Election 2008 Data Center cover including Top Presidential Candidate 2008 Web sites, the Top Democratic and Republican 2008 Web sites, the Top 10 Presidential Candidate Search Terms, Top 10 National Political Web sites, Top 10 National Political Search Terms, Fast Moving National Political Web sites, Candidate of the Month and Election 2008 Blog Articles.

"As the Internet continues to evolve as a major communications channel for candidates and a platform for the public to research issues, we are delighted to share insights on how American Internet users react to political campaigns and policies online as the election unfolds," said Tessa Court, chief marketing officer, Hitwise