Las Vegas gets its first national political party; Online activism

Finally, the desert city of Las Vegas breaks the ice and gets its first national political convention.

The Libertarian Party will gather there the first week of May 2012 to nominate its national ticket of guaranteed losers.

The Libertarians’ choice of Nevada along with the Republicans’ choice of Tampa for their 2012 nominating convention in late August means the country’s two major parties have now settled on their meeting sites.

The only one left is the fringe third-party Democrats, who haven’t agreed yet on one of four cities: Cleveland, Charlotte, Minneapolis and St. Louis.

Some unions recently expressed opposition to North Carolina as a right-to-work state, and to Cleveland, which is said to be low in terms of union hotel jobs. Although it’s Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s hometown. And President Obama has gone to that crucial battleground state a dozen times, although Democrats lost all the statewide races on Nov. 2 and some House seats.

Goshdarnit, Sen. Al Franken really likes the idea of convening in Minneapolis. Its next-door neighbor, St. Paul, welcomed the 2008 Republican National Convention, which picked John McCain and Sarah Palin as its nominees. They didn’t win. The Democrats gathered in Denver that year to not pick Hillary Rodham Clinton as their standard-bearer. They won anyway.

St. Louis hasn’t been the site of a summertime national convention since Woodrow Wilson’s second nomination in 1916 during World War I — something about the impenetrable humidity of that Missouri city in August. Since 1916, many places in Missouri have added air conditioning.

Wayne Allen Root, the Libertarians’ 2008 VP pick, told Citylife’s savvy Steve Sebelius that Las Vegas was the party’s pick in part because of its low taxes, small government and large number of showgirls. No, just kidding about that third part. It really was Nevada’s emphasis on personal freedom, which Libertarians are said to like.

Online activism

A Facebook co-founder whose social-media campaign helped Barack Obama take the White House launched a “social network for social activism” website Tuesday called Jumo.

Chris Hughes hopes his new venture will succeed where others have failed: in getting Internet users to shell out hard cash for causes.

Alongside speechwriters Jon Favreau, Adam Frankel and Ben Rhodes, Hughes was one of a crop of twentysomething politicos Obama tapped to win the youth vote that propelled the then-short-term Illinois senator to the White House at 47, the fourth youngest president.

Hughes, 27, built campaign website my.barackobama.com into a financial steamroller that raised more than 2 million donations of less than $200 and helped coordinate more than 70,000 Obama-themed events during the 2008 election cycle. Obama once referred to Hughes as “my Internet man.”

Hughes helped Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg develop his idea for a social network at Harvard. Although he left Facebook in 2007 for Chicago, Hughes still holds a 1% equity stake in the company.

His new network is similar to Causes.com, which was started by Zuckerberg’s roommate Joe Green and former Facebook President Sean Parker, Times writer Jessica Guynn reports on Technology blog at latimes.com.

Less than 1% of all charitable donations come from social media, Guynn notes, something Hughes wants to change by harnessing social media’s ability to bring together individuals who previously have indicated they want to receive information about something, be it a cause or a politician or a cute kitten.

Facebook’s predominantly age-18-to-34 audience showed it could come out for politicians in 2008 but also largely stayed away from the polls in the recent midterms, where Obama’s Democratic Party suffered a “shellacking,” in the president’s own words, largely delivered by an older demographic (although one that is increasingly using social networks).

Top of the Ticket, The Times’ blog on national politics (https://www.latimes.com/ticket is a blend of commentary, analysis and news. These are selections from the last week.