Credit: Republican National Committee

Of course, at least half the point of something like the RNC ginning up a Valentine's Day e-card generator is getting a press hit out of ginning up a Valentine's Day e-card generator, but we'll oblige.

The Republican National Committee's "GOP Valentine's Day Cards" won't let you customize a Feb. 14th message for your loved one, but it will let you hit them with a lovingly illustrated Republican talking point or joke. The card graced by Harry Reid's face reads "Wishing You a Happy Valentine's Day, in Any Dialect!" Some of the cards, though, you're only going to want to send to friends and family who follow the ins and outs of the congressional process pretty closely. The card featuring a tired-looking Blanche Lincoln, for example, finds its humor in the Senate health care fight. "I Caved and Cast the Deciding Vote to Send You This Valentine," it reads. Legislative funnies!

Credit: C-SPAN

The White House seems to be gearing up to kill three birds with one stone.

During a pre-Super Bowl interview, President Obama announced that he's invited Republicans to a half-day summit on February 25th that will give them an opportunity to present their proposals for fixing health care. The GOP has complained that Obama hasn't yet heard out their contributions to the health care debate -- bird one. Bird two is that the GOP isn't in much of a position to turn down the session, but it may well be a repeat performance of Obama's "question time" with the House Republican Caucus from earlier this month where Obama grasped much of the limelight, a fair amount of praise, and a bit of breathing room for his health care push.

As for bird three? Well, you'll remember that many on the right and left have criticized Obama from backtracking on his campaign pledge to hold health care negotiations live on C-SPAN. It's become a favorite cudgel for Republicans to use against Obama's push for health care reform. The summit later this month is a chance to combat that line of critique, at least just a little.

I asked C-SPAN communications director Howard Mortman if the network planned on airing the proposed White House health care summit. Short answer: heck yes. Slightly longer answer: "C-SPAN will carry it live and replay it...completely at night," said Mortman, continuing, "plus archive the event through the C-SPAN Video Library."

The Bob McDonnell train continues to roll along. Traditionally, no good can come to a politician for delivering the response to the President's State of the Union speech. Come to think of it, that's where the phrase "sweet Bobby Jindal" finds its origins. But as the newly-minted, web-savvy Republican Governor of Virginia preps to deliver the Republican Response to Obama's State of the Union tonight, he's going in fighting.

In addition to making the inspired choice to deliver his address in front of a crowd instead of in an empty foyer, his team has snatched up the SOTUresponse.com domain. They're running Google ads keyed to "State of the Union" to get people there. On the site, they'll be live streaming and liveblogging McDonnell's speech.

They're also propagating the #SOTUresponse hashtag on Twitter.

It has pretty quickly congealed into conventional wisdom that the Scott Brown big win in Massachusetts marked the moment when the GOP/conservatives/the right closed the technology gap between them and the left. Maybe. But it's worth paying special attention to the fact that Republicans haven't just been busy the last few years mastering the art of Twitter. Perhaps extra chilling for Democrats is that, for the right, "rebuilding the party" seems to involve devoting plenty of attention to building out infrastructure. Under that umbrella, for example: a focus on the right to making that election staple of phone banking more efficient for campaigns and more fun for volunteers. (Or at least less painful.)

Kristen Luidhard's Indiana-based Prosper Group was brought into the long-shot Scott Brown run in Massachusetts to flesh out the campaign's online operations. Prosper built the campaign website, helped drive Brown's million-dollar plus moneybomb, and more -- working in close conjunction with the Brown campaign's in-house new media director Rob Willington. Willington and Luidhard's firm are both part of the tech-centered Rebuild the Party movement that came to the forefront during the last RNC chair race, and have collaborated on past projects, like the Judicial Confirmation Network's drive against Sonia Sotomayor. Luidhard has provided a peek inside the Brown campaign's new media operation here, and detailed what when into that moneybomb here.

But I spoke with Luidhard about a different aspect of the Brown campaign's digital strategy: setting up pop-up phone banks using VOIP (in other words, Internet-based phones). Boring? Perhaps. But boring, executed well, can help win elections.

Here's how it works.

If you talk to people who worked on the web side of things in the big recent wins Republicans had in Massachusetts, with Senator-elect Scott Brown, and Virginia, with Governor Bob McDonnell, you hear something over and over again: don't underestimate the power of what's free. Crazy talk for consultants, perhaps. But many GOP tech folk are eager to make the case that a great deal can be accomplished, even in down-ballot races, using no-to-low cost online tools from Twitter to Ning to Google Docs. Here, Vincent Harris, who ran day-to-day web operations for McDonnell's campaign, explains how to extract the most campaign value from your candidate's Facebook presence.

Here's one way to get the political opposition to stop posting mean videos about you on the Internet: switch to their team. Politico's Ben Smith picks up on the fact that the National Republican Campaign Committee scrubbed its YouTube channel for ads against Alabama Representative Parker Griffith after he announced today that he's changing his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, in part, said Griffith, because of his disagreement with how health care reform legislation has played out in Congress.

Of course, the Internet, she rarely forgets. At least one of the ads appears elsewhere online. In it, the NRCC ad creators loop audio of Griffith saying "We have nothing to fear from radical Islam" and "America's greatest enemy is America and its materialism." The second time the latter loop is used in the NRCC spot, it's shortened so that it appears as if the Huntsville-area representative is just saying that "America's greatest enemy is America." Presumably the newly-minted Republican won't have to worry about any new hard-hitting ad spots from the NRCC after today.

UPDATE: And Ben notes that warm words for Griffith go missing from the DCCC blog.

BlogHer, the online network that serves to advance the voices of women, is heading to Washington to brief the White House and members of Congress on how to use technology to engage women online. Here's BlogHer's Erin Kotecki Vest:

I am pleased to announce that on Wednesday, December 16th in Washington, D.C., BlogHer Co-Founder and COO Elisa Camahort Page and I will be briefing the White House and Republican leaders on just how important women online have become and why they need to continue to pay close attention to this community. We will be presenting to White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett and members of the administration's new media team and Republican Conference Vice-Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who has invited all 17 female Republican members of Congress to join us. We will share data about the most active women in social media and best practices for listening to and engaging with us.

Just a few years ago, BlogHer was little more than an idea: that there was a natural constituency of women who chose to engage online. That assumption has been challenged by battles over mommy blogging and the like, but it's powerful to see that idea grow into something that is now being listened to (even if it's for strategic advice on how to reach more of that constituency) at the highest levels of government. A meeting like this also points to the fact that the White House has an interest in connecting with online audiences who are organized around issues, as a complement to or replacement for treating big-name progressive bloggers as the natural point of contact online.

Interesting to note, though, that this briefing is only aimed at the 17 female Republican members of Congress. Where are the Dems in this, not to mention the men?

Please note, we've reached the point in the evolution of the Internet where URL shorteners are now partisan.

UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long. After some folks figured out how to make naughty with the new GOP.am shortner, its features have been pared down.

There's an interesting little story, having to do with the Republican National Committee's new GOP.com, that sits at the intersection of online public data and the growing interest in using the nuts-and-bolts of technology as a point of political debate. (See the White House's supposed "spam" list, the pretty empty dustup over Rep. Michelle Bachmann's SMS opt-in, Texas gubernatorial candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison's deserved troubles with search-engine-tricking slipped into the code of her new website, etc., for proof that the latter is quickly becoming a trend.) The Sunlight Foundation's Luke Rosiak recently tweaked the Republican National Committee for financial disclosures that showed what the GOP paid out in technology costs at the time it was overhauling its GOP.com website.* Among other expenses, Rosiak focused in particular on a $1,039,155 payment to a hosting company called Smartech, comparing it to $203,000 spent by the Democratic National Committee for similar services.

Only they weren't similar services, writes James Richardson, who once worked in online communications at the RNC; they only seem that way because of the crudeness of the public data. "Hosting" on a disclosure form, the argument goes, is a catch-all label for a variety of services -- making the comparison to what the DNC pays to host Democrats.org like comparing apples to a fruit basket. Richardson spoke with former RNC "e-campaign director" Mike Turk, who said, "I can tell you from my tenure there that the Smartech bill includes a lot of things that aren’t GOP.com." According to GOP officials, writes Richardson, that million-dollar-plus tab bill covers Internet services at GOP headquarters, the hosting of 31 state party websites, and bulk email services for the national party and 40 different state GOP branches.

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.

The new GOP.com has launched, featuring a tiny talking Michael Steele, a shifting logo made up of "GOP Faces" submitted by the public, and most importantly a collaborative hub based around user accounts. Steele's RNC has hopes of using the new site as a platform upon which to grow the Republican Party. Dive in and see how they did. (via RedState)