TE do you know how many new PPA members since the beginning of the National Poker Week "promotion" ...I figure with the site actively advertising NPW we could have seen a nice spike in membership and hopefully awareness..

This is a special interest group not the general electorate. I'm sure half the members of PPA have no interest and signed up through a poker site free roll. Members who are motivated probably convince their relatives to sign or they just do it for them unknowingly, this adds to the total. This is why I'm curious to the PPA's actual membership. I know "one million" is a nice big number to market but I just question it's authenticity and where it comes from. I support what the PPA is doing and gave them money as well. I forward their email's and post on my social network site accounts with links. I just want to know how they arrived at this, is it honest or just a number that sounds good to PPA.

Do you think the groups like the NRA and Focus on Family have 1-2% response rates for email requests? I find it hard to believe and wonder what is the point of joining a special interest group and not bothering to take the time for an email request. Probably would take a person less time to do that than register for their interest group initially.

It's probably too late in the game, and I don't know if the PPA considered it, but I am sure we would have seen a higher response rate from their membership if they included a click here to add your name to the petition link in their email to members. Maybe they can do this for the next petition.

so when are you taking this to Obama. The fact you have been dodging the question is kinda scaring me.

Being "scared" about this seems to be an over reaction. We were unfortunately unable to secure the audience with President Obama during National Poker Week.

We continue to work on this meeting and expect to still have the opportunity later this year, perhaps with some of the leading professional players that were supportive of his campaign. In the meantime, the PPA will continue to promote the initiative, so that when we are able to present the petition it will have even more signatures. So if you have not done so already please sign the petition and encourage others to sign and disseminate to their friends and family for support.

We promise to keep you updated on our progress, but it wont happen during August.



Best,

John A. Pappas
Executive Director
PPA

Just so ya know...

The latest trick in "harvesting" e-mail addys is to sniff packets as they go over the internet, and since SMTP is an unencrypted protocol (for header info at least), it's trivial to extract e-mail addys as they fly by.

So, if you ever send an e-mail, your address has been grabbed by a spammer...it's not necessarily the company you sent it to's fault.

Damn, tried to sign, but I'm from the UK, wont let me. Good luck, I hope it goes through. Very impressive!

I'm not trying to bust your balls (I know you know I have defended you guy's allot here) but why would you put every where you were going to deliver this on poker week if you hadn't set it up or had some idea you could do it.
I hope this gets to Obama as I and my family spent allot of time getting people to sign it and for it not to get into Obama's hands would be very frustrating.

Have a run-in with an African American police officer and scream racism and you will get your meeting pretty quickly

[x] renewed my $20 PPA membership today

[x] called the offices and talked to representatives of Sen. Chambliss, Sen Isakson, and Rep Johnson (Atlanta, GA) today

[x] happy to report that all 3 interns stated they were receiving many calls in support of our fight


Click here

http://pokerpetition.com/

and sign the petition now. Today is the last day of National Poker Week in D.C.

did you even read what was posted in this thread? It doesn't matter cause they don't even know IF they will ever get to give it to Obama

Don't be so bitter, Jack. It's not like you went to some great expenditure of time or money to sign the petition. And you probably got a freeroll entry out of it, too! I'm sure the PPA did their best to get an audience with Obama, and I'm sure they'll try again.

The petition will still come in handy at some point, maybe even in the committee negotiations for the bills to show that there really are hundreds of thousands of voting citizens who are politically active on this issue. It would be nice to be able to get an audience with the President set up in advance when doing a petition like this, but it isn't that easy most of the time. Maybe down the road when the bill finally reaches the floor of the Congress for a vote, Obama will be more receptive.

I'm not bitter at all but I do think that when someone like the PPA say's sign this petition we are delivering it to the president of the United States on x date they should have had thier stuff in order and atleast known they had some hope of getting this done. This was very un professional on the PPA's part IMO it doesn't matter what they will do with it later or what "COULD" be done with it what was supposed to be done with it isn't. So the next time I ask the same 50-100 people that I did to sign this and send letters to do some thing else and they say what about the petition I signed? What should I tell them ahhh well nothing really happened with it it's just there :"friend's" well why didn't they deliver it to Obama "me" well they didn't exactly set any thing up with him to do it and the went to Washington but he wasn't available " People don't exactly like being bothered and when they see that they wasted 5 minutes of their time before why would they do it again int he future.
I mean we can't can even get all of 2+2 involved in sending letters and joining in now. When people see they are wasting their time by doing stuff like this it isn't good.
I don't think it's too much to ask that when they put some thing like this up that they have their ducks in a row and follow through with it. We aren't a bunch of high school kids getting a petition together so we can chew bubble gum in class any 7th grader that knows how to use a computer could have put a petition up and made false claims about what they were gonna do with it.
The PPA is an organization that accepts money from people and those people expect to see some thing this was pretty piss poor planning on their part and I def hope they can get future promotions like this right or I will stop donating money.

There is a lot going on in DC right now. While you and I would naturally see poker ranking ahead of health care and other issues, unfortunately that's not (yet) the reality of DC politics.

If John was focused solely in hitting the date, we could have all dropped it off with an Obama aide last week and then profusely patted ourselves on the back with great fanfare. However, the focus needs to be on overall effectiveness of the petition, and it will be more effective to find a better time to deliver the petition.

We know we can get it to President Obama. We can simply hand it to an aide. That's easy. What PPA is working on now is the optimal delivery.

The PPA is getting stronger, but we're not yet at the point where we can dictate the schedule of the President of the United States.

cmon now I know this.

I'm also on your side but when you say youre going to give it to him on poker week then it should have been. You made a claim that you actually had no way of comming through with and this is my point here. All I'm saying is in the future if you run a promo like this and you tell people your gonna deliver some thing to a certain political person you should have atleast took the time to set this meeting up before you got to D.C. and know where and how you were gonna deliver it.

You were quick to make such statements to me such as " we're not yet at the point where we can dictate the schedule of the President of the United States and We know we can get it to President Obama. We can simply hand it to an aide. That's easy. What PPA is working on now is the optimal delivery. and There is a lot going on in DC right now. While you and I would naturally see poker ranking ahead of health care and other issues, unfortunately that's not (yet) the reality of DC politics.
Then you should have known you weren't gonna waltz into D.C. and meet with him.

As well you said If John was focused solely in hitting the date, we could have all dropped it off with an Obama aide last week and then profusely patted ourselves on the back with great fanfare If you had no intention of delivering it on nation poker week then why did you make this claim on the petition?

You also really need to be putting this up some where like your web site and all the poker forum's you advertised this on that it was not delivered but you are trying or what ever to get to him so that atleast people know whats going on. I think I asked the question here twice before you finally answered it. This in it's self points to the fact you know the ball was dropped.

To the best of my knowledge, we had an appointment that fell through. I'll leave it to John Pappas to elaborate more if he cares to. The bottom line is that we could have easily handed it off to an aide and taken credit, but it's better to choose another date.

/signed

Its not a huge deal, but Jack's right that promising specific things and then not delivering makes the next claim by the organization less credible. Better to underpromise and overdeliver.

Again, there's no way we can stop the President or his top aides from rescheduling appointments. Also, I'm not sure a delivery during National Poker Week was promised. In my post, I said delivery would be "later this summer," and the site says, "this year."

If I am not mistaken there was a release(not a TE statement nor do I remember where I read it..It was early on in the advertising) that stated the specific date the Petition was to be delivered to the President during National Poker Week...This indicated to me that there WAS a meeting scheduled that later fell through...

Yes, we wanted to deliver it during National Poker Week. I just don't recall promising it.

Every where I read about the petition it said it would be delivered to Obama on nation poker week. I don't know why your trying to play stupid here but I can tell you that I don't like it and that it makes the PPA look bad which I really don't like.
If you did have an appointment and it fell through why didn't you say that in the first place. I know for me and prob everyone else it's allot more understanable that the President had to cancel than you guy's just never bothered to set any thing up and had almost 400k people sign a petition that had no hope of getting into his hands.