PACked

Jeb Bush isn’t running for president, he says. That’s how he can legally raise millions in as-yet undisclosed dollars for his Super PAC, which is carrying out many of the activities of a typical presidential campaign at this stage in the race, as Nicholas Confessore and Eric Lichtblau report in the New York Times.

Nevertheless, when in Iowa Saturday, Bush told reporters that he was definitely going to compete for the state’s caucus-goers, saying, “Why would I be here if I wasn’t going to compete in Iowa?” As Eli Stokols reports for Politico, Bush added, “What’s relevant is running a campaign, creating a strategy, building a good team towards success, which is in the primaries, and doing it in a way that makes it possible to win the general, which is the whole point of this.”

America Rising PAC, a conservative group founded by Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, is having success creating social media content attacking Hillary Clinton from the left and getting some progressives online to share it, Ashley Parker and Nick Corasaniti report for the New York Times.

The New York Times interactive team has built a nifty chart that lets you track the leading operatives from all the major presidential campaigns and their tangled trajectories from campaigns, PACs and party committees past to present.

Solomon Kahn, the head of the data team at PaperlessPost, has built a powerful, free new tool for visualizing who is funding America’s politicians that allows you to dig all the way down to the granular level. For example, he shows how his Congressman, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-MA), went from being heavily backed by labor to being heavily backed by finance, discovering the one day in 2007 when 14 people from the Blackstone Group maxed out on their donations to him. He’s raising money on Kickstarter now to help hire a communications strategist to get the word out. (h/t Lawrence Lessig)

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) tweets, with a photo: “Reading the FBI file on SCLC & myself, I am more convinced than ever that we cannot allow government surveillance.”

With President Obama in Camden, NJ, today to talk about improving community policing, White House CTO Megan Smith and domestic policy assistant Roy Austin Jr. are rolling out an ambitious “Police Data Initiative” in partnership with 21 leading jurisdictions around the country. A volunteer tech team is doing a two-day design sprint with the Camden police department, kicking off a much larger effort to help update how cops use data that has a big emphasis, Smith and Austin write, on using open data “to build transparency and increase community trust.”

Related: Presidential Innovation Fellow Denice Ross and the Police Foundation’s Jim Burch blog at Code for America on how police departments can jumpstart their release of open data.

Also related: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reading The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, for his current “A Year of Books” Choice. Alexander’s work underpins much of the rising movement against police brutality and mass incarceration.

Doing an online townhall late last week, Zuckerberg was challenged to explain why numerous accounts and posts of users in Ukraine were being taken down without being in violation of Facebook’s community guidelines, Tetyana Lokot reports for Global Voices Online. His answer, that “we don’t allow content that is overtly hateful, contains ethnic slurs, or incites violence,” will likely not satisfy his Ukrainian critics, she reports.

Blogger Scott Santens takes a long look at what happens when self-driving trucks eliminate millions of jobs, arguing that “Just as our roads a decade from now will be full of machine drivers instead of human drivers, a 21st century economy shall be driven by human consumers, not human workers, and these consumers must be freely given their purchasing power. If we refuse, if we don’t provide ourselves a universal and unconditional basic income soon, the future is going to hit us like a truck—a truck driven solely by ourselves.”

Such a strange vibration: Some teenagers are dropping out of high school and moving to San Francisco to do start-ups, Nellie Bowles reports for California Sunday magazine. She notes, “Behind this movement is money. A lot of money. These teens aren’t operating in a vacuum; they’re part of a new, ever-hungrier venture-capital ecosystem.” No flowers in their hair…

If you are frustrated with how your organization manages its technology tools, read this conversation between Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association digital consultant Sam Dorman and Greenpeace Mobilization Lab’s Michael Silberman. Dorman is onto something critical: the need to build a “digital product team…to make sure your organization is using great, high-quality technology that is fully aligned with what you’re trying to accomplish.” This excerpt gives some flavor of what he means:

Most groups love their website on the day they launch it. But there’s usually very little investment in it after that. And meanwhile, everything else is changing around it so every day the website gets a little bit farther and farther out of date. Eventually, the website becomes a huge source of frustration and embarrassment, and gets in the way of people doing their jobs. Then eventually you knock the whole thing down and spend a huge amount of time and money starting the whole cycle over again. The problem is, you only had this brief window of time where you actually loved your website and were getting good value from it! A product approach to the website is different. Instead of just letting it slip into decline, you admit that a website needs continued focus and continued resources in order to stay useful and relevant and secure, and even stylish. So yes, you’re investing more in it, but at least you know it will continue to deliver much better value as your organization changes and the world changes around it. And then along the way you are fixing all of these points of frustration for staff and keeping the technology strong underneath.

It’s difficult to read through this annotated list of Comedy Hack Day ideas, provided by its co-founder Baratunde Thurston, without starting to giggle. I think my favorite is “Inaccurate Search Engine.”