Suckers

And it’s not even August yet! According to Google Trends, in all but one state, the presidential candidate with the most searches on his or her name is Donald Trump. The one exception is the state of Vermont, where Sen. Bernie Sanders is the most-searched candidate.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has enhanced its public-facing consumer complaint database, and for the first time is including more than 7,700 actual consumer accounts of problems they are facing. That comes on the heels of a March 2015 decision to allow consumer to opt to make their stories public; since then, the agency says more than half the complaints submitted have chosen that option (scrubbed of personal information). The agency is now seeking public input on how to make this raw complaint data easier for the public to understand and use.

After a year-long push by the OpenGov Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation and the Congressional Data Coalition, Members, committees, and staff of the U.S. House of Representatives are now officially allowed to procure and use open source software tools, the three groups announced yesterday. While this is an important step forward in modernizing the workings of Congress, many other recommendations made by the three groups have yet to be adopted. Those include: the proactive publication of many of Congress’ working documents, insuring that pending legislation is posting online at least 72 hours before a vote, requiring individual identifiers in lobbyist disclosure reports, allowing more journalists (read “bloggers”) to be credentialed by Congress’ press galleries, along with more systemic fixes.

Here’s an animated history of the Atlantic slave trade, made by Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie of Slate, that maps the journeys of 15,790 slave ships in two minutes.

Responding to a massive traffic blockade by Parisian taxi drivers, France’s interior minister is calling for a clampdown on Uber, James Regan and John Irish report for Reuters.

France’s Justice Minister Christiane Taubira has indicated that she would be “absolutely not be surprised” if her country were to offer asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Intercept’s Jenna McLaughlin reports.

Eric Liu and Democracy Journal are crowdsourcing a list of the things every 21st-century American should know, revisiting E.D. Hirsch’s 1987 book, Cultural Literacy. Liu’s ten suggestions are “Whiteness, The Federalist Papers, The Almighty Dollar, Organized labor, Reconstruction, Nativism, The American Dream, The Reagan Revolution, DARPA, and ‘A sucker born every minute’.” That last one might be useful for all those people searching on Donald Trump’s name. Add your suggestions here.

Civic Design Camp Boston is underway today and you can follow along here.