(Photo: ITechBook.net)

The Wall Street Journal has unearthed more details about the Silicon Valley political advocacy group first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle.

Mark Zuckerberg--fresh off his fundraiser for Republican governor Chris Christie!--is working on launching the group, along with his close friend Joe Green, a former Harvard University roommate. Mr. Green was previously involved with NationBuilder.com and Causes.com and is now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz. (As we noted last fall, founder Marc Andreessen himself contributed exclusively to a number of Republican campaigns, after previously supporting Clinton-Gore.)

But the tech and Republican connections don't stop there.

The bipartisan group includes Joe Lockhart, a former Facebook VP of global communications now at the Glover Park Group, as well as "Beltway insider consultants, including Republican strategists Jon Lerner and Rob Jesmer." The Journal says Mr. Jesmer, the former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee "is especially active on a day-to-day basis."

So world's most prominent Chris Christie supporter Mark Zuckerberg has hired hard-right extremists Jon Lerner & Rob Jesmer as his lobbyists?

— Anil Dash (@anildash) March 25, 2013

The technology leaders are pushing for federal legislation relevant to their hiring interests, such as immigration and education reform, as well as funding for scientific research. And the Journal says it will soon have money to burn:

The group, which so far doesn't have a name, is aiming to raise roughly $50 million and has already secured commitments in the tens of millions of dollars from Mr. Zuckerberg and more than a dozen other tech executives includingLinkedIn Corp. LNKD +0.13% founder Reid Hoffman, said these people.

The Chronicle called the group a Super PAC. But according to the Journal, Mr. Zuckerberg's political advocacy group plans to register as a 501(c)(4). The formal announcement isn't expected for another few weeks, but that designation would make the group a so-called "stealth PAC." Like the better-known super PACS, stealth PACs "are allowed to accept donations of unlimited size and apply that money to political campaigns." However, unlike super PACs, stealth PACs must show "influencing the outcomes of elections is not their primary purpose." This distinction allows them not to "disclose any information about their donors" and means they are regulated by the I.R.S., which is less aggressive with oversight than the Federal Election Commission.

With Sheryl Sandberg's widely-expected campaign, maybe this means we'll be sorting through the SEC's Facebook investigation, rather than the Bain Capital files come 2016.

(GIF: Twitter/Bizweekgraphics)

Despite Anonymous' worst intentions, the State of the Union went off without a hitch last night--save for reducing the state of political discourse to water gulping memes. Every generation gets the joyless Twitter account it deserves, we suppose.

President Obama has relied heavily on technological innovation to get him reelected, and is fond of citing the industry as a potential source of economic growth. But this is the first SOTU where tech got real air time at the podium. Chances are that will only increase.

Here’s hoping, next time around, the tech bubble won’t be invoked in the same grim paragraph as the housing market.

What's more, certain sections of the speech read like chapters from Eric Schmidt's upcoming book The New Digital Age, which also tries to make predictions about the pervasiveness of technology and how that plays into the future of terrorism and cyber-warfare. Speaking of, you know what $2.51 billion in Google stock could buy you? A whole mess of campaign advertising. Hmmmm.

MAC MANUFACTURING

Apple CEO Tim Cook got a seat in Michelle Obama's viewing box last night--apparently so that the camera could pan up to his awkward-smize when President Obama said, "And this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again."

Less Foxconn guilt sounds great, right? Not so fast. Estimates show that Apple's Mac production would only add about 200 jobs.

A MAKERBOT IN EVERY POT

In the same tear about increasing manufacturing, President Obama dropped the mic on 3D printing and his proposal to launch a network of tech hubs:

"There are things we can do, right now, to accelerate this trend.  Last year, we created our first manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio.  A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything.  There’s no reason this can’t happen in other towns.  So tonight, I’m announcing the launch of three more of these manufacturing hubs, where businesses will partner with the Departments of Defense and Energy to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs.  And I ask this Congress to help create a network of fifteen of these hubs and guarantee that the next revolution in manufacturing is Made in America."

As to be expected, the rhetoric around the concept was vague and it's unclear how the DOD and DOE would employ the technology. We'll just keep on the lookout for drone components at Shapeways until someone clues us in.

"SPACE RACE TO THE BRAIN"

Don't think POTUS forgot about you, biotech! The next space race, he enthused, will happen in our minds:

"If we want to make the best products, we also have to invest in the best ideas.  Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy.  Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s; developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs; devising new material to make batteries ten times more powerful.  Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.  Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race."

Good time to start raising funds for that biotech sector, New York.

HIGH TECH HIGH SCHOOLS

The importance STEM education also got a shout out last night, with a nod to New York City in particular. But rather than Union Square's Software and Engineering Academy, the President pointed to P-Tech in Brooklyn, another quasi public-private partnership:

"Let’s also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job.  Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they’re ready for a job.  At schools like P-Tech in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York Public Schools, the City University of New York, and IBM, students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering."

CYBER SPECTRE 

Before the speech, reporters were briefed on the President's new executive order on cybersecurity. He led into that last night by delineating potential threats. Naturally, the word Stuxnet did not pass his lips:

"America must also face the rapidly growing threat from cyber-attacks.  We know hackers steal people’s identities and infiltrate private e-mail.  We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets.  Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems.  We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy."

(For the full text of last night's speech as delivered, head over to The American Prospect. For SOTU Vines--yes, Vines--head over to RebelMouse.)

Although the public-private partnership between the State Department, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Intel, and the World Wide Web Foundation "barely got a mention" at the podium, it warrants closer examination, argues Bloomberg Businessweek.

The initiative also offers a nice occasion to play one of Betabeat's favorite games: Six Degrees of Eric Schmidt.

For starters, in addition to empowering citizens in poor countries, Businessweek says, the Alliance "could also cement long-term ties between the State Department and the companies—while opening new markets and reaching new customers for Silicon Valley."

Part of the credit for that initiative goes to 25-year Silicon Valley veteran Ann Mei Chang, who left her role as Google's senior director for emerging markets last year to move to the State Department as senior advisor for women and technology. Over the past year, Ms. Chang has been brought together diplomats, nonprofits, and companies from the Valley (who lend expertise and seed funding), in order to discuss issues like telecom monopolies and lack of infrastructure in developing countries.

According to Businessweek:

"The idea behind the Alliance is to use corporate and diplomatic power to push foreign governments to change laws and policies—in this case, the obstacles that governments put up to wider Internet penetration."

Speaking of pushing foreign governments, Ms. Chang currently resides in Nairobi, the city Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt called, "a serious tech hub," leading the way for Africa. Mr. Schmidt also covered the same ground in his upcoming book "The New Digital Age," reports the Wall Street Journal:

He imagines that soon an “illiterate Maasai cattle herder in the Serengeti” will use a smartphone to “inquire the day’s market prices and crowd-source the whereabouts of any nearby predators.”

It's unclear whether the State Department shares all of Mr. Schmidt's views on Internet evangelism, however. Alec Ross, Ms. Clinton's senior advisor for innovation, expressed doubts about the usefulness of Mr. Schmidt's recent jaunt to North Korea with Bill Richardson, wise-cracking daughter in tow.

But if the State Department is planning on helping Silicon Valley reach new markets overseas, they might also want to take a closer look at some of the more provacative chapters of Mr. Schmidt's book, like the part where he and co-author Jared Cohen--who reversed Ms. Chang's path by going from the State Department to Google Ideas--called China “the world’s most active and enthusiastic filterer of information” and “the most sophisticated and prolific” hacker of foreign companies.

A slightly more candid take than Ms. Clinton's parting statement: "The Pacific is big enough for all of us and we will continue to welcome China's rise if it chooses to play a constructive role in the region."

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America via Zimbio)

If you've ever wanted to check out the "music alcove" in Mark Zuckerberg's Palo Alto pad or dip a toe in his salt water pool, next month might be your chance. Buzzfeed reports that Facebook's CEO is hosting a fundraiser at his 5,000 square ft. home to raise money for Republican Governor Chris Christie's reelection.

Back in 2010, Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Christie, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker famously graced Oprah's couch to announce the billionaire's carefully-orchestrated $100 million donation to Newark's public school system. They've continued to work together on that education initiative, "earning the praise of reformers, and ruffling teachers unions."

Buzzfeed says Zuck's support is a sign of how the popular governor's commitment to issues like improving education has garnered support from donors outside his party:

"But the backing from Facebook's chairman and chief executive offers far more than money: It is a mark of how Christie, almost alone among his party, has emerged as the sort of natural figure who can cut deep into traditionally Democratic constituencies, like powerful young tech magnates."

But it's worth noting that Mr. Zuckerberg, who hosted a town hall with Barack Obama in 2011 and once took a dig at Mitt Romney, has indirectly donated to Republican candidates in the past through his $10,000 donation to Facebook's corporate PAC. Shortly before the 2012 election, fbPAC continued to tilt toward the GOP, doling out $140,000 to Republicans compared to $127,000 to Democrats--contrary to the personal donations of Facebook's top employees.

As we've seen, sometimes Silicon Valley's young tech magnates age out into a different party better aligned with their billions.

UPDATE: It looks like the Democrats will not stand idly by as the well-heeled section of its base cozies up to the competitor. The Democratic Governors Association (DGA) has launched a petition called, "Stop Zuck's Christie Fundraiser!" Perhaps using his nickname will endear techies to their cause? The petition calls Mr. Christie a "right-wing Republican darling." However, Mr. Christie owes some of his 74 percent approval rating to his vociferous criticism of his own party's response to Hurricane Sandy.

Paging Mr. Cuomo! (Photo: flickr.com/MTAphotos)

A coalition of techies say it's time to do something about our campaign finance morass, and they're starting with New York State. A veritable who's who of Silicon Alley--including Fred Wilson, Andy Weissman, Dennis Crowley, John Borthwick, Kevin Ryan, and Esther Dyson--have released an open letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo, urging him to take point on an effort to make the political process work a little more like Kickstarter or Github.

The problem, as they see it: "Today, elections in Albany are dominated by a small group of affluent campaign donors, professional influence-peddlers and deep-pocketed vested special interests." Not to mention some of those state capital buildings are downright Politburo-back-deal chic.

So what does this have to do with the technology business? Glad you asked. The undersigned are confident they've got just the model for reform: "We think that the open and diverse culture of the web that can help fix politics in New York." To wit:

All around us, we see the flowering of diverse, distributed networks of large numbers of people who are coming together to identify common concerns and act in concert. On crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter, thousands of New Yorkers are financing each other's creative businesses and projects, pooling small donations to fund big dreams.

The letter concludes that, "It is time to bring this same way of doing things to campaign finance in NY State, and create a national model that will strengthen small-d democracy." They're encouraging their fellow tech leaders to add their names to the petition. (It is interesting to note that Reddit cofounder and Internet politico Alexis Ohanian isn't on the list just yet.)

In a statement announcing the push, New York Tech Meetup chairman and Persona Democracy Media founder Andrew Rasiej got figurative:

"Democracy is an incredible application, but it’s time for an upgrade to work out some of the bugs that have crept in. Tech leaders are encouraged that Governor Cuomo has made public funding of elections a goal for New York."

The whole thing is more a call to action than a specific plan, but we suppose you've got to start somewhere.

(Screenshot: YouTube)

A video taken of a touchscreen voting machine in Pennsylvania refusing to capture an Obama vote, and instead casting the vote for Romney, was uploaded to Reddit this morning. The video garnered almost 37,000 upvotes and served up a painful 18 second flashback to post-2004 fear of “stolen votes." After hitting Reddit, the video immediately went viral, ricocheting across news websites and Twitter feeds.

The anonymous user who uploaded the video and goes by the handle centralpavote wrote in the video's YouTube description:

My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot.

I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

Gawker spoke to a voter fraud expert who confirmed that the machine is not purposefully or maliciously attempting to keep people from voting for Obama, but instead that it's a mechanical error and simply needs to be re-calibrated. "It's a concern but not because of fraud," the expert said. "That's an obviously miscalibrated iVotronic (ES&S) voting machine... we would recommend that poll workers would recalibrate the machine and everything would be fine."

Now, NBC News reports that the machine in question has been taken out of commission in Pennsylvania. (The anonymous user's Reddit name, centralpavote, indicates that the machine was located in central Pennsylvania.) Score one for outraged internet commenters.

Update:

Mother Jones reports that a representative for the Pennsylvania Department of State has stated that a machine in Perry County, Pennsylvania was removed, re-calibrated and brought back online, but he couldn't confirm that it was the same machine from the YouTube video.

"There was a single complaint, so they recalibrated the machine, did a test run, and put it back online. We've had no complaints since then," the rep told Mother Jones.

Fierce. (Photo: Tumblr)

The Instagram army is out in full force today, smartphone drones snapping pics of every step of the democratic process, from the long polling lines to the braggadocious "I voted" stickers. But here's a helpful PSA for anyone voting in New York state: those cutesy Instas could actually (technically) land you a misdemeanor.

According to Think Progress, sharing a ballot (or a photo of a ballot) after you've marked down your choice could actually be against New York State voter laws. NY Election Law 17-130 reads that a citation is in order for any person who "shows his ballot after it is prepared for voting, to any person so as to reveal the contents, or solicits a voter to show the same." The Citizen Media Law Project confirms that "photos or filming of own marked ballot" is prohibited.

Many states have laws forbidding voters to take and share photos of their ballots, whether they're marked or not, including Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada and Texas. Gizmodo has a breakdown of the laws in each state. (Of course, word's still out on whether or not anyone's actually been given a misdemeanor for Facebooking their marked ballot this year.)

Many of these laws were put in place in the 19th century when vote buying was much more prevalent, NYU law professor Adam B. Cox told Betabeat. "It is true in many states that it's a violation of election law," he said. "Before we had secret ballots, there was a lot of vote buying, so it's not surprising that a lot of states prohibit you from showing your ballot after you marked it up."

As for New Yorkers, will your vote be invalidated if you're caught applying the Nashville filter to your Obama-marked ballot? J.C. Polanco, commissioner for the New York City Board of Elections, said on Twitter that it's not quite that serious. "Checked w General Counsel for u, no [your vote won't be disqualified]. But don't delay lines by taking pictures- sites are busy, glad you are engaged," he tweeted.

Between the obligatory first world problems tweet about cold fingers while standing outside the polling station, to amateur hour punditry on Facebook, the public displays of patriotism are relentless, self-righteous, and, most importantly, gloriously non-apathetic. Go ahead, express your political sensibilities. All the cool kids are doing it.

Nobody puts Elon in a politically expedient corner! (Photo: Wikimedia)

If your Twitter feed is anywhere near as tech heavy as ours, Elon Musk came in a close second to Big Bird as unfair targets during Mitt Romney's grossly misleading turn at the podium Wednesday night.

Lumping electronic sports car makers Fisker and Tesla in with Solyndra, the presidential candidate smugly described President Obama's tax breaks to green companies thusly: "I mean, I had a friend who said, you don’t just pick the winners and losers; you pick the losers." 

Tesla founder (and would-be Mars colonizer) Elon Musk already noted this week that the DOE is "bullish" on his electronic sports car company and that Tesla has never missed a loan repayment, despite production delays and revenue shortages.

Now Ray Lane, managing partner at Kleiner Perkins and investor in Fisker, another green car company, has decided to offer the "dyed-in-the-wool" business man little perspective on the green car startups. Mr. Lane told First State Politics:

“Each company have [sic] produced great products, 2,000 jobs and are the first new automotive companies in 50 years,” Lane said, by email. “While the rest of the world admires this achievement, only an American businessman turned politician could attack this success.  Write about the hard working entrepreneurs not the politicians.  Lets celebrate Henrik Fisker and Elon Musk, not criticize them.”

While he's at it, Mr. Lane decided to throw in a little fact-checking:

Lane also said that  Romney “inflated $500 million lost by Solyndra (one company) to $90 billion of TARP money, a massive leap of logic and corruption of facts.”

Green investments may have fallen out of vogue, in favor of the consumer web. But for the next debate, Mr. Romney might want to keep in mind that future-facing Silicon Valley isn't part of the 47 percent.

Screengrab from ColleensWorld.com

Colleen Lachowicz is a Democrat campaigning for Maine state Senate and an avid World of Warcraft player. Republicans supporting her opponent have a real problem with Ms. Lachowicz's activities and therefore have gone all out to make sure voters learn the evils of the online world she inhabits.

Politico reports on the warnings issued to Maine voters regarding the candidate's life online. Read and tremble, constituents:

In an unusual press release issued Thursday, the Maine GOP attacked Lachowicz for a "bizarre double life" in which she’s a devotee of the hugely popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft. In the game, she's "Santiaga," an "orc assassination rogue" with green skin, fangs, a Mohawk and pointy ears.

Maine Republicans also mined Ms. Lachowicz's posts on liberal blog DailyKos for foul language and incendiary barbs directed at famous conservatives like Grover Norquist.

The party built a website with screencaps of the candidate's writing. Visitors to ColleensWorld.com are greeted by an animated gif repeatedly morphing a photo of Ms. Lachowicz into her Warcraft character and a blurb about her Internet presence that concludes, "Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world."

We're probably just a decade or so away from a presidential candidate explaining why they drunkenly created (then forgot) a Brony-centric Tumblr one night in 2011.