Website Follows the Money

A newly improved political website lets you peek into the financial affairs of friends, neighbors and celebrities without the risk of a restraining order. The site, www.fundrace.org, takes existing political contribution data available on the Federal Election Commission’s site, www.fec.gov, and jazzes it up with colorful, easy-to-use search functions and maps.

Designed by a team at the New York City creative nonprofit Eyebeam, the site allows visitors to dig around by name and ZIP Code to find out who’s shelling out, how much and for which candidates. The site’s value lies in “what can you learn ... about the rest of the world, using who and how much they’ve contributed as the lens,” said creator Mike Frumin, 25, of Brooklyn.

Fascinating tidbits include how Donald Trump hedged his bets, giving the maximum $2,000 to both Democrat John F. Kerry and President Bush, and that hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons spread the love among six Democratic candidates, giving the most -- $2,000 -- to the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York.

Detailed national and city maps illustrate the precise origins of all this money. A swath of blue Democratic dots covers Boston and Cambridge, Mass., the home of Harvard University, while Houston and St. Louis are dominated by pink Republican dots.

“I think large chunks of data are hard to relate to,” said Jonah Peretti, 30, the director of research and development at Eyebeam, which promotes artistic and technological projects. Instead, the site “gives you a context so that you can start doing your own investigations.”

Traffic to the site has exploded from a trickle of 1,000 or fewer hits a day at its launch last fall to an estimated 100,000 visitors a day after its redesign this month. The increase stems from word-of-mouth buzz on blogs and sites like www.lavoice.org, and a mention by Associated Press.

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Active in Spirit

Liberal college students interested in political participation can skip the drudgery of marching in time-consuming protests or canvassing neighborhoods with petitions -- and instead raise money from the comfort of their dorm rooms.

A new site connected with the progressive group MoveOn.org replaces real-life activism with the virtual kind. ClickbackAmerica.org encourages students to sign petitions and join its online political efforts. Each time a young person participates, one dollar is donated to MoveOn’s Voter Fund, which works to put progressive advertisements on the air.

“This is a new way of instilling activism in college kids,” said Ari Rabin-Havt, 25, the site’s executive director and a graduate student in political management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

The organization’s goal is to raise $1 million. The seed? Money will come from Democratic donor Stephen Bing. Universities and colleges are ranked by their participation and subsequent money raised; more than 1,800 schools have signed up in the last two weeks. The top fundraising school will receive a visit from a surprise celebrity to thank them for their efforts. Last week UC Berkeley was in the lead, contributing $378 to the estimated $65,000 raised so far.

“I definitely think we’ll hit [$1 million] by November,” Rabin-Havt said.

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Watch Your Language

U.S. presidents are expected to be masters in communication -- but only in English. Only rarely have the leaders of the free world been able to chat about politics -- or anything at all -- in a tongue other than English.

But Bush and Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, are bucking the trend, with proficiency in three romance languages between them.

Bush has famously fielded questions from reporters in Spanish and sprinkled passable Spanglish into his speeches.

“A candidate who can speak a foreign language can pick up an ethnic minority and impress them,” said Craig Smith, a professor of communication studies at Cal State Long Beach and former speechwriter for Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.

“That Bush comes out of Texas and can speak Spanish is important to Latinos and Latinas and is going to help him with that swing voting group,” Smith said.

Kerry knows French and Italian, and has supposedly been boning up on espanol.

And if Kerry bungles his verb conjugations, he can always fall back on wife Teresa Heinz Kerry, who speaks five languages, including Portuguese, French and Spanish.

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Who’s Counting?

213: Number of late-night jokes made about Bush from Jan. 1 through March 9, according to a Center for Media and Public Affairs study.

53: Number of late-night jokes cracked about Kerry during the same period.

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Compiled from staff, Web and wire reports by Times staff researcher Susannah Rosenblatt.