• Obama meets the Lakers. Keep in mind that the President is about 6' 2".
• FEMA Director Craig Fugate, whom we interviewed here on modern disaster response, somehow snuck onto Twitter when we weren't looking.
• ProPublica tracks which federal agencies have pre-met tomorrow's deadline to have an Agency.gov/open website up and running, as per the White House Open Government Directive.
• Event notice: New York City's New School asks whether unlimited knowledge, in a democracy, can be too much of a good thing.
• The National Archives builds its Flickr commons.
• And New York's Big Apps contest names its victors. The winners: an "augmented reality" Android app for finding subway stations, a "Yelp for taxis," and a web guide to the city's many schools. Lesson: New Yorkers care a lot about transportation, and whatever energy is left over they dedicate to their kids.

Credit: Gregory Skibinski

Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer is blogging out the White House's anger over the news that Republican Sen. Richard Shelby has signaled a hold on 70 or so of President Obama's nominees as he seeks to get favorable treatment on some projects in his home of Alabama. In case you're not sure about how Pfeiffer feels about Shelby's behavior, how post on WhiteHouse.gov is titled, "Another Day, Another Disappointing Political Ploy Obstructing Progress."

That the Obama White House is wielding its official blog to directly and pointedly challenge (in)action in the Senate is interesting enough. But the Shelby hold episode might suggest a "what if?" question of interest to us digital politics geeks here. Namely, what other Internet assets might a White House and its allies have in a political situation like this? Or to put it another way, is anything different about the calculus of an entrenched practice like a Senate hold in the age of Twitter and Facebook and Google Groups and the rest?...

Credit: 20th Cen. Fox

China's so-called netizens revolt when "Avatar" -- and its provocative storylines about industrial expansion -- gets bumped from movie screens in favor of a tepid government-backed biopic on Confucius. The amazing thing? In perhaps a sign of the changing relationship between the people and the state, writes the New York Times' Simon Elegant, it was the government that relented.

Credit: WhiteHouse.gov

Way back when, when we first started discussing what a smart, savvy, modern, wired, and engaged Obama White House would look like, someone in these parts (okay, was me) suggested that one of the things that the Internet might be great at is directly connecting the American people with not only the President, but the subject-matter experts and point people buried within the administration who really do hold answers to questions on how the government does its thing day-in-and-out. The web could, the thinking goes, flatten that administrative hierarchy in a way that might be useful, ultimately making government more accessible and inclusive.

Say you want to know what's really going on behind this morning's news that we've scrapped a long-controversial national animal ID tracking program. Your best bet isn't going to be Obama or Robert Gibbs. If you're the sort of person who cares about food safety agricultural monitoring (a slice of people that ranges to farmers to students to researchers to activists), then you're going to want to hear details from someone at, say, USDA. If you can find someone who actually knows about program and can explain the competing interests that went into the reversal. We might come away actually knowing something more about how farm policy works in the U.S. It might be wonderful.

Anyway, that's a long lead-in just to point you to the news that, as the Hill's Kim Hart reports, the White House has announced a second bite at the 14,000 YouTube questions that came in after Obama's State of the Union address. This time, the official answerees are policy staffers from the Domestic Policy Council, the National Economic Council, and the National Security Council. It starts in just about ten minutes, at 12:45pm EST, and you can watch it here.

Update: The staffers doing the answering will, it turns out, be the Domestic Policy Council's Heather Higginbottom, the National Economic Council's Brian Deese, and the National Security Council's Ben Rhodes.

Credit: Carly for California

The Daily Beast's Benjamin Sarlin finds that the Carly Fiorina campaign is taking the "all publicity is good publicity" approach to the fact that its "demon sheep" documentary short has become an Internet wonder:

A spokeswoman for Fiorina, Julie Soderlund, told The Daily Beast that they were “energized” by the ad's response, citing its YouTube traffic as “a great success” and said that [Tom] Campbell “played right into our hands” by sending out the video himself. The ad's myriad critics are an asset—helping to spread the word—rather than a hindrance, this argument goes. “It's been touted as the most genius ad ever all the way down to the worst, but no matter what, people are talking about it and it generates views,” Soderlund said. She added that the viral response to the video was intentional, “though we were surprised how far and wide it went—and very pleased.”

As it turns out, the ad was the product of Fred Davis, the Republican ad man also behind the "Celebrity" spot from the 2008 campaign that painted Barack Obama as on par with Paris Hilton and other global figures. If a big splash is what they were after, it seems to have worked: the ad has been watched more than 400,000 times in the last three days.

What makes the demon sheep ad so darn compelling? Many commentators have focused on the moment when, near the two-and-a-half minute mark, the faux-sheep's eyes began to turn a fiery, glowing red. Fair enough. But there's really so much more to the spot than that one moment, no matter how attention-grabbing and frightening it might be. For examples, here are five other parts of the Demon Sheep experience that just have to make you scratch your head:

• As the ad opens, the phrases splashed across the screen are "purity," "piety," "honorable," and even "true believer." Cut to a field of sheep -- because those are qualities that the ovine species is known for?
• The female voices over celebrates true fiscally conservative leaders as "men we admire [and] aspire to be," despite the fact that the ad is for Carly Fiorina, an entirely female candidate who is positioning herself as a fiscal conservative.
• When the ad discusses the evils of budget pork, a picture of a peaceful sheep is flashed on the screen. This in a narrative structure where the sheep are playing the role of the the good guys.
• The narrator speeds up very quickly to say FiscalConservativeInNameOnly so it doesn't seem to be such an awkward and endless mouthful. Of course, having to race through saying it only proves how ungainly a phrase it is.
• At one point in the ad, the Campbell/evil wolf character is raised up on a pedestal, only to be struck by lightening, causing him to topple in slo-mo to the ground as the voiceover intones, voice-of-God style, "leaving...but one...way...to fall." And that, my friends, is just pretty weird.

Fellow Republican candidate Chuck DeVore, so as not to be left out of the party, is making use of YouTube's overlay feature to update an web spot from September in which DeVore pledged that his campaign wouldn't be run on silly slogans. The new, timely, annotation on the video clip? "We also promise to never use Demon Sheep in our ads."

Credit: Forty

The Phoenix-based marketing firm Forty has posted a walk-through of just went into the revamping of John McCain's website for his upcoming Senate race. Here's the new site, and here's what the old one looked like. For the design and process geeks among us, these insights into how projects go from conception stage to implementation out in the actual world are like candy. Or bacon, depending on where your tastes lay. More please.

Credit: BarackObama.com

At a fundraiser for low-dollar donors to the Democratic National Committee held in a DC hotel last night, President Obama fielded just four questions sent in by supporters through cell phone text messages or email, delivering policy-thick answers on his perspective of what needs to be done to pass health care reform (the gist: more vetting needs to be done), how government can help to grow small business (more lending), how we can keep America competitive in the future (more clean energy), and how the costs of higher education can be made more manageable (more loans and grants), in an event that had been billed by Organizing for America, in what was perhaps a bit of overpromise, as a "Conversation with the President." OFA Executive Director Mitch Stewart posed the questions to Obama at the tail end of an event that started about 20 past its scheduled 5:45pm EST start time, just after Obama wrapped up a speech to the crowd.

Leaving substance aside, performance-wise, aside from the event's Q&A-by-SMS twist what was perhaps most notable about the evening was just how fired up Obama seemed while delivering that speech. This Obama resembled more the candidate from the '08 campaign trail's most energetic days than the somewhat more staid president we've regularly seen over this past year. At one point, Obama just about yelled when admonishing the assembled crowd and those watching online to keep find, trumpeting, "Don't give up!" (Yes we can!, yelled someone in the crowd.) A passionate Obama continued. "The forces of the status quo might not give an inch," he said, "but we won't give an inch." Video of the full event is here.

• And inside the rehearsals for #demonsheep.
• How to run a money bomb.
• How to run a text-to-screen campaign. (Thanks Antonella Napolitano)
• John McCain relaunches, and key features include a "supporter wall" made up of fan videos and a live event stream, a la the White House. (Thanks Shaun Dakin)
• The Milky Way Transit Authority releases a new map.
• Ezra Klein makes the case against negotiating in front of the camera.
• Book review: SMS "uprisings" in Africa.
• A microsite summing up DC's reaction to snow.
• "Any system of government is simply an application of technology."
• Sneaking Cory Doctorow into Burma.
• Obama holds far fewer news conferences than his predecessors.
• And Andrew Sullivan argues in favor of question time. Anyone else think this accent gets more British when he's on the BBC?

PdF Conference Call

Kate Albright-Hanna just wrapped up an hour-long talk with PdF Network members about how Barack Obama's campaign used Internet video. Albright-Hanna, now at the online news and entertainment organization VBS.TV, was responsible for the campaign's online video operation.

Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe emerges as the main villain in Tim Dickinson's examination of how Organizing for America lost its magic in the early days of the Obama Administration. Some of Dickinson's criticisms would resonate more strongly were the national Democratic party not organized as a loose-knit collection of interests and was instead, say, the Mafia. Plouffe was at a DC book party while Massachusetts was burning! "Plouffe and OFA," the latter of which gets treated as the former's alter ego, "permitted Martha Coakley to fumble away Kennedy's seat." Martha Coakley and the people of Massachusetts might have had a thing or two to do with that.

The decision made by Plouffe and others to attempt to install Organizing for America into the Democratic National Committee comes into focus in Dickinson's piece. Dickinson calls it "a truly bizarre call." And here, Dickinson switches from a personality-driven narrative to what seems to be, boringly enough, central to the OFA story. Institutional structure -- and the choices made around it -- seems to underlay so much of what went down with OFA in the early going, including the Coakley affair. At the end of the two-year-plus campaign, Obama, Plouffe, David Axlerod and others had just poured their hearts and souls into getting a seat at the table; Plouffe was, by all accounts including his own The Audacity to Win, exhausted. The less likely choice would have been to go back outside to rallying in the streets. Organizing a version of Organizing for America as a grassroots organization rather than as an extension of the DNC would have meant that the Obama operation would have translated into the Obama operation taking on two jobs rather than the one (very big) one they'd just been given by the American people. (A reasonable question alluded to in Dickinson's piece is how would a free-floating OFA would have funded itself.)

Reading Dickinson, it seems like Organizing for America's future as a grassroots organization would probably have been better served had Obama actually lost. Once the win was won, all the considerable momentum from the campaign flowed into the presidency. No one with the authority or power to do so had was willing to pour the necessary time and resources into simultaneously converting Obama for America into a sustainable Organizing for America organization. Maybe it was a calculation. Or maybe it was a tremendous mistake. Organizing for America's executive director Mitch Stewart admits to Dickinson that the organization has make a few of those in its first year. "Organizing for America did not properly plan for that first week of August," Stewart told Dickinson, referring to the townhall protests of this summer where tea partier objections to health care reform were allowed to echo without much organized pushback.

You can read Dickinson's full piece here.