Daily Digest: GOP Luddism, Think-Tank Blogging, and Getting to Know Genachowski

• And Then There Was One: With sitting Republican National Committee chairman Mike Duncan signing on to the tech-fueled Rebuild the Party movement, South Carolina GOP head Katon Dawson stands as the sole announced candidate for GOP chair not yet jumping on board the grasstops effort. Duncan is showing a great deal of spunk in refusing to let himself be branded an establishment Luddite. Duncan marshals facts in his defense: "In the past two years, we grew our email list by six hundred percent to over 12 million names - - about the same size as the Obama campaign." Both Duncan and Dawson might want to have a go at winning the contest over on Choose Your Chairman. It would only take about two dozen votes to best current favorite Saul Anuzis.

• Blogging, Bounded: The Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund's acting CEO Jennifer Palmieri has jumped into CAP blogger Matt Yglesias's blog space to issue a "special note." Palmieri distanced the think tank from Yglesias's dig at the organization Third Way as peddlers of "hyper-timid incrementalist bull____," guilty of trying to sell their approach as one and the same as the aggressively moderate approach of Barack Obama. One hitch: Third Way is a CAP partner. Oopsie. With CAP head John Podesta leading the Obama transition effort, it's hard not to see the organization as eager to be the embodiment of institutional big-tent progressivism. The comments on Palmieri's mea culpa (or perhaps her "Matt's culpa") weren't kind. Here's a representative one: "This post is EXTREMELY creepy." When Yglesias left the journalism world at the Atlantic for the think-tank world of the Center for American Progress, he assured his faithful blog readers that from their point of view, the move "probably won't make a huge difference." He may have spoken too soon.

• Sunlight Labs, the Next Generation: The Sunlight Foundation's Labs project is starting to take itself a bit more seriously. They're shifting into the next phase of conquering Washington via API and databases, seeing themselves as less an experiment in transparency than as an ongoing concern.* Among the changes afoot: making what they build incredibly accessible so that their team of eight can be supplemented by the energy and smarts of outside programmers. First up from the new Labs is an Apps for America contest obviously inspired by DC's innovative Apps for Democracy contest. Top prize for making the best use of Sunlight's APIs and data is a rather sweet $15,000.

• Getting to Know Genachowski: Likely next Federal Communications Commission chief Julius Genachowski is the Tom Hanks of Washington. You can't mention his name without hearing the phrase "great guy, great guy." But while the FCC attorney has served as consigliere to everyone from Reed Hundt to Barry Diller and has been called the brains behind the Obama web operation, what he would do on telecom in the executive seat is a bit of a mystery. Ars Technica's Matthew Lasar digs into Genachowski's record from his time on the commission to years spent getting a cut of the dot com boom. Lasar doesn't turn up much, but, he says, "it's more than you've got on Caroline Kennedy." (Note: If you're playing along in the CTO-stakes, an FCC post for Genachowski would knock one oft-mentioned name out of the running for the still unfilled position.)

• Broadband Bailout?: Speaking of the future of American communications, the advocacy group Teletruth is objecting to what it's calling "a $44 billion dollar bailout" -- investment in broadband buildout that would reward the very telecom companies who have never built the infrastructure they've loooong promised. Sparking Teletruth's ire is a recent report from Free Press titled "Down Payment on Our Digital Future: Stimulus Policies for the 21st-Century Economy." The dust-up goes to show that "Internet for Everyone" may be a beautiful destination, but interested parties aren't yet working off the same map.

• Kids Talk to Obama: BigDialog, a techPresident partner project, seeks to build community consensus on questions to be posed to the incoming president. An exciting new partnership with PBS KIDS GO!'s Speak Out is aimed at letting the young ones have their say on three hot topics: the earth, schools, and staying healthy. The ideas topping the charts at the moment including more PE equipment and more nutritious school lunches. Hey, it's never too early to learn to collaborate.

In Case You Missed It...

Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin is investigating Change.gov, picking up on a quirk that we noted in early November involving GSA rules that prohibit the use of political slogans in government domain names. But Tom Watson's not having any of it, calling the streamlining of the transition site's genesis "simple patriotic goodwill on the part of the Bush team."

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.