Daily Digest: Stimulus, Subsidies, Scurvy and More

• Boehner's Bid to Get on the White House YouTube Channel: There's a fuss being made about President Barack Obama's refusal to allow a video from House Minority Leader John Boehner to stand as a response to the President's first video address while in office. But Boehner can't really feel personally slighted -- no video responses have been approved on the White House YouTube account. You can, though, catch a full dose of Boehner in this Digg Dialogg segment. This being one of those cases where the wisdom of crowds determines what questions get asked, the top-ranked one is on legalizing marijuana. (We're calling it the "Mary Jane Rule" of Web 2.0: In any truly open forum, a question about the legal status of pot will rise to the top.) But CNN anchor Mark Preston, grilling Boehner on behalf of Digg, isn't content to let the masses have the first say. Notice how Preston's actual first question is a real hard-hitting doozy: how'd your first meet-and-greet with the new President go? The people want to know, Mr. Leader. Well, at least Preston does.

• The Brief Life of Public Pool Reports: After the new WhiteHouse.gov launched, a section marked "Pool Reports" generated words of approval about a more open and transparent White House press experience. It could have been a true game changer. But the Washington Post's Anne Kornblut reports that that was never going to work. Pool reports are paid for by participating news agencies, and they're not about to let their hard work be freely posted for all the world (and freeloading competitors) to see. You'll notice that that section has been dropped from the site, leaving the presidential hub without much in the way of a press section.

• MyBO Troubles: ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick notes that some folks are reserving themselves a special place in the afterlife by using MyBarackObama.com to distribute malware. The way it works is this: images are made to look like the opening shots of an embedded video. Click on what appears to be a scene from a neighhorhood organizing meeting, though, and you're gifted with a Trojan executable file that infects your computer system. It's a clever, if evil, approach. It's not unusual these days to see images acting as placeholders for videos. You'll remember, in fact, that images standing in for YouTube clips is a tactic that WhiteHouse.gov recently adopted after criticisms that they were spreading around YouTube cookies a bit too freely.

• White House to Host Classes on Communicating Through Cave Paintings: In a press briefing yesterday, press secretary Robert Gibbs said simply "our email system is not working so well." For a campaign that came to depend on email, Facebook, and IM, and so giving up the power to instantly connect to the outside world and each other is a bit like Samson losing his hair. Writes Salon's Mike Madden: "They have to relearn how to communicate, because the law has not caught up with the way people live." Bear in mind, though, that we're in Day 7 of the Obama era. Email gets fixed, and new standards can be negotiated. In Madden's piece, our Andrew Rasiej offers some wise words of perspective: "It took the British navy 150 years to carry lime juice on its ships after it was discovered that lime juice prevents scurvy." The lesson: the web cures scurvy. The new White House is, at least, still keeping alive one tech-savvy tradition from the campaign. Notice the giant sign behind Gibbs during his briefing. It read simply: "WHITEHOUSE.GOV."

• One-Stop Citizenship Shopping: The General Services Administration's USA.gov isn't the prettiest or most functional of websites, and so the Sunlight Foundation's Ali Felski has given it an extreme makeover.* (USA.gov is not to be confused with America.gov, which is an outreach project of the State Department aimed at "Telling America's Story.") Felski not only makes the site quite attractive to look at, but rearchitects it so that citizens have all their government-y information at their finger tips -- from student loan data to where they're registered to vote.

• New Sites Aim to Follow the (Federal) Money: Also from the ever busy Sunlight is the new SubsidyScope, a project led by the Pew Charitable Trusts. While the site is just getting off the ground, its mission is to account for the vast sums of money that leave the federal treasury in the form of subsidies. First up: a database of who's getting what from the TARP program, a.k.a. "The Bailout." Similarly, Read the Stimulus, a project of conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and Taxpayers for Commons Sense, is helpfully making more than 1,500 pages of Obama's $850 billion stimulus plan and supporting congressional documents available in easy searchable form. Come for the data, stay for the analysis. The site smartly pairs the hard-to-get bill text with conservative commentary on the massive spending package from its partner organizations.

• Cheney Leaves Town and Takes Map Fuzziness With Him: The Naval Observatory, currently home to Vice President Joe Biden, is no longer the blurry spot on Google Maps it was under former VP Dick Cheney, notes Think Progress's Ryan Powers. See for yourself. What's still unclear: why and at whose bidding the new, unobscured aerial shots came to be used.

• An Open Government Get-Together: TransparencyCamp, a gathering of that "trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks" wil be taking place in Washington DC on February 28th. Should prove to be a great event.

In Case You Missed It...

Nancy Scola says that a meeting between Senate law enforcement officials and the creators of the "Purple Tunnel of Doom" Facebook group proves a powerful accountability loop. She also reports that buried in the huge stimulus package are a trio of powerful broadband provisions. And finally, Nancy notes that a new White House blog post screams "give us a minute here, people -- we're working on it."

And Matt Burton suggests that White House fellowships, now available, are "a real way for superstar geeks to help The Man."

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

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