• Republicans Push for Omnibus' Moment in the Sun: House Republican leadership is using a bit of transparency jujitsu against their Democratic counterparts. House Dems have been using their desire to embrace President Barack Obama's vision for a new kind of politics as a justification for their approach to passing stimulus legislation. Well, Minority Leader John Boehner and others are saying to Speaker Nancy Pelosi et al today, go whole hog. "[B]e consistent with President Obama's call for greater transparency in government" by posting the House's version of the upcoming omnibus spending bill online. (Or, as they call it in the letter, "on-line.") Doing so would, write the Republicans, "allow the American people to study the contents of the bill between now and the week after President's Day, when the $500 billion legislation is scheduled to be brought to a vote." For its part, though, the White House itself has complied to varying degrees with a promise to post non-emergency legislation online for a five-day review period. We're kinda liking this 'virtuous circle' of transparency one-upsmanship, though one might ask why Republicans weren't exactly rushing to post pending bills online back when they were in charge.

• Union Unity Powering the Free Choice Widget: Talk about mesmerizing. Watching this new scrolling Employee Free Choice widget would be enough to soothe the crankiest baby. But besides being an attractive piece of web property, sources are particularly excited that a handful of sometimes-bickering union folks -- AFL HQ, SEIU, Change to Win, Communications Workers, so on and so forth -- came together to pull it off. The widget runs through the more than million names of union members who support the bill to change labor organizing rules.

• Homing in on a CTO Pick: With the job of e-gov administrator at OMB seemingly out of the way, NextGov's Jill R. Aitoro is reporting that the still-unfilled role of federal Chief Technology Officer may go to Virginia's low-profile Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra. Nobody could have seen that coming! Except, that is, your faithful bloggers here at the techPres Daily Digest, who advanced Chopra as a dark horse pick way back in mid-November. Yes, we're bragging on our foresight. And yes, feel free to mock us if the job goes to someone other than Chopra.

• "Tempted by the Fruit of a Tax Cut...": If you spent some time on Twitter yesterday, you may have learned that tax cuts are, in fact "the only way to understand what dolphins r saying to one another." Proposed late yesterday afternoon as a snarky response to the Republican push for more and deeper tax cuts in the stimulus package, the #taxcuts hashtag has already generated 20-plus pages of Twitter Search results. Some uses of the hashtag were gently mocking of the omnipotence of lower taxes. Others were just plain weird, like this Squeeze-inspired one: "I bought a toothbrush, some #taxcuts, / a palm aimed at my face / more #taxcuts, a hairbrush, / more booze in a case..."

• Following McCaskill: Politico's Ben Smith is finding Claire McCaskill's self-written Twitter feed a refreshing break from politicians' generally boring tweets, too often written in condensed press release-ease. In updates not confined by the bounds of conventional grammar, the freshman Missouri Senator opens up on the political -- "Its harder than it looks to get the handful of R votes we MUST have AND keep the Ds happy.Back at it in am." --- and the the personal: "Yum. Fried oysters for lunch. Not exactly on my diet." On occasion, she'll even blend the two: "Even Maddie,my 19 yr, approved of my bill to limit CEO pay while companies were taking taxpayer money.And she's usually a critic." McCaskill's tweets are indeed humanizing, and they fit well into what seems to be Obama's approach of personalizing (ex., his speech to the Dem Caucus yesterday) the legislative struggle over crafting a stimulus package.

• Wanting OFA to Take the Battle to the Web: Here's something we think is worth keeping an eye one: emerging sentiment, similar to that expressed in this DailyKos diary, that the new Organizing for America needs to equip allies to do battle in the modern age of the web. Translation: fewer neighborhood talk sessions, more coordinated blogging/widgets, lobbying of electeds.

• Who Knows? Maybe They'll Be a YouTube Hit: Just for the fun of it, check out the Daily Show's Lewis Black's report on how Congress has started "doing what other unpopular people do": posting stuff to YouTube. (Thanks, Shaun Dakin)

In Case You Missed It...

Peter Daou offers insight into the opening rounds of the conflict between a new president and Washington's special blend of "conventional wisdom." Writes Peter: "The assumption that the new presidency would transform the political process, usher in an era of unprecedented citizen empowerment and decimate the old conventional wisdom-making machinery, has been undermined by the reality of entrenched power structures, deep-seated rivalries, die-hard habits and Beltway business as usual."

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