With the American economy showing about as much useful forward momentum as as a stripped-down Chevy up on cinder blocks in the front yard, people are naturally starting to get a bit curious as to whether the $700 billion Congress put to bailing out banks' troubled assets was a smart use of the peoples' dollars. Elizabeth Warren is wondering that too. Warren, a professor at Harvard Law, was Harry Reid's appointment to the Congressional Oversight Panel that was created under the same Emergency Economic Stabilization Act that launched the TARP program. "It's tough out there and it's scary, and frankly I'm worried," she admits in a recent YouTube video -- which is either endearingly forthright or downright terrifying, depending on how you look at it.

As the battle for the RNC Chairman gig heats up, Americans for Tax Reform is hosting a debate among the half dozen candidates vying for the job. The debate is happening now at http://rncdebate.org/. The live webcast by ATR is a step in the right direction for the GOP.

It's not specifically a tech-politics related event, but it's good to see the right opening up and broadcasting the debate publicly. ATR also opened up the discussion to the public and took questions online.

I'll recap the event afterward with thoughts. (UPDATED)

With the 111th session of Congress kicking off tomorrow and a mere 15 days until President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office, getting his desired $700 billion (or so) stimulus package signed, sealed, and delivered before inauguration day would take a feat of super-human legislating. What could complicate that goal: a proposal promoted by top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell to put the stimulus plan online for a full week...Is it our turn yet? Pressure is building for Obama to finally name a Chief Technology Officer, the nation's first...The first round of Change.org's Ideas for Change in America contest, to which techPresident is a partner, has wrapped...and a good deal more.

We're still days into 2009, and now is the time to prepare for the epic interplay between tech and politics in the 2012 presidential cycle.

The inauguration arm of the Obama transition is organizing a "national day of service" on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend -- itself established as a time to contribute a little something extra to the world around you -- and in it, they're building the architecture for a continuing service corps beyond inauguration weekend. The project echoes the campaign: the inspiration and equipment coming from the top, with the fleshing out of events and projects bubbling from the bottom up.

Sure, you could spend these last waning hours of aught-eight in existential reflection on how admirably you spent the last twelve months, examining how to be a better you the year ahead. Nah. Spend them catching up the ongoing transition from wired Obama campaign to a presidential administration connecting with supporters and non-supporters alike...Pew's out with a new study that finds that a good chunk -- 62% -- of Obama voters have it in their heads to support President Obama's legislative agenda...and much more.

Micah and I were just playing around with some TubeMogul video-traffic charts for the YouTube channel of the transition team -- which includes not only the weekly video "fireside chats" that Obama has been filming weekly but other video content from inside the transition -- and found two things. First, the overall viewership of the channel has gone off a cliff since its launch, with particularly severe catering since the second week in December. And the second, well, read on.

Israel's social media offensives -- on Twitter and on YouTube -- in the days since the start of air attacks in Gaza includes attempts that seemed aim at winning the war of public opinion on the idea that the military operation is a reasonable response to Palestinian rocket attacks and is targeted solely at Hamas properties and assets.

An online politics wrap-up article by Jose Antonio Vargas published in the Post this weekend has been working its way through the internet politics crowd over the past couple of days, being posted on Facebook, forwarded on Twitter and zapped via email. It's a good piece, and it reflects the time that Jose has spent covering the online politics beat -- he was one of the few mainstream journalists who really dug into HOW people were using the internet for politics this time around, as they created a profoundly new environment for politicians, journalists and activists alike.

I have to take my friend to task over the title, however -- which in his defense, may have been written by a copyeditor rather than by Jose himself. "Politics Is No Longer Local. It's Viral" sounds catchy, playing off the legendary observation that "all politics is local." It's also almost embarrassingly wrong, and a serious misunderstanding of the realities of the Obama campaign.

Launched at yesterday lunchtime, the second round of Change.gov's Open for Questions -- the Obama transition team's attempt to tap into the questions Americans most want their next president to answer -- has already pulled in 1,753,453 votes from 39,860 people on 33,150 questions...The Nation's Ari Melber sees in Open for Questions a chance to advance question that the press corps seems loathe to ask: will President Obama appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration on torture, warrantless wiretapping, and more?...The Chicago Sun-Times' Lynn Sweet is beating up on Obama for his Seat at the Table feature, which posts the printed materials from meetings held by the transition team...and more.