• From the recently discovered YouTube channel of the game designers behind the U.S. Army's "America's Army" video game. Watch the above for details on how they get the furrowed brow of a virtual drill sergeant just right.
• Maybe it's the snow, but freshly-minted Senator Scott Brown is still without a website.
• The Orange Revolution, one of the earliest case studies in how digital technologies can shape political engagement, seems to more or less be over.
• Microsoft is setting up some government scientists with free cloud computing.
• And Google's DC talk on the topic of "Democracy Online" that we mentioned last week has been snow-poned.

Credit: C-SPAN

The White House seems to be gearing up to kill three birds with one stone.

During a pre-Super Bowl interview, President Obama announced that he's invited Republicans to a half-day summit on February 25th that will give them an opportunity to present their proposals for fixing health care. The GOP has complained that Obama hasn't yet heard out their contributions to the health care debate -- bird one. Bird two is that the GOP isn't in much of a position to turn down the session, but it may well be a repeat performance of Obama's "question time" with the House Republican Caucus from earlier this month where Obama grasped much of the limelight, a fair amount of praise, and a bit of breathing room for his health care push.

As for bird three? Well, you'll remember that many on the right and left have criticized Obama from backtracking on his campaign pledge to hold health care negotiations live on C-SPAN. It's become a favorite cudgel for Republicans to use against Obama's push for health care reform. The summit later this month is a chance to combat that line of critique, at least just a little.

I asked C-SPAN communications director Howard Mortman if the network planned on airing the proposed White House health care summit. Short answer: heck yes. Slightly longer answer: "C-SPAN will carry it live and replay it...completely at night," said Mortman, continuing, "plus archive the event through the C-SPAN Video Library."

Credit:DSCC

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the official campaign arm of Senate Democrats, is having some fun at Sarah Palin's expense by inviting people to create visual mockups of her comments at the recent National Tea Party Convention in Nashville. "Tell us what you think Sarah Palin is saying using our new whiteboard tool. Feel free to draw, add text, and decorate the scene however you'd like," reads the DSCC site, built on a tool called ScribLink. The DSCC is saying that they'll be selecting some of the "best" images to post on their website. Yep, you'd better believe that the artwork people send in is -- if any of it is actually going to see the light of day -- going to be filtered first.

In other DSCC news, they're also running a petition asking Carly Fiorina's campaign to create more web video, on account of the demon sheep episode.

For the hundreds, nay, dare I say thousands of you planning to come out tomorrow to the Atlantic's "State of the Union for Technology" event featuring, among others, yours truly, we just got word that it's be cancelled, in light of the fact that DC is frozen solid. The good folks at the Atlantic are working on rescheduling the event, and you'll certainly be notified as to when.

Credit: USDA/U.S. Army/MTV

Game designers were called to the White House's Truman Room last week to brainstorm. What the White House wants to know is what experts in the field of gaming interaction know that can be used to combat one of the United States' toughest foes: childhood obesity.

The target of the White House gaming project is young Americans in those critical "tween" years of 9 to 12, when many of us develop our eating habits for life. (Here's the attendee list for last week's White House session on gaming, led by U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra.)

Games and government aren't perfect strangers. The USDA, for example, has even experimented with nutrition-based games before; witness "MyPyramid Blast Off," aimed at a slightly younger set. But there's a growing interest both inside and outside government about how richly immersive and expertly crafted gaming experiences can help shape their players' ways of thinking about the world, whether that's the U.S. military's "America's Army" virtual war environment to MTV's choose-your-own-adventure-style "Darfur is Dying" online game to the massively collaborative "World Without Oil" experience.

Chopra is particularly interested in figuring how if small government-funded prizes might encourage game designers to build effective anti-obesity gaming experiences that young people will actually want to play. More here.

"Open" Pages by Agency:

• Agency for International Development
• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Energy
• Department of Education
• Department of Commerce
• Department of Defense
• Department of Health and Human Services
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Department of Interior
• Department of Justice
• Department of Labor
• Department of State
• Department of Transportation
• Department of Treasury
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Environmental Protection Agency
• General Services Administration
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• National Science Foundation
• Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Office of Personnel Management
• Small Business Administration
• Social Security Administration

Saturday was the deadline for federal agencies to get web pages up and running at [agency].gov/open, as per the President's orders in his Open Government Directive issued 60 days previous. And despite the snowpocalypsemageddon and DC's own special way of dealing with weather (panic!), all twenty federal agencies covered by the order managed to get something up before time ran out. (Check the list to the right to see how each agency went about setting up their "open" page.)

Beyond that, there's, frankly, not a tremendous amount to report. The requirement of the OGD on the web page front weren't hugely demanding. In addition to a page in place, all the agencies were really directed to do was to get "incorporate a mechanism for the public to...give feedback on and assessment of" how the departments were doing on the open government front. As Sunlight's John Wonderlich notes, many of the departments chose to simply plug in the GSA-approved IdeaScale tool for collecting and collaboratively vetting that feedback. [Update: Here's what GSA is telling agencies about IdeaScale that has so many of them using it.] Generally speaking, the open gov pages put up by agencies to meet Saturday's deadline are an act of digital flag-planting, functioning as placeholders for more in-depth open government work to come.

The White House had its own homework assignment due this weekend: developing an open government dashboard to track whether and how well the dozens of agencies under its purview are fulfilling what the OGD expects from them. That's up at WhiteHouse.gov/Open/Around. The barebones matrix color-codes the agencies on whether they're providing high-quality data to Data.gov and whether they've got their "Open" home pages up and running. The big, empty box still left to be color-coded? Whether the agencies have drafted comprehensive and meaningful plans to open up their processes in powerful ways. Those plans are due in about two months.

Call it Orszag chic: Rick Snyder, a Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, ran an ad spot during the Super Bowl that touted his bona fides as "one tough nerd," though one of his achievements is distinctly more geeky than nerdy in the details, and that's his tenure as the Chief Operating Officer at Gateway, a.k.a. the computers with the cow spots on the box.

No matter. Being a geek and/or nerd in politics has sometimes earned politicians the label of technocrat -- and it's not always used in an endearing way, particularly in contrast to leaders who offer grander visions about how the world should change. But perhaps its a sign of our data-lovin' times, where the President is cheered for battling to hang onto his BlackBerry, that Synder views his nerd cred as an asset in the beleaguered state of Michigan.

Evidence in favor of the idea of that Synder is, in fact, a detail-obsessed nerd? His campaign website at RickForMichigan.com adds footnotes to his Super Bowl ad.

• 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.