On ABC's This Week this weekend, former Bush White House official Karl Rove criticized the Obama White House for the alleged deed of having "sent out unsolicited e-mails to federal employees asking them to contact their legislation about this bill." Now, if what Rove's saying here were actually true, that would run the risk of violating the Hatch Act that is intended to separate government service and political activity. But let's parse this a bit, because there seems to be some fuzzy thinking at work. Whether or not it makes our brain hurt, the details matter here a great deal. That federal government employees are receiving White House emails on their dot-gov email accounts doesn't seem to be the problem. And anyway, that's up to the agency's themselves to decide the appropriateness of. As for the charge that the emails were "unsolicited," well, here's what the White House's new media director Macon Phillips had to say on the White House blog:

Let's be clear -- and done -- with this incorrect claim: the White House only sends mass messages to email addresses submitted through email signup forms on WhiteHouse.gov. And every message we send has a clear unsubscribe link at the footer to stop receiving messages at any time.

What would be more significant is if the emails from the White House were asking federal employees to take specific political actions, but even the emails being cited by Republican allies contain only a call-to-action that asks recipients to forward the emails' contents on through their address books, or through Twitter, Facebook, etc. Phillips, again, tackles the question of emails requested by federal government employees inappropriately called on them to take specific political actions. Phillips says nuh-uh:

This is simply not true and unless Mr. Rove can point to a White House email making this request of anyone, federal employee or otherwise, he should correct this dangerous and inaccurate assertion.

The spirit of the Hatch Act is really to do away with a direct connection between government employment and political activism. The thinking is that allowing the two to co-exist only opens the door to unseemly political patronage that corrupts the whole idea of a non-political civil service -- which is itself considered one of the better ideas to come out of the administration of government in the American experiment. Is the White House planning to track how many times a federal employee re-tweets their email, and reward their government service on that basis? That's pretty doubtful. The Hatch Act isn't meant to prevent government servants a full life as public citizens. It's to curtail a corrupting quid pro quo. It's difficult to imagine that blast emails from the White House saying "tweet this!" get us into questionable territory.

For students of recent political history, that this particular allegation is coming from Rove is a bit rich, given that he ran political briefings for federal government employees from his perch in the White House. But it's of a piece with a line of attack we've seen bubble up and die down over the last year. Some on the political right, particularly the Rove/FoxNews wing of things, have tried to use some political jiujitsu on the White House's new media operation -- turn a strength against them, that sort of thing. That landed Macon Phillips in mug-shot form on FoxNews this past summer. Andrew Breitbart's Big Government has now picked up the thread. Expect more.

The New York Times had a piece this weekend describing a new ad technique being used out in California that features a claymation-like avatar of Meg Whitman, Republican candidate in the governor's race there, saying bad things about Meg Whitman.

The written piece is a bit tough to make sense of without watching the ad itself. But that you can only do if you actually "become a fan" of Level the Playing Field on Facebook. Which is not a bad way (NYT story on A1 of the Sunday edition + mandatory Facebook following) for LTPF to pick up some attention.

Those of you who follow Democratic campaigns might not be surprised to learn that the strategy is the work, it seems, of Chris Lehane. Lehane is the hard-charging Democratic campaign vet known for making creative use of both opposition research and the peculiarities of reporters and their news cycles. LTPF is also the group behind the WikiMeg experiment we've written about. Level the Playing Field is working to back Jerry Brown's bid for governor, but is not directly connected to his campaign.

The Times reports Lehane saying that the costing of creating the "Meg-a-tar" was a cool $30,000, which makes one think that they could have saved some money emulating the good folks at Red vs Blue.

Your completely random bonus fact of the day is that a "megatar" already happens to be, well, a thing. According to Wikipedia, it's a "stringed musical instrument designed to be played with two-handed tapping."

Credit: The White House

The White House tends to let some time pass before posting photos to its Flickr feed. That's both, it seems, because of in-house logistics around getting them from the White House photographer to the web, and because, at least in some cases, professional consideration for the working photographers covering the events. Not so last night. The House of Representatives passed the main health care package at 11:30pm ET, and by about ten minutes after midnight the White House was emailing around the link to the photo above. This is Barack Obama set on "thrilled," it seems. Anyway, it's a nice way to own the moment. It's leading WashingtonPost.com right now, at least. You also saw Barack Obama's Twitter avatar also celebrating the vote with a simple tweet of "Yes We Can."

In large part, of course, the question now becomes this bigger question of how the White House and his allies can starting "selling" the health care bill for political gain, or, in the worst case for them, to at least to preserve against losses. Organizing for America, which is suddenly being reconsidered as a viable, useful organization after a year of perhaps overheated consideration earlier on, is in a nice, for them, position. Selling health care reform will, more much then the bill's progress was, resemble a political campaign. And running political campaigns is something more innately in the DNA of the organization than pushing through legislation was.

Credit:U.S. State Department

• The State Department's Flickr feed, while generally not rising to Souza-like levels of artistry, does offer a peek at the circus surrounding Hillary Clinton's diplomatic visit to Moscow.
• Here's Rep. Bob Latta, Republican of Ohio, in mobile app form. (Thanks Shaun Dakin)
• 150,000 people use the FCC's new app to find out more about their broadband speed.
• And the Census Bureau is answering both critics and questions on its Twitter feed.

Credit: SquareUp.com

TechCrunch reports that Square, the cell-phone based payment processor, is being used by at least two local political candidates to fundraise at events, as part of the service's beta rollout. (via Tech Republican) TechCrunch's commentators are appropriately skeptical. Aren't trend stories required by some higher power to have at least three examples? But since it's Friday, let's go ahead and indulge in a little harmless speculation about what the potential of Square might be in politics.

Having gotten a chance to play with an early version of Square, we can report that the whole process has been engineered, by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, to be as easy as possible. The user experience is simple, for sure. But perhaps more importantly for Square users, Dorsey and his team have spent considerable energy streamlining the payment collector's experience on the backend, particular when it comes to engaging with a bank and payment processor. Think about the possibility of a candidate or advocacy group, just starting out, being able to carry a Square-enabled phone door-to-door, collecting small payments.

As TechCrunch notes, though, there's something hanging up Square's usage in campaign politics, and it's something that has also proven to be a hurdle in text-message fundraising too -- the ability to collecting donor information in the way the law requires. But TC reports that team Square is working on that:

[...] Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together.

Organizing for America ran a full-page ad (pdf) in today's USA Today, they report, that makes use of the photos sent in through their online photo-uploader -- an interesting bit of online/offline synergy.

Others have made this point elsewhere, but it's worth pointing out again just how quickly the idea that bills should be available online for a few days before a floor vote has become conventional thinking. It seemed like as soon as the House Rules Committee posted a final version of the health care bill, all of Washington automatically calculated ahead 72 hours to the earliest possible time a floor vote could happen (which puts us on Sunday).

That doesn't have to be the case. Speaker Pelosi could call a vote whenever she wanted, at this point. That she hasn't -- and that people don't seem to have expected her to -- is probably a testament to the work done by open gov advocates (for example) to, in fairly short order, make the 72 hour rule into something of a norm.

Not to be outshone by either Organizing for America or the people who put together that "State of the Internet" video, the White House has repackaged its health-care-by-the-numbers week-long campaign into a catchy two minutes of statistics, cute graphics, and punchy music.

Credit: SupremeCourt.gov

The Supreme Court yesterday unveiled the much-needed redesign of its website at SupremeCourt.gov.

The old SupremeCourt.go

The site was once a bit of an eyesore, and difficult to use -- more appropriate for a small rural parish's website than the online home of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Information was difficult to find, and required an intimate familiarity of the court's jargon and proceedings to make much sense of. How's the redesign? From a non-attorney's perspective, the site -- design-wise -- has been updated to about, hmm, 2002. Then again, the highest court in the land does not like to rush blinding into the future. The early aughts is perhaps the best we could have hoped for. As for functionality, it's easier now to find some of the site's key elements, but there's still plenty of work to be done. But first, here's how SCOTUS described the launch in a press release:

Visitors will find that the Supreme Court Web site has an updated and more user-friendly design. The site continues to provide online access to the Court's slip opinions, orders, oral argument transcripts, schedules, Court rules, bar admission forms, and other familiar information. But it also has several new features, including enhanced search capabilities, an interactive argument calendar, improved graphics, and additional historic information.

The blog of Legal Times finds key elements of the site's content pleasingly easier to get to now:

Several important pieces of information about the Court that used to take several clicks to get to are now brought forward, for easier access.

And Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation, which notably did a volunteer mock redesign of the Supreme Court site, notes several improvements, along with several areas where things could still be better:

• The webpage needs to provide more information about what the Court is doing, explaining legal terms of art, and grouping relevant information together (such as information pertaining to a particular case).
• It should incorporate a user-friendly advanced search engine.
• Use machine-readable formats (not just PDFs).

But, that said, the most important part of the Supreme Court website took place under the hood, as they say. For more than a decade, the Supreme Court hasn't actually had control over their own online home. They relied upon the Government Printing Office to manage the site, shipping changes GPO's way anytime they wanted anything posted or tweaked. A handful of Supreme Court justices trekked to Capitol Hill recently to ask for appropriated money for an in-house site. They got it. Now, going forward, the staff of the United States Supreme Court will actually run the website of the United States Supreme Court. That should make things easier, and suggests that this week's redesign was just the start.

Update: Alex Howard does an in-depth review of the new Supreme Court website -- and notes that the new site breaks a number of old links.

Credit: BarackObama.com

• Organizing for America launches a little visualizer front-end interface for their campaign to have supporters send in signs saying why they're backing health care reform.
• That Google DC event on online democracy that fell victim to the great snow-valanche of oh-ten has been rescheduled for the end of March.
• The State Department reportedly plans an internal social network.
• And FEMA launches a map that shows you in plain color the flood history of your county.

(With Micah Sifry)