• All the world's talking about Wookieleaks.
• The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media soft launches.
• Does the Internet know no "let me think about that"?
• Organizing the unemployed.
• And Alliance for a Better Minnesota joins Meg Whitman in the Facebook polling-ads vanguard.

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A man dressed as a giant air freshener is taking to the New Jersey streets in search of fellow Garden Staters who, like him, feel that the state is getting a bad rap in the latest spate of Jersey-themed reality television shows.

This is all part of web video to support an online PR push called Jersey Doesn't Stink, which is geared as a pushback against shows like "The Jersey Shore" and "Real Housewives of New Jersey" on behalf of people who feel these programs reinforce unfair stereotypes of New Jersey residents as mindless fistpumpers with fake tans or bad drivers with awful hair.

Actor Anthony DeVito roams what looks to be Hoboken and Jersey City, seeking support for the homeland of Bruce Springsteen and Frank Sinatra by way of Snooki references.

"That girl looks like a pumpkin, though, doesn't she?" he asks one man.

In a conversation with two Jersey residents on a park bench, he sums the gist of the campaign in a single line: "It's unfair to paint everyone in New Jersey with that same broad, orange brush."

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Former USDA state official Shirley Sherrod to sue Andrew Breitbart for posting a snippet of video that framed her as racist:

"He had to know that he was targeting me," Sherrod told reporters at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists in San Diego.

"He hasn't apologized. I don't want it at this point. He'll definitely hear from me," she said.

When asked if she planned to sue Breitbart, she replied, "I will definitely do it."

Breitbart said Thursday he had not been contacted by Sherrod's attorney. He had no comment on her plans to sue.

Fascinating stuff, on the facts. Seems likely that, if it were to go through, it'd be the first time that a court case would hinge upon the question of when posting video ripped from its context actually becomes a punishable offense.

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According to a least one source, in Yemen, the U.S. CIA is now actively pursuing the so-called "Internet imam," raising the possibility, according to the source, that the imam will be killed before going to court or otherwise facing the justice system:

Last month, a handful of lawyers in the U.S. got a series of unexpected phone calls from Yemen. They came from an accomplished Yemeni academic and former government official, Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki. He is the father of al-Qaida's most famous cleric, the Internet imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been linked to both the Fort Hood shootings and an attempted bombing on a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.

The Awlaki pere was making the calls to key U.S. attorneys, NPR has learned, to see if he could mount a case on behalf of his American-born son against the U.S. government. By his account, the Obama administration has unfairly targeted the younger Awlaki by putting him on a CIA "capture or kill" list. By doing that, the administration has essentially green-lighted Anwar al-Awlaki's assassination — without filing any charges or having a court weigh the evidence in the case.

"This is an instance where the executive branch is claiming the power to go ahead and kill Awlaki without going through anything that resembles the traditional legal process," said New York University Law professor Sam Rascoff. "It essentially amounts to going right to the death penalty phase of a case without ever bringing it to a jury — and that ought to give us pause."

Awlaki has earned the name "Internet imam" for his work connecting with Muslims, often young Muslims, online -- selling them them on the idea of a combative, extremist vision of Islam while similtantously bringing them into the al-Qaeda orbit. American intelligence figures talk about him as a "talent spotter." For some time, U.S. authorities seemed somewhat underalarmed by just how much damage a religious figure could do armed only with a laptop and an Internet hookup. Part of the switch was no doubt motivated by the fact that Army Major Nidal Hasan exchanged several emails with Awlaki before he went on a shooting spree in Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 people dead.

(Apologies for the extremely slow posting today. Chewing on something big, and it seemed worth a bit of focused attention.)

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How is it that Arlington National Cemetery could devolve into such a mess? So close to official Washington that you could walk there from Capitol Hill without breaking much of a sweat, it is by design and popular imagination a burial place befitting those who have given military service to the United States. And yet reporters and Army investigators have shown that Arlington National Cemetery is home to hundreds, if not thousands of unmarked graves, urns found in dirt piles, and graves that show up on now official cemetery map.

That's the subject of a Senate hearing happening at this very moment being conducted by the Government Affairs Committee's ad hoc subcommittee on contracting, chaired by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) with Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) as ranking member.

But one thing we already know is that what's happened at Arlington is, at least in part, a failure of technology. Or rather, a failure of cemetery leaders to comprehend that cobbled-together hardware and outdated software went beyond obscure, siloed "technical issues" to have the effect of dishonoring American soldiers.

According to a June report by Army investigators (pdf), for example, Arlington National Cemetery, supposedly the jewel of the national cemetery system, was running IT that would have embarrassed even other government burial places, not to mention private facilities across the country. "When asked about the cemetery's information technology (IT) posture," reads the report, "one ANC leader stated that the cemetery is at a 'one' on a scale of one to five, with five being the best." Modern cemetery practice is to use customized software systems that employ GPS to keep track of burial sites, scheduling tools to track internments and inurnments, ordering features that manage headstone production. Arlington had little of that. And it had no dedicated IT staff responsible for overseeing the system.

The alternative? "This forces Arlington to maintain its present practice of manual record-keeping as its primary means of record-keeping." There's little wonder how things turned out. It's pretty much what they were planning for.

For more background on the chaotic situation at Arlington National Cemetery, check out the on-going reporting that Salon's Mark Benjamin has been doing. And you can watch the Senate committee hearing's live-stream here.

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• UK | Wikileaks' war records: the datajournalism perspective
  The Wikileaks disclosure of Afghanistan war records has been frontpage news in the last two days. It was not only about journalism, but also about datajournalism
  The three newspapers that broke the story had less than a month to choose how to publish the data: how to choose? How they did it?
  Here's what was the process at The Guardian:

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• With 92,000 new documents and pressure in the online space for folks to offer near instantaneous commentary, it's not surprising to see the read on the Wikileaks data dump -- It changes everything, It's nothing we didn't know -- fluctuate pretty rapidly, too. The Guardian, one of the three "media partners" selected by Wikileaks to vet, analyze, and promote the documents, has come up with one interesting new perspective on the raw material. They've plucked out 300 incident reports they judge to be most compelling and plotted them on an interactive Google Map.
• In a bid to bind the Republican Party to Tea Party interests before the midterm elections in November, the DNC has launched a new site and web video describing the "Republican Tea Party's Contract on America." What the GOP-TEA would do, warns Democrats, is push for the repeal of the health care reform package, privatize or eliminate Social Security, end Medicare, and more.
• As part of New York City's push to boil down restaurant health inspection results to a single letter grade, they've revamped the relevant city website to read more like a report card. Useful stuff, unless, that is, you were hoping to ever again have an appetite to eat in New York City. My favorite local eatery, it turns out, has other frequent visitors, but of the four-legged variety.
• Four Lebanese men face prison time for slamming their country's president on Facebook. President Michel Suleiman's Facebook page, naturally, pushes back on objections to the prosecution of the men: "The president is a keen champion of freedom of expression, but even so you must punish those whose offensive language goes beyond all norms of reality."
• Twitter loses its oldest recorded user.
• And ProPublica is asking Gulf coasters to report in on how they're doing in getting their "legitimate" claims paid out by BP.

(With Nick Judd)

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The White House called in some guy that'd been hanging around the place to demo for folks how the new HealthCare.gov information clearinghouse and plan picker works:

Recognizing that "Presidents of the United States of America" isn't a particularly robust user group, Obama demos the site from the perspective of Barack and Michelle Obama of years ago, two young lawyers living in Chicago. As a public resource and guide to the changing post-reform health care landscape, HealthCare.gov has a ways to go, particularly in getting insurers to hand over the data on plan costs that will go to flesh out the site's comparison matrixes. Getting the President himself identified with the site is at least a little boon to the people inside government that have to actually make the thing work over the long run. For some more background on HealthCare.gov, check this out.

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Experience tells us that efforts to spice up yet-another-fundraising-email can lead to some curious word choices. Today's example comes from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. In his note to the DCCC list, Hoyer warns Democrats that Republican Leader John Boehner is "measuring the Speaker's chair."

Is Boehner afraid that he might not fit?

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When last quarter wrapped, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman (R) was reported to have spent on web development IT a full seven times what her challenger Jerry Brown (D) spent on his entire campaign. The Whitman campaign was unapologetic. A spokesperson told the local paper that Whitman's Silicon Valley-based campaign "will use every tool at our disposal" in Whitman's bid to replace the term-limited Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Enter a new tool. Last night at 9pm, the Whitman campaigned rolled out on Facebook what the company calls a "polling ad." Companies like Budweiser, Chase, and CareerBuilder have paid for similar ads, but Facebook says it believes that Whitman's poll ad marks its first use in a political contest.

What makes a "polling ad" unique, at least from Facebook's perspective, is that it marries traditional online advertising with the social tools that make its platform so powerful and popular. Whitman's "A New California" poll-slash-ad, for example, asks users to vote on which California issue is most important to them, in light of the state's high unemployment rate, budget deficit, and school woes. Voters can see not only how the entire universe of Facebook users have responded to the poll ad, but also how their Facebook friends, in particular have voted -- complete with tiny avatar photos of your friends under each polling option. Other ads in Facebook's so-called "Engagement Ads" suite include ads that let users leave comments, send gifts, or "like" a brand directly from the advertisement's interface.

As of this afternoon, some 6,200 people had voted in Whitman's poll/ad. "Creating jobs" is in the lead, with 43% of the vote. "Cutting state spending" and "Fixing education" nearly equally share the rest.

"The Facebook ads play an important role in our aggressive strategy to build our online community of support and engage younger voters in the campaign," said Whitman campaign spokesperson Sarah Pompei when asked why they're investing in the polling ads. "This is just the latest in the innovative communication tools our campaign is using to build the groundswell of support for Meg's agenda."*

As for the Brown campaign, a spokesperson dismissed the ads to the LA Times as "more gimmicks."

*Updated with comment from a Whitman campaign spokesperson.

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So, I was reading this Dana Milbank piece about how debate on the House floor yesterday afternoon was consumed with discussion of the 92,000 documents released by the website Wikileaks on the execution of the war in Afghanistan. Milbank has some fun with members casually dropping references to "the Wikileaks Report" and "the Wikileaks expose."

And I thought to myself, "Self, you know what might be fun? Pulling up the Congressional Record. Digging through it to see just many and what kind of mentions about Wikileaks there have been this week in Congress. Why? Because this is a website few people had heard of until a few months ago, one that's run by a non-American citizen, hosted on servers outside the United States. Wikileaks' ability to shape the debate in the U.S. Congress raises all sorts of fascinating new questions about the ability of a single person or small group of people to, as Margaret Mead famously said, change the world."

"Why, reading our nation's official record of what actually came out of the mouths of our elected officials," I went on, "might provide some insight whether the Wikileaks document release is less important as an exposing of new important than it is as a catalyzing moment. The importance of the cache of materials is not that it sheds new lights on Predator strikes or the duplicity of our allies. Instead, the power of Wikileaks in this instance is as , to use a modern phrase, as an aggregator, using sheer volume to break through the clutter of the modern media environment and capture even the attention of Congress."

I had myself intrigued. Hooked. Wanting to know more. So what, then, does the Congressional Record, the official recording of what happens in our names in Congress every day, the source material to our democracy, reveal about the ability of the "world's first stateless news organization" Wikileaks to drive debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives? Dunno. The Government Printing Office website keeps timing out when I try to access yesterday's Congressional Record. Not exactly confidence-inspiring about the country's ability to meet the complex challenges and threats of the future. But if it makes the federal government of the United States of America feel better, Wikileaks.org has had trouble staying up lately, too.

Go read Milbank.

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Russia is being roiled by a police officer's video-taped testimony exposing alleged corruption and other police abuses, posted on YouTube, reports the New York Times' Clifford Levy:

One day last fall, a police officer here put on his uniform and sat on a drab tan couch before a video camera. In a halting monotone, he recorded two video appeals to Vladimir V. Putin, 13 minutes in all.

He was a nobody cop from a nowhere city, but his words would startle this country.

“How can a police officer accept bribes?” the officer asked. “Do you understand where our society is heading?

“You talk about reducing corruption,” he said. “You say that it should not be just a crime, that it should be immoral. But it is not like that. I told my boss that the police are corrupt. And he told me that it cannot be done away with.

“I am not afraid of quitting. I will tell you my name. I am Dymovsky, Aleksei Aleksandrovich.”

The videos were uploaded to YouTube in November, and a nation that has grown increasingly infuriated by police wrongdoing could not take its eyes off them.

Starting straight into the camera, Dymovsky implores his country's elders to step up and object to the current trajectory of the country. "Senior policemen, where are you?," asks the officer from Novorossiysk. "You are retired, nothing is holding you. Rise your heads and help raise young policemen." Dymovsky has since been fired from the police force.

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• On occasion of the President's upcoming 49th, Michelle Obama emails: "Together with other Organizing for America supporters -- and me, Malia, Sasha, and Bo -- we'll wish him a happy birthday and let him know that we're ready to take on the year ahead alongside him." Once you add your name to the President's mailing list birthday card, it's hinted that there is perhaps, something else you might get him: a contribution to OFA.
• MoJo's David Corn argues that even the jaded should be stirred by the Wikileaks Afghanistan doc release.
• Friday starts a conference in San Francisco on "modern direct democracy."
• Careful what you tweet. You almost ruined Vincent Harris's surprise proposal.
• And ABC News covers social networking's effect on politics.

(With Micah Sifry)

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As we recently mentioned, the Obama White House has launched a series of weekly emails on various policy topics, starting off with newsletters on energy policy and the economy.

But on the chance that that's not enough White House in your inbox, a new media product rolls out from the chief executive today: The Daily Snapshot. The White House describes the update as a "quick look at what's happening each day at the White House."

The White House Daily Snapshot will, they say, include the hottest news from the frequently-updated White House blog, a Photo of the Day from the busy White House photo office, and that day's entries on the President and Vice President's public schedules (which, as we told you early today, are also now available in auto-updating feed format that you can add to your Outlook, iCal, or other scheduling program.)

A daily emailed missive from the White House part, of course, of the Obama team's struggle to get eyeballs on what they're doing day in and day out, with the presumption that people's opinion on the Obama presidency will rise the more that they know about it. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer talked about the President's appearance on "The View" this week being motivated by "the difficulty of reaching people in this hyperactive media environment." If you can't beat the hyperactive media environment, join 'em, it seems.

You can sign up for the White House's new Daily Snapshot here.

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Well, okay, maybe not right now.

As part of its efforts around the upcoming midterm elections, the Republican National Committee has launched NovemberStartsNow.com, and it's no tucked away, "let's keep tinkering with it" site. At the moment, the RNC's official GOP.com online home redirects right to this new domain. "Barack Obama's presidency has been a disaster," reads the microsite. "He is either unwilling to or incapable of doing his job. The economy is in shambles, the government is failing, and Americans are losing hope. Barack Obama was not ready to be President."

Not quite ready, either, is November Starts Now. The site features three slots for video content. The first is occupied by the infamous "3am phone call" ad Hillary Clinton ran against Obama in the presidential primary. The second and third simply read "Video Coming Soon."

Democrat or Republican, progressive or conservative, web designers of every stripe are shedding a few tears.

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Well, now, if this isn't uncomfortable, I don't know what is. A 31 year-old Oklahoma woman and her husband have launched Don'tVoteForMyDad.com as part of a campaign to convince voters to vote against their father(-in-law). He's a candidate to be a judge in Oklahoma, but his offspring doesn't seem to think he'd be a very good one: "District 21 judicial candidate John Mantooth is not a good father, not a good grandfather and in my opinion a review of his 37 year record as an attorney in Cleveland, Garvin and McClain Counties reveals that he would not be a good judge."

Amongst the couple's complaints is that their father once regifted to them a weevil-ridden box of chocolates. For his part, Mantooth blames the campaign on the fact that his son-in-law was once law partners with one of his opponents in the upcoming primary.

If these folks find themselves in the same place in the future, that would make for one awkward family photo.

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Google's offerings to the public sector have just expanded, with the announcement that the company is now offering a version of their "cloud" based Google Apps suite (Gmail, Google
Docs, Calendar, and more) that has been specially built to meet the security and policy needs of government:

...Google Apps is the first suite of cloud computing applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation from the U.S. government. The FISMA law applies to all information systems in use by U.S. federal government agencies to help ensure they’re secure. The federal government’s General Services Administration has reviewed the documentation of our security controls and issued an authorization to operate, the official confirmation of our FISMA certification and accreditation. This review makes it easier for federal agencies to compare our security features to those of their existing systems; most agencies we have worked with have found that Google Apps provides at least equivalent, if not better, security than they have today. This means government customers can move to the cloud with confidence.

Moving government services to so-called cloud computing has been a major push of the White House Office of Management and Budget; see, for example, Apps.gov. Politico's Morning Tech raises the interesting point that with the departure of OMB Director Peter Orszag at the end of the month, folks like U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra lose a strong ally in the push to apply innovation to government. That said, says the Politico team, incoming OMB Director Jack Lew has been known to see technology as an area where government can be made more efficient.

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Some full-color, moving image creativity from AFSCME: the union of government employees filmed an ad going after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for holding up federal funding for Kentucky that they, last night, projected on the sides of buildings in downtown Louisville. CNN has more.

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You need never ask that again, now that we have the President's, and Vice President's, public schedules have been posted online by the White House. Bonus: You can also subscribe to feeds of the schedules using Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, and more, so that your calendering app will be automatically updated with the comings and goings of the chief executive. It's a nice bit of added transparency, but there is a downside: your calenders will be side by side, so it'll be tough to avoid the fact that on the same Wednesday afternoon your calendar reads "Go get teeth cleaning," his reads "Meeting with the Russian President."

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I recently asked Aaron Smith, research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, if they had any data looking at how internet use might vary by degree of religious affiliation. Turns out that Pew hasn't really dug deep into that question, so I can't tell you whether Mormons tweet more than Baptists, or if Episcopalians update their Facebook profiles more often than Lutherans.

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