The dawn of a post-partisan era, eh?

As expected, the House tonight passed a massive stimulus package in a desperate attempt to help pull a sinking economy out of the mud. The margin: 244 to 188. Not a single Republican voted for the bill.

Depending on where you stand, the bill could be good news for the tech industry. Funneling billions of dollars into clean energy initiatives, health IT and broadband deployment, the bill could be a boon to companies like Google, which has a keen interest in all three areas.

It certainly had the support of one of the key industry associations, the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents major tech players like IBM, Intel and Cisco.

ITIC President Dean Garfield met with President Obama today along with CEOs from several tech firms and other industries.

"I am glad to see that President Obama values the role that the high tech industry plays in this economy," Garfield said in a statement. "This stimulus legislation is an important first step toward putting the economy back on the right path."

Of course, Garfield added that a key component of any successful stimulus was tax credits for companies to rejuvenate the investments that would save or create jobs.

The tax vs. direct spending split was the central fissure between Republicans and Democrats in the House debate. Roughly two-thirds of the money in the bill passed today would come in direct spending, much to the chagrin of Republicans.

The bill now passes to the Senate, where lawmakers are working swiftly to craft their own, more expensive version, which will likely include more compromise provisions. In the broadband title alone, lawmakers have crossed partisan lines to include some tax cuts for qualifying network build-outs, which were absent from the House bill.

The total price tag for the House bill settled at $819 billion. After an accounting review, the Congressional Budget Office brought the original total of $825 billion down to $816 billion. Then Democrats introduced and passed a $3 billion amendment for mass transit projects in today's floor debate.

The price tag for the Senate version now stands at more than $900 billion.

Remember that big spectrum auction last March? The one where Verizon Wireless, AT&T and a slew of other providers ponied up $19.6 billion for a coveted swath of the airwaves so they could steam ahead with their plans for building out advanced wireless networks?

Well, hurry up and wait, because those airwaves aren't going to be available until television broadcasters switch to an all-digital format, and a plan to delay the transition is gaining momentum in the Senate.

By law, the date for the DTV transition was set for Feb. 17. But with less than a month to go, there is growing concern among lawmakers and regulators that millions of Americans won't be ready. And millions of Americans with no TV service is not a recipe for building political capital.

The leadership of the Senate committee considering legislation to delay the transition until June 12 today announced that it had reached a bipartisan compromise on the bill that removes some of the provisions that the panel's ranking Republican had objected to.

But a DTV delay, which has drawn support from President Obama, has rankled the wireless industry. The companies that spent billions on the spectrum at last year's auction would have to postpone their plans to expand their networks. In the case of Verizon and AT&T, companies looking ahead to lightning-fast 4G networks, it would certainly be a setback.

CTIA, the trade association representing wireless industry, has lashed out at the idea of a delay.

"We are concerned that a delay of the transition date could postpone investment in and deployment of broadband wireless services and decrease confidence in the auction model for spectrum allocation that has generated billions for the U.S. Treasury," Joe Farren, a spokesman for the organization, said in a recent statement. "In the midst of the current economic struggle, these are important considerations."

The principal concern over moving ahead with the transition in February involves a government program to provide people with coupons for the converter boxes they will need to keep analog TVs that receive signals over the air working. The agency administering the program ran out of money for the $40 coupons, and many people have complained that their coupons expired before they were able to redeem them.

The bill would provide accommodations for people whose couldn't redeem their coupons due to natural disasters or delays in mail service or natural disasters, or because retailers ran out of inventory.

The economic stimulus bill being debated in the House would allocated $650 million to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to fund the coupon program.

A House committee was scheduled to consider a bill to delay the DTV transition this week, but postponed the hearing to an unspecified date.

WASHINGTON -- What sort of social occasion would bring Ben Affleck and John Kerry together? Why, Google's inaugural ball, what else!

On a night when President Obama made the rounds to 10 official balls with headliners like Jay-Z and Mary J Blige, Google's ball was hardly the marquee social event here in town.

So it wasn't the first stop for the A-listers (might explain why I was there).

But Google, an increasingly assertive Washington presence, still put on a pretty good show, and scored a few celebrities on a night when the capital was full of them.

Cordoned off from the revelers by a rather stern looking security escort, Kerry chatted it up with Google CEO Eric Schmidt (an Obama campaign surrogate and advisor) in a side room while Affleck and Larry Page, Google's cofounder, caught up on old times, or so I imagine.

Also making the scene were Sarah Silverman, Jessica Alba and, I'm told, John Cusack.

The search giant co-hosted the ball with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and offered to match donations to five nonprofit organizations, including One Economy, a group working to bring technology to low-income Americans.

For a venue, Google chose the Andrew Mellon Auditorium, a federal building at 13th St. and Constitution Ave., just across from the national mall and surrounded by streets paved with soda cans, hamburger wrappers and other detritus left by the two million folks who laid siege to the capital for the inauguration and parade.

Google had the basic elements of a gala party covered: thumping music blasted out by a rather innovative deejay (mashing up Fergie's "My Humps" with Guns and Roses' "Sweet Child of Mine"), a stark white Apple-chic decor, and, to the delight of many, an open bar.

In addition to the smattering of celebrities, the geek contingent was well represented. It was, after all, a Google party. So it came to be that a popular area of the party was the game room just off from the bar, where partygoers could play Wii Rock Band and bowling on the flat-screen TVs, or, for the more cerebral, sidle up to one the tables for a game of checkers, backgammon or chess. Yup, people were playing chess at the party. But not Affleck.

Concerned that millions of Americans will be left in the dark if broadcasters switch off their analog signals on the scheduled date of Feb. 17, Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.V., the incoming chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, has introduced a bill to delay the transition until June 12.

Rockefeller warned that millions of Americans are still waiting to receive coupons for the converter boxes that will be required to ensure analog sets still receive over-the-air signals, and accused the Bush administration of mismanaging the transition.

"It did not have to be this way," Rockefeller said in a statement. "I am especially concerned because this transition is going to hit our most vulnerable citizens -- the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and those with language barriers -- the hardest. Rural communities that rely on over-the-air television will be especially impacted. We risk leaving those who are most reliant on over-the-air broadcast television for their information literally in the dark, and I'm fighting to see that this does not occur."

Part of the problem is that the agency with the Commerce Department that is managing the coupon program has run out of money. The stimulus bill introduced in the House yesterday would allocate $650 million to fund the program and other aspects of the transition, but lawmakers hope to get that bill passed just days before the scheduled DTV transition date. That wouldn't leave nearly enough time to get coupons to everyone on the waiting list.

Rockefeller's bill follows a call from President-elect Obama to delay the transition.

In addition to fixing the coupon program, the bill hopes to give the Federal Communications Commission enough time to adequately staff call centers and ramp up its efforts to educate consumers about what steps they'll need to take to ensure they don't lose signal.

The two Democratic commissioners at the FCC have expressed support for a delay. Republican Chairman Kevin Martin, who will resign on Jan. 20, has warned that a delay would only further consumer confusion, given that a year-and-a-half of public-service messaging about the transition has focused on the date of Feb. 17.

WASHINGTON -- With a new administration days away from taking office, much of the talk about open, e-government has been at the federal level.

But in a practical sense, a great many of the policies that affect people's everyday lives are made by state and local governments.

Here at the annual tech-policy conference of the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Caucus, a private-sector coalition that advises legislators on Internet issues, Virginia's secretary of technology was on hand to discuss some of the challenges and successes of technology initiatives on the state level.

"We at the states and the local level find ourselves translating much of the work you all do on Internet issues into actual initiatives that we can govern," Aneesh Paul Chopra told an audience of Hill staffers, regulators and others here at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill.

Working with Gov. Tim Kaine, Chopra said he has been engaged in developing an ambitious agenda aiming to use "technology as a way to transform our overall approach to governing."

But state governments' tech initiatives are often hindered by arcane accounting rules governing the allocation of federal funds, he said.

"The foundation of open government was to make sure that we have in place a modern, more robust, more enterprise approach to IT infrastructure," Chopra said. "If Microsoft, Google and all those folks can put all their applications on the cloud, and can run them in these mega, mega-datacenters, you'd think government would have the ability to do the same thing and could figure out the accounting rules, but the accounting folks haven't quite gotten together with the tech folks."

Funding shortages are also a chronic issue, particularly as states are feeling the pinch from the economic downturn.

"In a world where you have to choose between funding more healthcare services or social services or cops on the ground, frankly getting $300 million in a one-time shot for IT probably wasn't going to happen," Chopra said.

Nevertheless, he said that Virginia has scored some successes using a model of public-private partnership, where the state enlists the services of an IT firm to advance its tech agenda. Virginia recently partnered with Northrup Grumman to overhaul its state computer systems. The firm signed a 10-year deal to replace government PCs, implement and manage cyber security and oversee other aspects of the state's IT operations.

Operating on a "shoestring budget," Virginia has had to do some "horse-trading" to strike deals with its partners in the private sector. In the case of Northrup Grumman, the firm agreed to shoulder the up-front costs of the project in exchange for a flat annual payment of the technology line items in the state's budget.

A central aspect to the technology push of government at all levels is modernizing and streamlining their databases. Many agencies still operate legacy systems, and databases are often set up so that information is not interoperable, owing to privacy concerns and other issues.

"Open government first and foremost begins with an open and more modern IT infrastructure," Chopra said. "We have all this data, we just can't mine it, because the information is siloed."

For instance, Chopra said he would like to be able to correlate data about children's reading-test scores with their parents' employment data.

"It makes making better, data-driven decisions very, very difficult."

Virginia, along with other states, has partnered with Google to improve the availability of government data on the Web by adopting the site-map protocol to allow the search giant to crawl the sites of its roughly 90 agencies.

"Frankly, it became a lot easier to find stuff," Chopra said.

The state has also struck an agreement with Microsoft to bring its technology-training academy to the state. Virginia is trying to overhaul its graduate equivalency degree (GED) program to focus more on technical skills. The idea of a high-school dropout scoring a job in IT is "laughable," Chopra said. Yet that is exactly what Virginia is trying to do.

In February, the state plans to enroll its first 30 students in the Plugged In program, where they will learn technical skills that aim to land them a spot in the 21st century economy. Northrup Grumman has agreed to give each person who graduates from the program an interview for an entry-level IT position. Chopra said there is a high likelihood that most will get hired.

Now that the Commerce Department has run out of money for the coupon program for the converter boxes that some Americans will need to keep their TVs working once broadcasters switch off their analog signals next month, a new wave of panic about the nation's preparedness is rippling through Washington.

Add to the ranks of the concerned President-elect Obama, who is calling on Congress to extend the deadline of Feb. 17 that is mandated by law.

In a letter to leaders in the House and Senate, Obama aide John Podesta asked for legislation to delay the transition to ensure that call centers are adequately staffed and all Americans who want coupons for converter boxes receive them before their signals go dark.

In response, Ed Markey, the outgoing chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, said it was worth considering Obama's request, but that a delay would "entail significant logistical challenges."

Markey is planning to introduce legislation to fund the coupon program, administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and help the agency clear the backlog.

For more than a year, the Federal Communications Commission, broadcasters and news organizations have been running advertisements and service-oriented news stories aimed at etching the date of Feb. 17, 2009 into TV viewers' minds. In a recent speech, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin expressed his concern that pushing the date back would cause confusion among consumers, and said he hoped Congress would act quickly to get the coupon program back on track.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat, said he saw no problem with pushing the date back.

Obama's call for a delay will no doubt spur Congress to reexamine the issue, but support is by no means unanimous. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, a ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, echoed Martin's concerns.

"I am concerned about moving the date of the upcoming digital television transition," Hutchison said in a statement. "We need to focus on a solution to the coupon shortage. Shifting the date this close to the transition, without a sound plan to share information about the new transition date, will likely result in significant confusion."

The DTV transition isn't just about people with analog TVs and rabbit-ears antennas losing their signals. Last March, the FCC sold the spectrum that broadcasters will vacate when they move to the all-digital format at an auction that raised nearly $20 billion. The major winners, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, plan to use that spectrum to build out their 4G wireless networks using the LTE (long-term evolution) standard. With the first waves of those build-outs scheduled to conclude this year, a delay in the DTV transition could be a significant setback for the nation's two largest wireless carriers as they try to fend off the 4G threat from the Sprint and the WiMAX camp.

One of best-known faces of tech policy on the Hill is stepping out of the fray. Rep Ed Markey, D-Mass., announced today that he will no longer chair the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Markey will assume the chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, also a branch of the Energy and Commerce Committee, where he hopes to oversee an ambitious clean-energy agenda.

Replacing Markey at the head of the Internet subcommittee will be Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat who has long been interested in consumer rights online.

The two Democrats are essentially switching chairs, as Boucher previously headed the Energy subcommittee that Markey is taking over.

As a long-time chairman of the Internet subcommittee, Markey was a tireless advocate of digital rights, inveighing against advertising schemes and other online practices that he saw as a threat to consumer privacy. Markey was also a champion of the open-network principles trumpeted by many technology firms and progressive think tanks. Markey was unsuccessful in his attempts to write Net neutrality principles into law.

Boucher, who represents a rural district in Southwest Virginia, is a strong supporter of Net neutrality.

A spokeswoman for Boucher said he is still formulating his detailed agenda for the subcommittee, but in a brief statement, he said he planned to promote broadband deployment and ensure that the DTV transition goes smoothly.

"Just as first canals, railroads and Interstate highways were the major arteries of commerce in earlier eras, in the 21st century, access to broadband telecommunications will be a defining feature of economic success for our communities," Boucher has said.

Boucher is the co-founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Internet Caucus, which educates lawmakers on Internet issues.

He is also a long-time member of the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property.

Rumors about former eBay CEO Meg Whitman's political ambitions have been kicking around since she handed over the reigns at the online auction house last year. Now that she's jettisoned her positions on several corporate boards, the speculation has begun again in earnest.

This time, the iconic Silicon Valley executive is believed to be eyeing the governorship of California, which term limits will force Arnold Schwarzenegger to vacate in 2010.

Effective Dec. 31, 2008, Whitman resigned from the boards of eBay, Procter & Gamble and DreamWorks Animation, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Whitman recently served as a national co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign, and had been widely considered an insider for a position like Treasury secretary had he won.

Unnamed sources have emerged to suggest that Whitman had made up her mind about a run for governor, citing her decision to clear away her corporate obligations as a telling sign. Look for it to become official with the formation of an exploratory committee in four to six weeks.

If she runs, Whitman will face fellow Republicans Steve Poizner and Tom Campbell, both of whom have already formed their own exploratory committees.

As the wildly successful CEO who presided over eBay's rise from an obscure Internet startup with an unproven business model to an e-commerce kingpin, billionaire Whitman would no doubt benefit from her corporate cache, despite eBay's recent struggles.

She would also be cutting her political teeth on a pretty big stage. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the former CEO of a company like eBay, big as it is, would doubtless find the political arena brimming with new challenges.

There is an old saw that sunlight is the best disinfectant. It seems a little ironic, then, to blame a law called the Sunshine Act, which was aimed at bringing government proceedings into public view, for creating to the toxic culture that many say pervades the Federal Communications Commission.

The three-decade-old law applies to dozens of government agencies, but the FCC's structure and its recent leadership have made it especially caustic in that setting, critics say.

The Sunshine Act prohibits a majority of commissioners (there are five) from meeting to conduct official FCC business while behind closed doors. As a result, the commission roughly once a month holds an open meeting, where members of the public and press can watch as the commissioners read prepared statements and cast votes on the items on the agenda.

The Sunshine Act came from a good place. On its surface, it seems to advance the cause of opening government to the public, which would theoretically make it more accountable.

But to critics, the problem is that the Sunshine Act has had the unintended consequence of bleeding the debate and honest dialogue out of the commission's consideration of the issues. Paradoxically, it has made the FCC a more secretive place.

"The Sunshine Act is one of the biggest barriers to dialogue among the commissioners," Kathleen Abernathy, a former commissioner, recently said at a seminar in Washington on reforming the FCC.

She stressed that it's important to prevent a "cabal" from forming among three like-minded commissioners, but at the same time lamented the effect of prohibiting the commissioners from collaborating on the various draft proposals to arrive at some meeting of the minds ahead of the open meetings.

Because they are open to the public, the open meetings have become highly scripted affairs, said Henry Geller, a former administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the Commerce Department that advises the president on telecom and IT issues.

"Now you have kabuki," Geller said of the FCC's open meetings. "I can get it on the Internet, but I don't bother."

Kabuki. Some of the panelists chuckled at that, but they were laughing because it's true.

In a 2005 letter (PDF) to Ted Stevens, who then chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, Commissioner Michael Copps and then-Chairman Michael Powell wrote:

"The open-meeting requirement [has not] generally achieved its goal of having commissioners help shape each other's views in the course of public deliberations. In fact, this requirement is a barrier to the substantive exchange of ideas among commissioners, hampering our abilities to obtain the benefit of each other's views, input, or comments, and hampering efforts to maximize consensus on the complex issues before us. Due to the prohibition on private collective deliberations, we rely on written communications, staff, or one-on-one meetings with each other. These indirect methods of communicating clearly do not foster frank, open discussion, and they are less efficient than in-person interchange among three or more commissioners would be. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, commission decisions are in some cases less well informed and well exp1ained than they would be if we each had the benefit of the others' expertise and perspective."

Despite this and similar bipartisan entreaties, efforts to reform the Sunshine Act have run aground.