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Jimmy Kimmel gives us an advance look at John McCain's new youth ad:

Update II: Got the video up and working again.

Update: Grrrrr......looks like the video got removed from YouTube. Basically, in so many words, Rendell said that young voters were drinking the Obama Kool-Aid and were swayed by pretty words and a nice speech, but knew very little about Obama's actual policies.
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In what is becoming an all-too common script for Clinton surrogates, Governor Ed Rendell thinks that young voters are suckers, duped by drinking too much of the Obama Kool-Aid:

I'll let some young voters rebut these allegations for themselves:

I've just arrived down in DC for the Roosevelt Institution's conference, Towards a New New Deal: FDR's Liberalism and the Future of American Democracy. It's an interesting crowd. Probably 40% of the crowd are young people involved with Roosevelt - aspiring policy makers. The other 60% seem to be older folks, many of whom probably are policy makers (in the sense that they work at policy oriented institutions). This strikes me as a good thing. In the best case scenario, it means that the Roosevelt Institution isn't ghettoized at a "kids's table" that lacks any connection to the real progressive policy world. We'll see if that observation bears out throughout the day.

We're on a ten minute break now before the first panel. Once things get going I'll pop in every couple of hours with my thoughts on how it is going. In the meantime, mtvU's Editorial Board held it's session with Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday. I still haven't had time to watch the clips, but I put them here without comment for your own information/enjoyment.

I know the clips look the same, but they are all different. If you're more for text than video, Ben Adler has the rundown on the forum at the Politico.

This has youthy content-creators written all over it. More details here.

I wish I was kidding, but the College Republicans blog is using this video to tout McCain's experience. Apparently he likes to steal lines from more famous people, and there's a whole bunch in there about space. As in aliens, by which I don't mean undocumented workers, but aliens with ray guns. What's McCain's position on immigration again?

The scariest part is that this is a paid ad by the McCain campaign.

Quick hits for a lazy Saturday. Look for an announcement here tomorrow.

• Are today's teenage girls the next generation of online organizers? Looks like it. A new study from PEW shows that young girls are more likely than boys to be online content creators (35% vs. 20%). The one exception is online video, which is still an area in which boys participate at twice the rate of young girls.
• In anticipation for March 4th, Sen. Obama is wooing young Latinos in Texas, trying to take a bite out of his opponents base. The senator was at UT Pan American this week speaking with students about his education plan.
• Hat tip to Sarah Lai Stirland at Wired for tipping me off to Hillary Speaks to Me, a grassroots video project designed to showcase Sen. Clinton's support among young Americans (from 4 - 35 looks like a descriptive range). The site is one of the most authentically bottom up efforts in support of Senator Clinton that I've seen. The creators say that it's not "too little too late," but I have to disagree. This would have been good to see eight or nine months ago, but at this point it is overshadowed by the sheer volume of quality user generated content clogging the tubes in support of Sen. Obama.
• At WireTap, Future Majority friend and researcher for CIRCLE Karlo Barrios Marcelo explains why three is the magic number.

Here's a video of yesterday's march in Prairie View Texas in support of student voting rights. Warning, the sound is a bit loud:

I don't write a lot about topical issues. Mostly this blog covers tactical and structural topics, or follows elections. But this was was pretty funny, and very cleverly done, so I thought I'd post it.

If you are really looking to dig in to FISA, you could do worse than reading Matt Browner Hamlin's blog, Hold Fast. Matt was the blogger for the Dodd campaign, and has been a real leader in the FISA fight. His blog is probably one of the best places on the net to track what is happening with FISA legislation.

Oh, and did I mention that at 25 Matt is a Millennial?

Awesome. I love remix culture, and this goes right to what Josh (Koenig) was saying the other day over at TPM Cafe:

This is the keynote from Black Youth Vote's SpeakOut event at South Carolina State University earlier this month:

I think Johnson sets up a false dichotomy between online and offline activism, but his points about Citizen Change/Vote or Die! not creating a real movement around electoral politics rings true to me. And I've heard his comments about the cooption of the civil rights generation by the political establishment echoed in a lot of articles about Hip Hop Activism.

Very interesting. I'm trying to talk to some folks at the Hip Hop Caucus so I can dig in a little deeper on what groups like the Hip Hop Summit Action Network and others actually accomplish. I'll be writing more about this in the near future.