mtvU

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.

A few quick hits for today:

• Campus Politico interviews Keli Goff about her new book - Party Crashing: How the Hip Hop Generation Declared Political Independence. I ordered my copy earlier this week and am waiting for it to arrive.
• mtvU has announced that on April 8th, Nancy Pelosi will be the next politician to sit down with the student Editorial Board. Last month President Clinton was grilled by four students, all of whom did a good job at pressing the former president on the ups and downs of his presidency. Considering congress's low marks, it will be interesting to see if these young journalists let Speaker Pelosi off the hook because of Congress's recent work on student loans, or if they drill down on still-pressing topics like the environment, the war, the economy, and health care.
• Kristin Gorski has a very interesting post on the Huffington Post about how Sen. Obama's campaign has sparked the imagination of the graphic design community.
• CBS News has an interesting article about Obama's potential to be a map-changing candidate in November.