MTV Choose or Lose and Kanye West have teamed up to present Homecoming, a one hour special where Kanye surprises returning veterans at their homes and talks to them about the challenges they face.

“There are hundreds of veterans out there who are falling through the cracks. They make the ultimate sacrifices for us by laying down their lives, but it seems like a lot of them just get forgotten about” said Kanye West. “I know my music inspires and helps a lot of people but you can always do more. I teamed up with MTV and took the opportunity to share the spotlight with these veterans and hear their stories. I went to their homes to listen and get their first hand experiences. I wanted to hear their stories.”

The “Choose or Lose & Kanye West Present: Homecoming” special will shine the spotlight on three Iraq war veterans, representing the diverse cross-section of America’s returning armed forces. The issues faced by these three young veterans are emblematic of the issues that will be faced by the more than 1.7 million young people who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. The documentary will also highlight how viewers can help through extensive resources available through Chooseorlose.com and the Dr. Donda West Foundation.

Recent MTV research revealed that nearly 70 percent of young people 18-29 personally know someone who has fought in Iraq. Through this special news presentation, Choose or Lose hopes to elevate the issues of young, new veterans; ensure Presidential candidates address these issues; and mobilize millions of young people to understand and take action in ways to help their peers who have served, who with the greatest honor, ensure that they register and vote.

The program is set to air on Monday, July 28 at 10pm ET/PT.

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They start actually talking about it 2 minutes in. Focuses on how angry we are and how anonymity has led to wild and crazy netroots action.

“Modern technology has empowered whack jobs.”

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In commemoration of July 4^th and our young veterans, MTV’s “Choose or Lose” will takeover MTV2 tomorrow with special programming, including a bloc of “True Life” episodes.  Exclusive messages from John McCain and Barack Obama that pay tribute to the young men and women who have served in the nation’s armed forces will air exclusively on MTV2 and www.ChooseorLose.com throughout the day.  You can take a sneak peak at the messages in their entirety at the following links:

John McCain – Choose or Lose July 4^th Message: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAyR2qJtCqE
Barack Obama – Choose or Lose July 4^th Message: http://youtube.com/watch?v=nC-pvn_tMfM

Here is the press release:

Coming off of a record breaking turnout of 6.5 million 18-29 year-olds who voted in the 2008 primaries, MTV continues its commitment to engage and inspire young Americans to vote in the 2008 Presidential Election. As part of its Emmy-winning “Choose or Lose” campaign, on Independence Day, MTV2 will present a special Choose or Lose day-long “takeover” in which short and long-form programming will engage millions of young adult voters to honor – and elevate the issues – of the more than one million young men and women who have served on the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The MTV2 Choose or Lose takeover will include exclusive 60-second video messages from presumptive Presidential candidates, Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Barack Obama. The messages will air exclusively on MTV2 and www.ChooseorLose.com on July 4^th. The dual 60-second video messages will pay tribute to the young men and women who have served in the nation’s armed forces. The 60-second messages form Obama and McCain, as well as the MTV News reports will also be made available on MTV Mobile through all of its wireless carrier distribution partners.

Recent MTV research reveals that nearly 70 percent of young people 18-29 personally know someone who has fought in Iraq. Through this special MTV2 takeover, Choose or Lose hopes to elevate the issues of young, new veterans; ensure Presidential candidates address these issues; and mobilize millions of young people to understand and take action in ways to help their peers who have served, who with the greatest honor, ensure that they register and vote.

To illuminate young veterans issues, throughout the day special reports will be aired from some of the 51 MTV / Knight Foundation Street Team ’08 citizen journalists across the country. These reports will highlight stories of young veterans in their communities, focusing on the challenges of post traumatic stress disorder, lack of educational benefits, and the myriad of challenges facing young veterans struggling to acclimate back into civilian life. All Street team reports can be accessed at www.ChooseorLose.com. In addition, you can receive weekly Street Team election updates on your mobile phone by texting ST to 84465. (Standard rates apply). MTV News will also feature two new reports, one on Ashwin Madia, an Iraq war veteran running for Congress from Minnesota’s 3rd district, and the recent passage of the 21^st century GI Bill.

In addition to the Street Team and MTV News reports, MTV2 will present a special July 4^th programming bloc centered around young veterans and issues they face as they live and return from life in the military including:

· 6:00pm – Iraq Uploaded

· 6:30pm – True Life: I Live in Iraq

· 8:30pm – True Life: I’m Shipping Out

· 9:30pm – True Life: I’m Coming to America

· 10:30pm – True Life: I’m a Civilian Again

“Choose or Lose ’08” (www.ChooseorLose.com) is MTV’s Emmy-Award winning campaign to engage, inform and empower young voters on the political issues that matter to them most.  First launched in 1992, the campaign has helped fuel several of the largest youth voter turnouts in US history, including in 2004, when it helped inspire nearly 22 million 18-30 year olds to register and vote.

Other elements of “Choose or Lose ‘08” include the pioneering MTV / MySpace Presidential Dialogue Series, which has featured Senators McCain, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Governor Huckabee and Representative Paul taking unfiltered questions – in person and online, in real time – from youth nationwide; “Choose or Lose Presents Clinton & Obama Answer Young Veterans”; and MTV “Street Team ’08,” 51 specially-recruited citizen journalists, one in each state and Washington, D.C., covering the 2008 elections from a youth perspective.  “Street Team” members file weekly multi-media reports, tailor their coverage for mobile devices and focus on the political issues that most impact young people in their respective states.  All “Choose or Lose” content, plus more information on the candidates, issues, registering to vote and a spirited debate, can be found on www.ChooseorLose.com.

For more information on youth-based activism, the upcoming election and young veterans log on to think.mtv.com. The Think Community is dynamic, multimedia driven and enables youth to easily learn more about the issues that matter to them most, share their opinions – via uploaded online videos, podcasts and blogs – and connect with others to make a difference.  The site is one of the only to reward members for positive actions taken online or off, serving up chances to hang out with socially conscious celebs, access to exclusive MTV events, exposure on MTV and other national media outlets, as well as grants, scholarships and more.  Think.MTV.com was founded in partnership with the Case Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Goldhirsh Foundation and MCJ Amelior Foundation.  For more information or to build a profile and become involved, visit Think.MTV.com.

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YDA President David Hardt and Christina Aguilera will be on Larry King Live tonight discussing the youth vote.

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It is a nice change to see a mainstream media organization actually begin to understand the concept of the internet. MSNBC.com now includes embed codes for all of its videos. Where at one time we had to wait for someone to rip that Keith Olbermann Special Comment we just had to share and put it on YouTube, only to have it taken down a week later, we now have it when we want it.

Hopefully other news outlets will follow suit and begin to allow embedded videos. To highlight the feature, I included a video from Countdown about John McCain and his allies supporting policies that led to the drastic increases in gas prices.

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If you subscribe to Sirius Satellite Radio you can check out my interview on The Blog Bunker tomorrow (Friday,  May 23)  at 5:30 PM Eastern Time on Indie Talk Channel 110. I’ll mostly be talking about the youth vote and youth political participation.

P.S. You can tell how excited I am to get Photoshop back when I feel compelled to make a graphic for this.

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Saturday Night Live has launched its SNL Elections 2008 page, featuring videos from the show, e-cards, and more. Here is a list of some of the features:

• Political clips from past shows.
• Obama, Clinton, and McCain e-cards.
• Vote for all-tim favorite SNL Presidential candidate.
• Whack-a-pol game.
• Message boards with threads for each of the three remaining candidates.

Unfortunately the site does absolutely nothing to encourage people to vote. No register to vote button, nada.

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The cable news networks have been constantly reporting on head-to-head polls comparing Obama vs. McCain and Clinton vs. McCain and using these polls to determine electability. Questions about whether or not one candidate’s supporters will embrace the nominee have been all over television and the blogs. Despite all the hype that they cause, these head-to-head polls are pretty meaningless until the Democrats have a nominee.

The newest NBC/WSJ poll helps illustrate this:

Indeed, even though Democrats have an 18-point advantage over Republicans in a generic presidential ballot test (51-33 percent), this latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey shows Obama besting McCain by only three points (46-43 percent) and Clinton topping the Arizona senator by only one (45-44 percent).

While the argument can be made that John McCain has more appeal than other Republican candidates, it wouldn’t make that dramatic a difference. Here is what I think is happening. Clinton and Obama supporters, when they are polled, tell the pollster that they would not vote for their Democratic opponent against McCain. Why would they do this? To make their candidate look like a stronger choice for the Democrats in November. However, when they are asked the Democrat vs. Republican question they answer more honestly. Once we have a nominee I predict that the Democratic candidate’s numbers gain dramatically over McCain.

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Yesterday marked the release of Rockstar Games’ highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV, and once again the Baby Boomers are freaking out over the evil demons that will possess the souls of the unsuspecting innocents from the two most dangerous gateways to Hell: Xbox360 and PlayStation 3.

Now I don’t normally write on this subject, but I figure I’m not running for office or anything so I might as well. This uproar is just the latest in a long line of cultural panic in this country, from dangerous comic books in the 1950s to video games today. The argument is, of course, that these video games will turn children into stone-faced killers. Disputing the claims made by those under the spell of the culture of fear is the subject of the blog GamePolitics.com. Here are some of their posts:

• FBI Stats Don’t Support Claims That GTA is Cop Killer Game
• Expert: Grand Theft Auto is Not Why Kids Join Street Gangs
• As GTA IV Launches, Harvard Med School Author Advises Parents: Relax

Child psychologist Dr. Frank Gaskill argues against the video game fear-mongers, as do a number of other reputable authorities in the psychology and medical communities. As people now feel that the uproar of Elvis Presley’s dancing was silly, Millennials feel the same way about music and video games.

In Danny Goldberg’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit he talks about the cultural disconnect between Baby Boomer politicians and the younger generations. The outrage shown by Boomer political figures like Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore over music lyrics turned off a lot of young people. The Millennial generation has shown a preference for openness, freedom of speech and expression, and transparency. Unwarranted hysteria over video games and calls for censorship of the medium is unacceptable to those that have grown-up with and fully understand computer and video games.

While stirring up unwarranted fear and seeking draconian responses to the specter of youth poisoned by video games may earn politicians some brownie points with scared-to-death Boomers, it will be to their detriment in appealing to the growing Millennial generation.

In a world where we are afraid of all the wrong things and ignore the real dangers we face, this kind of pathetic outrage is not surprising, but hopefully one day people will start to actually read the research and evidence before they begin their political posturing. As Dan Abrams would say, this is why America hates Washington.

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Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic wrote of The GOP Generational Time Bomb and created this very telling chart:

Well, despite the fact that Marc Ambinder gets it, there are still many that are blind to the youth vote and seem to find it a personal mission to ignore or discount all of the research and evidence that has been done over the last few years.

Cassy Fiano of Wizbang flat-out mocks the youth vote in a response to the Washington Post article that makes the statement that the youth vote will matter in 2008. Here is Cassy’s thoughts about the civic reawakening of the Millennial generation:

A civic reawakening? Were 20-year-olds “awake” to politics before and somehow “fell asleep”? Um… ok. And, you know, there’s the teensy problem of this poll being conducted with MTV’s help, which automatically dampens the prospect of it becoming a reality.

Look, if “young people” vote, then that’s fantastic. If they don’t, then oh well. They aren’t going to make or break elections, no matter how much the media fawns over them. Every election season its the same old song and dance, and it ain’t a different tune this time around.

It’s not just Cassy Fiano that gets it wrong. Don Surber takes on Marc Ambinder’s piece referenced above. In his commentary, with the cliche title Young People Don’t Vote, he gets it so wrong that the Darwin Awards should make an exception and “honor” a living person.

But young people are a waste of time and energy when it comes to voting. They are not where the voters are.

Voters over time tend to grow more conservative. The percentage of young voters who were Republican was at its nadir in 1952. But Republican Ike Eisenhower was elected president. See Pew Research.

In 2000, Dems held an 8-point advantage in this group and still lost the presidency (Al Gore’s plurality was measured in tenths of a point).

In 2004, Democrats increased that lead to 11 points. Bush won by 3 points.

If there are long-term effects, how did Republican Richard Nixon get elected 16 years after that 1952 nadir — and President Reagan re-elected 16 years after that — and President Bush 16 years after that? Those young Democrats became Middle Aged Independents and then Old Republicans.

Ambinder said it is a ticking bomb. Oh there’s a bomb in that post all right, but I don’t think it is on the Republicans.

The PEW Research source he uses, could that be something I missed that shows young people becoming more conservative as they get older? Oh no, it’s the research that Ambinder covered that shows young voters increasingly identifying as Democrats. Not the best supporting document I would think.

Here are the fallacies that these critics of the youth vote seem overly fond of:

1. Young people don’t vote, so it doesn’t matter if they identify as Democrats. Even if we accepted the untrue statement that young people don’t vote, they do eventually grow up, this isn’t Peter Pan. Since research in fact has shown that party identification for the most part stays consistent throughout life, it still should be troubling to conservatives.
2. The silly kids are Democrats now that they are young and don’t know any better, but they’ll grow out of it. Research says otherwise my conservative friends.
3. Not enough young people will vote to affect the 2008 election, since Gore and Kerry didn’t win with the youth vote. Have you not heard of a trend line? Surber actually shows the youth vote increasing from 2000 to 2004, he should know better. With elections as close as they are, as well as the examples of Democratic candidates in 2006 that did win because of the youth vote, I don’t know how they can ignore it.

Though as frustrated as I get sometimes reading this nonsense, there is a silver lining. As long as conservatives completely write off the youth vote as unimportant and believe that the ghost of Ronald Reagan will personally visit each young person as they get older and magically turn them into Republicans, Democrats have an unobstructed field. So conservatives, by all means, keep it up. The youth vote doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it.

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