Around the Tubes: 7/6/07

Annie Schectman is our new intern here at Future Majority. She'll be compiling our "Around the Tubes" posts for the summer, as well as helping us have a deeper presence on FaceBook and MySpace. Give her a warm welcome. --Editors

Around the Tubes: An account of the week’s most interesting posts.

• On June 28, Aaron Blake posted on The Hill, illustrating the trends of Republican voters concerning health care, foreign policy, and gays in the military. The post revealed the lack of growth within the party, as millennials tend to be more progressive and ideological divides stratify older voters. According to the poll, “41 percent of Republicans [are] now 55 or older, compared to 28 percent in 1997.” While the Republicans polled self-identified as conservatives, most endorsed candidate Rudy Guliani, who leads the polls with a notoriously checkered background
• YouTube and CNN have partnered up to create Community Counts, an awesome way to make the presidential debates interactive. The democratic site allows voters to post video questions for the candidates like “What is your position on gays in the military?” or “What is your gun control policy?” Anyone can then vote to determine which questions are asked, relieving Anderson Cooper from his position as youth-question moderator -- much to the relief of all young politicos. The videos are all tame, but like everything on YouTube, they are infinitely creative and genuinely young.
• Also on YouTube, a jarring anti-war video featuring portraits of dejected Iraqi children. The propagandist post is hokey but effective.
• Emily Greenhouse of The Nation writes about SAVE (The Student Association for Voter Empowerment), a new for-youth by-youth organization that strives to increase electoral participation among young voters by making the system more accessible. SAVE hopes to permeate college campuses by next fall but needs financial support. As a high school junior eagerly searching for politically active campuses, I am thrilled by organizations like SAVE that bolster my confidence in my generation of progressive voters.
• Generation Debt reviewed Michael Moore’s latest film “Sicko,” focusing specifically on Moore’s comments about the effect of student loans on young voters. Debt, Moore and his interviewees assert, demoralizes and frightens young Americans, effectively subverting voter turnout. The post’s comments were overwhelmingly antagonistic towards Moore (I think unwarrantedly). True, Moore can be crude, sensational, and controversial, but I was pleasantly surprised by the success of Sicko. I found it informative and well-supported. In fact, I thought his reflection on student loans was a slight divergence from his health care narrative but not at all egregious. Besides, when the mainstream media is dominated by Bush-apologists, what’s wrong with a little progressive propaganda?