China

Some reading for your Saturday. (Updated by Mike)

• A Missouri state senate race was decided by youth volunteers.
• Russell Simmons, a famed hip-hop producer, appears on Fox News to discuss his GOTV effort.
• An excellent article delving into McCain's failure on technology policy and its connection to his poor performance among youth.
• Paul Krugman ponders our globalized economy and its understated fragility with regard to geopolitics.
• David Broder tackles the well-oiled machine that is the Obama campaign.
• The Toronto Star has an interesting column on the disappearance of fashion's connection with politics; it turns out Millennials would rather profess their opinion online and turn them into social movements -- who knew?
• MSNBC examines the volunteer efforts of China's Ba-Ling-Hou Generation, the American Millennial's counterpart; many Chinese youth have mobilized to confront the damage from the recent massive earthquake that struck a few weeks ago.
• U.S. News and World Report has a profile on the generations of the two presidential candidates; unfortunately no discussion of the impact of Millennials.
• User Generated Content at its best:

In case you missed it . . .

• A loophole in Ohio voting law that will allow for one-stop registration and voting this fall could be a huge boon to Obama (and young voters) in the state.
• Yesterday activists launched a campaign on Facebook against Evan Bayh as the potential VP pick called 100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh. You would already know this if you were friends with Future Majority on Facebook.
• Huckabee youth group "Huck's Army" is now recruiting for McCain.
• Future Majority friend, activist, and videographer "noneck" Noel Hidalgo was deported from China this week for filming protests in Tiananmen Square. Noel and his crew might be following me around during the DNC convention producing video for FM. Let's hope it doesn't get quite so dicey in Denver.
• Jared Polis won his primary in Colorado and will go on to become the next Democratic congressman in his district. Not only that, he is the first openly gay candidate elected to congress and he may well be one of - if not the - youngest congressman in the country. I'm proud to have had Jared as a guest in our live blog series. Congrats to him and everyone who worked on the campaign.
• I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but in the next few days, Barack Obama will announce his VP nominee via text message. This was a great idea on their part. They probably received thousands of cell phone numbers that can now be used to get out the vote in November via text.
• The New York Times has more on that in Garret Graff's op-ed about text messaging in the Presidential campaign.
• Blender asked the candidates about their favorite songs. John McCain - what happened to Usher? I thought he was your favorite artist?
• The Washington Post has the skinny on the hottest parties at the DNC.
• In Nevada, a 22 year old is running against an incumbent state Senator who has held office since 14 years before his challenger was born.
• The Wall Street Journal finally picked up on James Fowler's study of the Colbert Bump.
• Generation Vote has a put together a Youth policy platform.
• The Post Chronicle has some thoughts about what Obama's youth supporters need to do post-election day.
• Tom Friedman actually wrote a decent piece about McCain's energy policy.
• It's Getting Hot in Here explains the whole "Gang of 10" energy compromise and why it's a win for Obama.
• David Burstein of 18 in '08 explains the significance of just one vote.
• Medill reports that this may be the geekiest of all conventions.
• Wow:

While I work on this op-ed, here's two links I had originally planned on blogging about today before that Washington Post story hit the wires.

• Campus Politico takes a look at the place of protest music in today's fragmented culture. A very good take on the limits of the genre in today's media environment.
• Hat tip to Matt Browner-Hamlin for pointing me to this piece about the Tibetan Freedom movement and how some young organizers are taking advantage of the Summer Olympics to make headway on the issue.