If you want a nice anecdote for how Clinton is appealing to gender solidarity, search for "Just a Girl" on Youtube; the first result is the clip from the New Hampshire Democratic debate where Clinton talked about how her low likability ratings "hurts her feelings" and Obama subsequently quipped "you're likable enough." The video was put up by the Clinton campaign on YouTube, and they presumably paid for the top spot.

So, is Clinton trying to appeal to women born between 1977 and 1982 who really liked Clueless and Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion?  The song, incidentally, is both awesome and a very effective statement for the Clinton campaign.  Here are some lyrics:

Oh...I've had it up to here!
Oh...am I making myself clear?
I'm just a girl
I'm just a girl in the world...
That's all that you'll let me be!
I'm just a girl, living in captivity
Your rule of thumb
Makes me worry some

I'm just a girl, what's my destiny?
What I've succumbed to Is making me numb
I'm just a girl, my apologies
What I've become is so burdensome
I'm just a girl, lucky me
Twiddle-dum there's no comparison

 Unfortunately, I don't expect Barack Obama to buy video placement on searches for "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud."

Didn't college students learn anything from the post-Borat lawsuits? Never make a drunken, racist video. Come on, people. Is that such a hard rule to follow?

The Smoking Gun posted a video this week of several white Univeristy of Louisiana students covered in mud--a la blackface--reenacting the Jena 6 attack. Freshman nursing student Kristy Smith posted the video and several pictures of her mud-clad friends on Facebook. She's since removed them, but not before the video got picked up by Smoking Gun and posted to Youtube: 

Smith apologized for the video via Facebook, giving well-written explanations like "We were just playin n the mud...I promise i'm not racist. i have just as many black friends as i do white. And i love them to death." Apparently they were drinking and the situation "got a lil out of hand."

Right. Either that or the video reveals that racism is clearly "a lil out of hand" despite our best efforts to sweep it under the rug.

Today MySpace and MTV announced the details of the presidential candidate forums they will hold this fall. Hosted on college campuses across the country, broadcast on MTV and streamed live on MySpace, the forums seek to foster “candid, unfiltered” discussions between young voters and the major Republican and Democratic candidates.

As I write in an identical blog post at HuffPo, the blogosphere seems abuzz with optimism about the forums, the latest evidence that 2008 won’t be your mother and father’s election. “MTV and MySpace have hit up an interactive format with the potential to pioneer a whole new way of doing candidate debates/forums,” writes Michael Connery, co-founder of Future Majority, a prominent blog with well-done reporting on progressive youth politics. (Yes, that Mike Connery who came at Campus Progress back in June.)

I am asking everyone who has a webcam to record a statement and upload it to YouTube saying why Texas Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles should stop the execution of Kenneth Foster on August 30, 2007. I hope people who make video statements will also send an email to Perry with a written message and a link to the video. This is the first time someone has used a video petition to stop an execution. So please post your video and be part of history. 

With the NFL season just around the corner and my New England Patriots poised to win at least 14 games thanks to a scarily revamped air attack, I thought I'd make a very special selection for today's Campus Progress As-Yet-Unnamed Wednesday Afternoon Recurring YouTube Feature: a tribute to Tom Brady. It has been suggested that this video contains some slightly homoerotic undertones, but I just don't see it. Enjoy.

...but I'm thoroughly unexcited about the YouTube element of tonight's Democratic debate. CNN is vetting the questions, so what, exactly, is so great about this? Is there any chance that they're going to choose a question so provocative, so groundbreaking, and so incisive that there's no way it would have been asked had this process not been opened to the public? I mean, check out these submissions:

-- a man standing in front of an ATM, asking how the candidates would stop the spread of check cashing centers and predatory lending in the inner cities.

-- a woman holding a picture of a brother wounded in Vietnam who had post-traumatic stress disorder and who never got the necessary help. She wanted to know how the candidates would ensure today's veterans get better treatment.

-- a woman saying she had to charge her health care expenses to her credit cards and wanted to know how the candidates would make health care affordable and available to all. "I'm sick about not being able to afford being sick," she says.

Good questions? Yes. Questions that wouldn't have been asked otherwise? Nope. The YouTube questions are a gimmick, a means of making it seem as though average Americans are intimately involved in the debate process, despite the fact that they aren't. I'm confused as to why this "YouTube debate" is getting so much attention, and being treated as something exciting and new, when the actual questions themselves remain under the complete control of the same people as always.

Reddit is great. Every time I go there I find something interesting, entertaining, or both. The danger, as a CP blogger, is that I will start to lean on the site too heavily, and that most of my posts here will simply link to stuff I found there. 

So I have tried to be selective, and on several occasions I have successfully restrained myself from lazy, "lol omg look what i found on reddit!!!!!!!!!!"-style posts. This morning, however, I can't help myself. This is something I simply must share with the world:

Words fail.

Wednesday seems like as good a day as any to post a couple of good YouTube videos, apropos of nothing. Today's theme is animated music videos.

The Defense Department has decided to make it impossible to reach 13 Web sites from its network, citing an overabundance of “recreational traffic.”

In the policy released today, General B.B. Bell, commander in South Korea, said use of those sites “impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.”

Not going to bother putting this on the front page since it's basically just an excuse to watch one of the coolest men to ever walk the earth call Bill O'Reilly out like the little bitch that he is, but if you've got some headphones or your speakers turned down, here's Snoop Dogg offering his unedited opinion of Bill-O, courtesy of YouTube and Dutch TV. (Do I even need to advise viewer discretion?  It's Snoop Dogg--his uses F-bombs like most people use the word "the.")

 Link

But, uh, back to the lecture at hand...

Did you hear about that totally humiliating public break-up, complete with acapella kiss-off, at UNC-Chapel Hill? You know, the one where hundreds of students gathered round to chant, "Slut, slut, slut!" at a broken-hearted woman and then posted the video on YouTube?

Well, I'd bet money that the whole thing was staged. Thoughts?