Conservative strategists team up to produce a new grassroots site for the right; some conservative bloggers are supporting Barack Obama, and some netroots bloggers are going for Clinton, while cats and dogs start living together; anti-Obama hoax emails are still making the rounds; a new Brave New Films video ties John McCain to another radical pastor; Obama gets vampiric in a new musical; Yes we shall... support Cobra Commander for president; Hillary Clinton has a secret meeting with a party official, and we have the footage; and Andrew Rasiej is crowned as a "czar" of the New York tech scene.

A new song wants to convince John McCain to fire the lobbyists working for his campaign; the DNCC blog dust-up continues; The Next Right is set to launch next week; a catalog of robo-calls from around the country; the ultimate "nightmare ticket"; two funny, meaningless bits of web-detritus; a forum on Online Political Participation at NYU in June; buy a Barack Obama and Raul Castro tea set from the RNC; analyzing Obama and McCain's SEO skillz; an analysis of McCain's new web site; and an Alaska Senatorial candidate pledges to post his calendar online.

The Next Right launches; is Slatecard the "Republican ActBlue"?; Hillary Clinton's bad day; it's the network, stupid; Barack Obama is the jukebox favorite; Al Franken continues to get hounded by bloggers; Newt Gingrich hints at a 2012 or 2016 run; and Hillary and Barack dance in Puerto Rico.

#1 Digg video is anti-McCain voter-generated content; Facebook (anti-)campaigns for Vice President; C-SPAN gets searchable, linkable, AND embeddable; Convention website showdown; NYTimes Op-Ed on the power of text messaging; McCain's tech policy (lack thereof); Organizing tips for #dontGo

The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini is warning conservative allies about the coming press-pocalypse. Using Bobby Jindal as a model, Ruffini traces attempts to "delegitimize and destroy up-and-coming Republicans" as they resonated through Daily Kos to Keith Olbermann to Talking Points Memo to Politico to the general political consciousness. Oh, he's not upset about it. He wants it. Conservative commentators need to get off their lazy behinds, says Ruffini, and start reporting. His commenters aren't so sure. Some argue that stories about Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers were just too fluffy to get traction. Others make the point that GOP leadership is too weak to do the aggressive oppo pushing that a party in opposition needs to do to earn its version of events an airing. Writes commentator "Cahnman": "Here's a much simpler solution: Don't nominate John McCain ever again."

Whatever you make of the origins of today's planed "tea party" protests, it's clear that the national Republican Party is eager to capture some of the wind in its flagging sails. But a correspondent writes to point out that the GOP's online campaign capitalizing on the events violates what might be the first commandment of online organizing: thou shall collect email addresses. Over at teaparty.GOP.com, you can send an e-post card and digital tea bag of your choice to President Obama, VP Biden, Speaker Pelosi, or Majority Leader Reid, making the statement "I do not believe that it is patriotic to pay more taxes." What the site doesn't do, though, is at any time ask for your email address.

UPDATE: A reader points out that if you pick the option of sending yourself a copy of the email, you are, of course, asked for your address.

There’s a very interesting confluence of conversations taking place at the moment on the topic of how technology is changing politics. One is on the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency. Let me see if I can combine the threads. (And sorry, this is a bit of a long post, thanks to all the traveling in DC I did last week.)

Based on an unconfirmed report on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment site that former President Bill Clinton and James Carville are supposedly planning a dirty-tricks campaign against seven or eight top leaders of the Tea Party movement, the Tea Party Patriots network has responded with an amusing and effective expression of solidarity.