As the New York Times' Brian Stelter reports, C-Span is declaring victory over the creation of a comprehensive online library of government-related video going back, in full, to the Reagan years, and with caches of content from even earlier. C-Span reports that they've digitized and uploaded nearly half a million videos since 1987, comprising about 160,000 hours of video footage. Fire up the archive when your kid is a baby, sit down and watch non-stop, and you'll be done when she's ready to leave for college. It's all online now at C-SpanVideo.org.

Good news for bloggers: a great deal of the C-SPAN clips are embeddable. As for copyright, a perennial question when it comes to what C-SPAN provides, it appears to remain the same for this resource. In other words, whatever happens on the floor of the House and Senate is public domain. Whatever happens at non-floor government events, including congressional hearings and White House events, they're claiming copyright over -- and they're generally cool with that copyright protection being honored by leaving the C-Span logo on the footage. They claim full copyright over documentaries and other original productions.

There's enough in there to keep a history teacher (or history geek) busy for quite a while. I'd never seen Al Gore's concession speech to George Bush from 2000, for example, but that's in there. There's quirkier fare too; C-Span has visited the gravesite of every deceased American president, and that's in there too. Dive in.

One of the most interesting elements in this Thursday's "summit" at the White House on health care reform is the Administration's commitment to broadcast the proceedings live. But it's not just inviting C-SPAN into the room (finally), or posting the video on the "/live" section of WhiteHouse.gov. The White House new media operation is giving the embed code to anyone who wants to host the video on their own website. I'm pasting the code in below so you can see what you get, for now...

It's just fun to see what the White House looks like all snowy:

Via the White House blog.

Well, this is a weird twist. Remember that video that was widely circulated last spring in which a Guatemalan lawyer posthumously blamed his country's president for his murder? The one where he said "If you are watching this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Alvaro Colom..." that went on to spark widespread trouble in Guatemala and challenged Colom's presidency? (It the video above, if you've never seen it.) An investigator from the United Nations, reports the Washington Post, has concluded that the lawyer ordered his own killing.

It's tempting to connect this to this post about how web video isn't always what it seems, but we'll leave it alone.

Someone on the great Twitter was scratching their head over why we hadn't covered yesterday's epic battle over Marc Ambinder's tweet about web video. Ask and ye shall receive! So that we're starting from the same point, this is what Ambinder, the Altantic's political editor, had to tweet:

Note to DNC/RNC/DSCC/NRCC/NRSC/DCCC: our website will not publish your web videos unless you make them actual TV commercials.

It's fun for folks to play like Ambinder if hating on the wide universe of online video here, but he's pretty clearly not. What he's hating on, instead, is how political operatives whip up online content not to actually reach their bases or to win hearts and minds, but to get a cheap and easy press hit out of it. Yes, it's difficult to believe it, but some folks do engage in such a practice. And web video is often the means, because it looks and smells like something actually meaningful even without any additional human context.

Ambinder's metric seems misguided, yes, and a bit of clinging to the ol' broadcast days. As some people pointed on on Twitter, you can just drop a little bit of money to run a video once at 3 p.m. on local cable and voila, it's a TV spot. But otherwise, the point, from these seats, is a valid one. Crafting something in 15 minutes and calling it "news" does not make it so. Much of the trick about writing about the back and forth of politics is learning when something actually matters, and when you're instead just witnessing political professionals performing for the media.

The real surprise is that it took them this long. PressTV, operated by the government-affiliated Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting company, has just run a documentary that alleges that the video that rocketed around YouTube and around the world which captured the June, 2009 death of Neda Agha Soltan was actually evidence of a double-dealing plot. According to the IRIB read of events released this week, Soltan was in on a scheme to fake her death, but that her co-conspirators turned on her and actually carried out the deed:

The documentary alleges that Arash Hejazi, the writer and physician who treated Neda as she lay bleeding on a Tehran street, as well as her music teacher who was with her at the protest, were members of a team that carried out the plot.

"While Neda is [pretending] she is injured and is lying on the back seat of the car on their lap, they bring out a handgun from their pockets," the documentary's narrator says.

"A handgun that they obtained from their Western and Iranian friends to water the tree of reforms and kill people and create divisions within society. Neda, for a moment, realizes their wicked plan and struggles to escape, but they quickly shoot her from behind.

"The narrator adds that this is how "deceived and deceitful" Neda was killed.

The graphic video of Soltan's death in the streets of Tehran has helped to catalyze anger against the Iranian regime, both in an out of Iran, so it's no wonder that they'd have in interest in coming up with some sort of alternative explanation to try to convince viewers that what they're seeing isn't actually what they're seeing.

The 2009 post-election protests in Iran have changed the Internet. Or, at least, how people are learning to use the Internet to resist oppressive governments and other regimes. The Catch-22 of online resistance is that those places in the world where we've seen the citizenry most actively pushing back against governments online -- Iran and China, to name just two -- also happen to be the places where authorities tend to have the most control over the Internet, able to dictate that telecommunications companies filter Internet traffic or, as we've seen happen around the world, simple flip the "off" switches on the country's routers and hubs until times of turmoil pass.

That's why we're seeing a great deal of creativity going into figuring out ways to circumvent the censors, and perhaps not surprisingly, the latest round of work dedicated to online circumvention seems to be focusing on video work. A new group called Access has sprung up that is dedicated, at the start at least, to protecting and promoting web video. Online video has been proven to have enormous currency in the Iranian context. We might not be able to easily wrap our minds around the latest dictate from this or that cleric, or parse the latest official statement coming out of the Iranian government, but video of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in the streets of Tehran is powerful stuff. It stays with you. What you take in through video can be difficult to shake.

Just one example: the gruesome video above of the seeming death of a protestor in Tehran on December 27th.

YouTube's CitizenTube blog has been aggregating videos from Iran's most recent protests, and it has a guest post up from Access' Executive Director Brett Soloman about how the organization is working to make video accessible from all over the world. Part of Access' strategy seems to be to flood the zone. The group spends time converting videos to all sorts of formats (including mobile, enormously popular in Iran) and propagating them throughout social networking sites like Facebook and the Iranian-themed Balatarin, all in an effort to make video of what's happening in Iran nearly unavoidable.

Here's one way to get the political opposition to stop posting mean videos about you on the Internet: switch to their team. Politico's Ben Smith picks up on the fact that the National Republican Campaign Committee scrubbed its YouTube channel for ads against Alabama Representative Parker Griffith after he announced today that he's changing his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, in part, said Griffith, because of his disagreement with how health care reform legislation has played out in Congress.

Of course, the Internet, she rarely forgets. At least one of the ads appears elsewhere online. In it, the NRCC ad creators loop audio of Griffith saying "We have nothing to fear from radical Islam" and "America's greatest enemy is America and its materialism." The second time the latter loop is used in the NRCC spot, it's shortened so that it appears as if the Huntsville-area representative is just saying that "America's greatest enemy is America." Presumably the newly-minted Republican won't have to worry about any new hard-hitting ad spots from the NRCC after today.

UPDATE: And Ben notes that warm words for Griffith go missing from the DCCC blog.

Maybe Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkely thought solving a Rubik's cube in a YouTube video was the best way to demonstrate that overhauling the American health care system was difficult, but not impossible. Maybe. The better bet is that he saw an opportunity to redeem all the long hours he's put into pulling off this feat.

What has arguably been the most public part of Organizing for America's push to get health care reform legislation through Congress has been a project where they collect on video the personal stories of Americans who have strong feelings about changing the state of American health care, most often because they or a loved one has suffered medically or because they got caught up in an insurance mess. Sharing personal stories is one organizing technique honed during Obama campaign era that some organizers see as most applicable to what citizens across the country can do to pass Obama's legislative agenda in Washington.

Thus, "Light, Camera, Reform," Organizing for America's latest attempt to capture on the rich medium of video American stories about what's the matter with the health care in the U.S. A panel of judges that includes will.i.am, Rep. Patrick Murphy, and Charlie from The West Wing will pick the best 30-second YouTube submission. The chosen ad will then get a national television airing.