Not to be outshone by either Organizing for America or the people who put together that "State of the Internet" video, the White House has repackaged its health-care-by-the-numbers week-long campaign into a catchy two minutes of statistics, cute graphics, and punchy music.

Organizing for American goes all "State of the Internet" with a new, short, graphic-intense web video illustrating the "Cost of Inaction" on the health care reform legislation that's facing make-or-break time in Congress this week.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee* sees House Democrats one iPhone app commercial, and raises it one Google ad.

*Corrected: This originally mistakenly referred to the National Republican Campaign Committee.

Credit: Carly for California

The Daily Beast's Benjamin Sarlin finds that the Carly Fiorina campaign is taking the "all publicity is good publicity" approach to the fact that its "demon sheep" documentary short has become an Internet wonder:

A spokeswoman for Fiorina, Julie Soderlund, told The Daily Beast that they were “energized” by the ad's response, citing its YouTube traffic as “a great success” and said that [Tom] Campbell “played right into our hands” by sending out the video himself. The ad's myriad critics are an asset—helping to spread the word—rather than a hindrance, this argument goes. “It's been touted as the most genius ad ever all the way down to the worst, but no matter what, people are talking about it and it generates views,” Soderlund said. She added that the viral response to the video was intentional, “though we were surprised how far and wide it went—and very pleased.”

As it turns out, the ad was the product of Fred Davis, the Republican ad man also behind the "Celebrity" spot from the 2008 campaign that painted Barack Obama as on par with Paris Hilton and other global figures. If a big splash is what they were after, it seems to have worked: the ad has been watched more than 400,000 times in the last three days.

What makes the demon sheep ad so darn compelling? Many commentators have focused on the moment when, near the two-and-a-half minute mark, the faux-sheep's eyes began to turn a fiery, glowing red. Fair enough. But there's really so much more to the spot than that one moment, no matter how attention-grabbing and frightening it might be. For examples, here are five other parts of the Demon Sheep experience that just have to make you scratch your head:

• As the ad opens, the phrases splashed across the screen are "purity," "piety," "honorable," and even "true believer." Cut to a field of sheep -- because those are qualities that the ovine species is known for?
• The female voices over celebrates true fiscally conservative leaders as "men we admire [and] aspire to be," despite the fact that the ad is for Carly Fiorina, an entirely female candidate who is positioning herself as a fiscal conservative.
• When the ad discusses the evils of budget pork, a picture of a peaceful sheep is flashed on the screen. This in a narrative structure where the sheep are playing the role of the the good guys.
• The narrator speeds up very quickly to say FiscalConservativeInNameOnly so it doesn't seem to be such an awkward and endless mouthful. Of course, having to race through saying it only proves how ungainly a phrase it is.
• At one point in the ad, the Campbell/evil wolf character is raised up on a pedestal, only to be struck by lightening, causing him to topple in slo-mo to the ground as the voiceover intones, voice-of-God style, "leaving...but one...way...to fall." And that, my friends, is just pretty weird.

Fellow Republican candidate Chuck DeVore, so as not to be left out of the party, is making use of YouTube's overlay feature to update an web spot from September in which DeVore pledged that his campaign wouldn't be run on silly slogans. The new, timely, annotation on the video clip? "We also promise to never use Demon Sheep in our ads."

Is now, quite naturally, on Twitter. ("People think I was born in Hell. I was actually born in California. The confusion is understandable.") Follow him or her, snatch up one of these good-looking t-shirts, and then carry on with the rest of your day.

(Just in case you've got no idea what the heck this means...)

It's like Chicago 10, but it got made a lot quicker. Remember how the Supreme Court ruled that California's Northern District court wasn't allowed to broadcast video footage from the Prop 8 trial taking place in San Francisco? Mashable has the story of a pair of filmmakers who have thought up a workaround. Using court transcripts, they're recreating the trial and posting it all to YouTube. In the interest of creating an unbiased record, they are reportedly using actors of equal physical attractiveness to portray each side. (No word on whether, in real life, the pro- and anti- same sex marriage forces involved in the trial are equally as good looking.)

Here's a creative use of new media to put a new spin on local politics, coming to us from Skagit County in northwest Washington State. A group of activists is shining light on what goes down in county business meetings by condensing video posted by the country from each of their long administrative sessions, boiling them into bite-sized YouTube clips of a few minutes each. Writes one of the people behind the project, "Skagit County has a history of good ol' boy bully politicians who do all they can to take care of their friends and remain in office." Here's more from the Skagit County activist:

Located only 50 miles north of Seattle, the county is on grow [sic] and gaining progressive young professionals who sit on the sidelines shaking their heads. The County records their meetings and posts them on their web site at skagitcounty.net and we are not infringing on copyright by reposting elements of the meetings on youtube.com.

...

We track decisions made as best we can and assemble them into concise youtube clips to help the public better understand what and when decisions were made, and how the process went down.

While few people from Skagit might have the stamina or ability to sit through a full session, they can get the scoop by watching things like "Solid Waste Self Haul 100% Minimum Rate Increase," a two minute YouTube clip. That recent decision-making process on flouridating the Skagit County water supply? Down to five minutes.

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 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.