One of the things that I did as part of attending the Breitbart Awards last weekend was attend a panel on C-Span’s new video library service. It’s actually pretty useful: it allows you to take clips from C-SPAN and email them, Tweet them, embed them and whatnot.

For example: say you wanted to show a clip from today’s disastrous Ohio speech that Obama made. What you’d do then is sign up for a free account, log in, call up the full thing, and find the clip that you wanted. In this case, it’d be this part:

…which is where President Barack Obama deliberately quoted this partisan Democratic opinion piece in the Washington Post by Greg Sargent and made it sound like it was coming from a possible Romney supporter and was part of an official think-tank. The reality, of course, is that Mark Hopkins (the analyst in question) was clearly noted by Sargent’s own article as not being a conservative economist, and he was not speaking directly for Moody’s*. But it’s a little hard to describe that – or the fact that apparently Barack Obama thinks that we’re already in a recession (“push us deeper into recession”) – without the attached video clip. But as you can see, C-SPAN is now providing that kind of access to its video archive. There’s also other things that you can do with an account, like save particular clips and whatnot… but embedding alone should be useful to researchers/activists/propagandists.

And there’s tons of stuff in there. Spanning decades. Get over there, sign up, and start looking.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Note, by the way, that Sargent is making a partisan argument against Romney’s positions, and as such is perfectly permitted to use the conclusions of non-conservative economists providing their own private opinions (you can still disagree with it, of course**). So I do not want to make it sound that the fault here lies in anyone except Obama; or, more accurately, his speechwriter.

**An analysis of the actual original Sargent article is beyond the scope of this article, and I can’t say that I was too interested in it when it came out in the first place.