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C-Span Posts Full Archives Online
An anonymous reader sends word that C-Span has completed its project of making all of its footage available online. "The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday. Having free online access to the more than 160,000 hours of C-Span footage is like being able to Google political history using the "I Feel Lucky" button every time,' said Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC host."
Point of Order!
rewriting history since 2109
The video is only as good as the meta data associated with it.
Half the health care debate wasn't on CSPAN at all... we could go back and see the insanity over and over again
C-SPAN is a private non-profit and receives no government funding.
I'm glad this exists but will probably never visit it.
Close captioning textfiles of every video might be more useful. Much easier to sift through data and refine your searches that way. The full record of CC files in .txt format can't run more than a gigabyte. Anybody got a link to that .torrent?
moox. for a new generation.
Consider the amount of processing power it took to compress 160,000 hours of video fully indexed and ready for viewing.
Incredible for a non-profit.
You've got to watch Ollie North's jaw muscles working. You know he's thinking about jumping over the table and snapping Inouwe's neck like a twig. He's trying to decide whether or not his patron Ronald Reagan would have pulled strings to get him pardoned for the attack or not. Considering the blanket pardons that went down later, I'm guessing that Reagan/Bush would have indeed pardoned North if he'd attacked.
The amazing thing about that moment in history is that Oliver North and Ronald Reagan actually believed they were doing God's will by selling arms to the guys in Iran who are now our "sworn enemies" and the "Axis of Evil".
That's ultimately why this C-Span archive project will not interest most Americans, who seem to believe that history started last week, and there were no terror attacks on the US during the Bush Administration(a quote that Dana Perino, Bush Press Secretary has made numerous times). You just watch, by 2012, people will believe that Barack Obama was president on 9/11.
You are welcome on my lawn.
C-SPAN is a private non-profit and receives no government funding.
True enough, but that's not really the whole story. I'll quote Wikepedia's summary:
Put crudely, everyone with a cable-TV feed is paying for it. But wait, there's more ..
I doubt anyone would quibble with the above. I sleep comfortably knowing that consumers of (mostly) mindless entertainment along with viewers of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all help pay for what's routinely offered on C-SPAN. That irony, of course, is layered with another irony, that while most of those groups repeatedly make claims of media bias, few would consider watching C-SPAN. Boring? You betcha. Most of life's issues are mind-numbingly dull in their complexity, especially when presented unedited and unfiltered.
The amazing thing about that moment in history is that Oliver North and Ronald Reagan actually believed they were doing God's will by selling arms to the guys in Iran who are now our "sworn enemies" and the "Axis of Evil".
Now? The thing that was so scandalous was they were our sworn enemies even then! At least with the Afghan "freedom fighters" that Reagan also armed, we can say that he didn't know then that they would become our great enemy. But with Iran the Reaganites knew exactly who they were dealing with.
Oblig. Onion
CSPAN isn't always boring. Sometimes authors speak very compellingly about their books. When they've got a good author and a good topic, CSPAN is easily the best thing on the tube.
That irony, of course, is layered with another irony, that while most of those groups repeatedly make claims of media bias, few would consider watching C-SPAN. Boring? You betcha. Most of life's issues are mind-numbingly dull in their complexity, especially when presented unedited and unfiltered.
I sometimes listen to House/Senate debates on C-Span in the car and when you compare news articles to the actual debate, it's amazing how much nuance journalists throw away.
Our Representatives usually have a very good grasp of the issues, but this fact is rarely carried through into the reporting which follows.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I intentionally block scripting on a website and blame the creators when it doesn't work properly too.
/Firefox and NoScript user.
//No issue using site.
Javascript isn't the "abortion" it used to be, it's critical in many sites, especially with dynamic content. If you want to block a significant portion of web content, that's your choice, but don't complain when things don't work because you refuse to allow your browser to use the required Javascript libraries.
Holy fuck, I just read two posts in a row actually extolling politicians on Slashdot.
I think I'm going to go lie down now.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
That irony, of course, is layered with another irony, that while most of those groups repeatedly make claims of media bias, few would consider watching C-SPAN. Boring? You betcha. Most of life's issues are mind-numbingly dull in their complexity, especially when presented unedited and unfiltered.
Not to mention that much of what Congress does is mind-numbingly stupid in its procedural complexity and various random tactics that are commonly used all the time to slow down what's going on even further (and thus make it even more boring).
Back when I was in high school, I'd sometimes turn on C-SPAN when I came home after school after a hard day and needed a nap. It provided useful "white noise."
What I quickly learned was that aside from days when debates were happening on major issues, most of C-SPAN when Congress was in session consisted of Congressmen speaking on obscure resolutions like honoring some random person, or (better yet) delay tactics like quorum calls, invoking procedural idiocies that bog down debate in parliamentary matters, etc.
It's ironic that the service that brought Congress to the public on video resulted in Congressmen themselves hanging out in their offices rather than the chamber, thus creating not only the news soundbite (nobody's usually there listening anyway, so everybody's trying to score a place on the evening news on camera), but also the creation of novel ways of slowing down business. I can remember entire afternoons consisting of quorum calls, where everyone would file into the chamber for attendance purposes that would waste a half hour, file out, and then someone else would "note the absence of a quorum," and the whole process would start all over again.
Your tax dollars at work....
Check out the rights page. All of the footage of Congress and various Federal events is under the Public Domain. It's annoyingly still flash video, but you can legally rip it from the site and do whatever you want with it. Same with the subtitles.
It's nice to see copyright law working correctly for once.
eclecti.cc
What does "liberal" have to do with this story? Couldn't simply a news anchor say the same thing? Or does referring to CPAN and Google in a sentence make you a liberal?