“As goes California, so goes the nation,” boasts this Tea Party video by Lipstick Underground.

5:33 video

I heard about it from a liberal classmate who was not pleased by this video’s high professional quality.

Stop Taxing Us web-site

Hat tip to Norman Zamcheck.

“You Picked a Fine Time to Lead Us, Barack”

3:16 video

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“Banking Queen” – a song tribute to Barney Frank by Paul Shanklin.

3:16 video

Ronald Wilson Reagan, February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004

General Electric is airing a very nice and truly well-deserved tribute to the greatest president of the last century.

0:32 video

I remember the scene as Ronald Reagan’s funeral cortege wound its way up the narrow road to his resting place at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. One local woman was filmed by the news cameras holding up a sign which spoke for all of us. It read “WELL DONE.”

What a non-PC title! 4:48 video

Hat tip to Tom Seus.

Reason TV: Light Bulbs vs. the Nanny State
2:07 video

Hat tip to Roger Kimball via Karen L. Myers.

Yale Baseball Team, c. 1890. They would not approve.

The New Yorker reports on negative reactions from a variety of Old Blues to that noxious and appalling “That’s Why I Chose Yale” recruiting video.

Some samples:

Christopher Buckley, Class of ’75, son of the late William F., Class of ’50, paused to pour himself a “stiff one” and dashed off an e-mail to another alumnus: “OMFG!” …

James Goodale, Class of ’55, and a former general counsel for the Times, made it through all seventeen minutes—more collegians bursting into song, accompanied by “Up with People”-style dance numbers, and even some electric-guitar shredding in the art gallery—before reporting that the production seemed “intended for an audience that I couldn’t divine.” He added, “My God, if you’re a hockey player, you think, I’ll go to Princeton.” …

“Halfway in, I said, ‘These people are kidding,’ ” the former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, Class of ’56, recalled the other day. “Then I realized, ‘No, they’re not.’ And I was depressed.”…

“It’s a variation on Marie Antoinette in the garden of Versailles. I’m surprised they didn’t dress the girls as shepherdesses. In the ancien régime, this is the kind of thing that would have prompted the French Revolution. Are we supposed to send this to struggling youths in Asia and Africa?”

John Rogers, Class of ’84, and the English department’s resident Milton scholar [reacts:]

It’s the God-damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. …

Milton would be absolutely and perfectly appalled by this. …

Yale is saturated in an ironic mode that your parents can’t understand. … This is aristocratic and privileged irony—an aristocracy not of moneyed fathers but of generational ironic sensibility: ‘I can speak with more quotation marks around my nouns and verbs than you.’

IvyGate review: “That’s Why I Chose” to Ram a Soldering Iron Into My Ears.”

Embarrassed Y’10 Says:

This is embarrassing. Absolutely embarrassing.

“1 in 4, maybe more” just became “1 in 2, probably you”

Had this been released before I enrolled, I very likely wouldn’t be here.

Absolutely horrendous.

How to unload a backhoe from a dump truck without a crane. Karen will be impressed.

French 1:15 video

Hat tip to Robert Breedlove.

This parody perfectly captures the preferred format of a television news report.

2:04 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Main courtyard Branford College, Yale University

The Yale University Undergraduate Admissions Office boasts of having set out to “reinvent the dull genre of admission videos… with something… a little different.”

That something turns out to be this generally lame and appalling, faux hip 16:49 musical video, produced in collaboration with undergraduates and recent alumni.

It is intended to appeal to today’s high school students as a take-off on the popular high school musical television series Glee, and was praised by one alumnus on the LinkedIn discussion as “clever, fun and effectively ma[king] the point, without being boringly traditional, pretentious or elitest. (sic)”

Of course, I am myself boringly traditional, pretentious and elitist, so my soul positively writhed in horror at the spectacle of a Yale education being marketed in bad rhymes on the basis of a strange combination of consumerism (a salad bar and grill, college laundramats and gyms), the collegiate architecture of James Gamble Rogers, conformist political correctness (4 “cultural houses,” a sustainable farm), and the mere quantity of organizations and activities.

Somehow or other, Yale’s distinctive identity, described by F. Scott Fitzgerald thusly:

I think of all Harvard men as sissies… and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.”

was wholly overlooked.

Today’s young people are implicitly being expected to decide on their choice of college in much the way they would choose between holiday resorts or apartment complexes, purely on the basis of appearance and amenities. Yale today has no distinctive character or identity at all, it seems. The video has nearly 17 minutes of musical performances (of a sort), and no one ever sings “Bright College Years.”

It was not completely without its moments, however. Near the beginning a motley crowd, obviously made up of Yalies, is sitting there pretending to be parents and prospective students. A fashionably racially diverse admissions officer (played by Kobi Libii) is unctuously answering questions.

He answers an inquiry as to whether all Yale professors teach undergraduates in the affirmative, boasting that all tenured Yale professors teach undergraduates, so that even a freshman might be taking a class from a Nobel Prize winner. At that point, a wife goes “Oooo!” and elbows her husband, an Asperger type sporting a pocket protector, who blinks confusedly a few times in response and who (one strongly suspects) is, in fact, himself one of those very same faculty members just referred to.

Bruno Ganz’s portrayal of everyone’s favorite demented dictator chewing the carpet in Oliver Hirschbiegal’s “Der Untergang” (2004) is becoming a reliable vehicle for parody subtitling.

This time Der Fuehrer is displeased with some of the limitations of the Ipad.

3:59 video

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Personally, I thought the recent version depicting news of Scott Brown defeating Martha Coakley reaching the bunker was a good deal funnier.

Me, too.

Where on earth did Steve Lee get some of the full autos and RPGs he’s shooting in this 2:39 music video?

Hat tip to Xavier.

2:16 video

Not as good as some earlier ones, rather a lot like the year itself.