In today’s Wall Street Journal, Will McGurn points us to three paragraph’s from President Obama’s “Audacity” book that are quite astonishing in light of how he and his party have governed in their first few weeks in office. McGurn wrote:

In a passage from his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” he sounds like a Republican complaining about the stimulus. “Genuine bipartisanship,” he wrote, “assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained — by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate — to negotiate in good faith.

“If these conditions do not hold — if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs . . . are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so — the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100% of what it wants, go on to concede 10%, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this ‘compromise’ of being ‘obstructionist.’

“For the minority party in such circumstances, ‘bipartisanship’ comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled, although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being ‘moderate’ or ‘centrist.'”

Of course, these views were formed and expressed prior to the Democrats taking control of both houses of Congress in 2006. Some questions:

Is President Obama aware that he and his allies just committed every sin he decried above? If so, is he at all embarassed by this fact? And how to we reconcile these lofty sentiments with, “I won?”

I usually have two or three books going simultaneously. Here are some recent acquisitions. I’m either reading these or have added them to the pile of books I plan to start when I acquire that proverbial Round Tuit:

Just like last week, here’s more marketing brilliance from the 1950s.

If you’re a Midwestern beer maker whose customer base is overwhelmingly comprised of working-class stiffs and blue-collar bowling alley dwellers; and your product carries a sonorous, liliting name like “Blatz”– who should you get to be your celebrity endoser?

It would be a bonus if he was a local guy.  “Hey, I’ve got it!”

That’ll bring ’em in, grandpa!

Based on this ad, I’m guessing the ad agency decided to try to position Blatz as a classy, upscale drink. This, in spite of the fact that the name of the product is evocative of the sound a blob of oatmeal makes when dropped from a height of 10 feet.

And this doesn’t look odd at all:

Yes nothing befits a white tie affair like a bunch of bottles of Blatz on the table.

By the way . . . apparently the brand is alive and well.

Why is the killing of 19 people by outlaw-rebel-thugs big news when it happens on the other side of the world (Afghanistan); but it is unworthy of mention when 21 are killed by same an hour’s drive from El Paso, Texas?  Hugh wonders:

The Evolution of Stereo, Speakers and Home Audio

It’s been a while since we’ve visited the archives of advertising gold.

In the 50s, the Harley-Davidson brand stood for wild, tough, macho adventure and rebellion. But somewhere along the way, the company lost its mojo and floundered for decades until recovering in the 90s. Precisely when and how did the Harley brand go wrong?

I’d put my money on the day these ads came out:

Perhaps, in retrospect, marketing the Harley as a dweeb-mobile that even Aunt Beulah can ride was a tactical error.  The Aunt Beulah and finger-pointing salesman markets never warmed to the Harley and the rebels without a cause didn’t exactly appreciate being lumped in with these squares.

And thus an icon’s years in the wilderness began . . .

Not that you’re likely to need any convincing that the so-called stimulus bill is a disastrous, counter-productive pork-a-palooza, but . . .

Charles Krauthammer’s column today does a good job of summing it all up and at the same time showing how un-change-y and un-new President Obama’s prescription truly is.

Read it!

Friend-of-Blather Ted sent me this picture today with a very humorous comment about a “prayer line” you wouldn’t want to be in.

But something about the photo struck me as familiar. Not the composition, really, but some other quality. Then I remembered where I’d seen this before:

In a brilliant little post titled “The Hysterical Style” Victor Davis Hanson writes, in part:

If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results. After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn’t create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece—or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.

Do read the rest.

David Brooks is very good today:

“What Life Asks of Us”

(hat tip, Fergus {formerly of the North of England, now of the South of Kansas City})