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C-based Carl’s Jr. was founded by an outstanding gentleman, a devout Catholic and patriotic American, Carl Karcher. He sold the company late in his life and all the good, wholesomeness he put into his advertising campaigns disappeared, replaced with Paris Hilton making love to a hamburger and similar tawdry and sleazy campaigns designed to appeal to their target market: sex-obsessed, hormone-drenched nitwits.

That was then.  It’s gotten worse.  Carl’s Jr. and its co-brand, Hardee’s, have just introduced donut holes on their breakfast menu - a nasty looking product of fried, cinnamon-sprinkled bread globs with a sugar and chemical dipping sauce that looks to be made of 100% artery plaque.

OK, so that should be fairly simple to advertise without offending the multitudes and crumbling the civilization.  But what fun would that be?

In the first TV spot, the announcer says Hardee’s is announcing its new product, “Biscuit Holes,” and asks passers-by, who look like normal people but are really gutter-dwellers for hire, what they think the product should be named.  Cover the kids’ eyes; here come some of their responses: Goodie Balls, Hole Munchers, Puffy Nuts, Melting Holes.

Not content to let that pass by without some one-upsmanship, the announcer cleverly holds up two of the balls side by side and asks the last taster, “What about ‘Bistecles?’”

Not appalling enough? There’s always TV spot #2, where the announcer has conventional donut holes and Carl’s/Hardee’s Biscuit Holes on a little table, the donut holes marked “A” and the Biscuit Holes marked “B.”  He asks another group of sex-obsessed sell-outs which they prefer.  You guessed it:

“The B hole has it over the A hole.” “The A hole seems kind of small.” “The A hole tastes nasty.”

These are not commercials that play on late-night pay-per-view soft porn channels. They are designed for every day, all day TV - the kind families watch together and kids watch alone. The TV we watch after church on Sunday.

One Million Dads has set up an auto-letter you can use to send a protest letter to the company’s president, Andrew Puzder.  I suggest you click here and fire one off.  And, come to think of it, you might want to offer him a name or two of your own. Like sleazeballs.

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n Calvin Klein’s world, promiscuity reigns, and young girls are gang-banged by three guys (there’s a third on the floor - see his knee?) and it’s all jolly fun as long as you’re disrobing from Calvin Klein clothing in the process.

I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment of what most kids are up to nowadays, and I certainly don’t think Klein should be promoting it on this billboard, which now is riding high over a high-traffic part of New York City.

Not that many years ago, sex in advertising meant an attractive woman in an elegant dress standing next to the latest Buick, or a wholesome girl in a swimsuit that left everything to the imagination drinking a Coke.  Now it means a slut in a lip-lock and under-the-pants butt-grab.  That’s not sex in advertising; it’s porn in advertising.

If you agree and would like to send a message to Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation, the company that owns Calvin Klein, One Million Dads makes it easy.  They’ve put up a letter-generator, so in less time than it’ll take that girl to catch an STD, you can send a letter to Calvin Klein telling the president of the company:

Dear President Shiffman:

I am highly offended by your company’s disrespect for the millions of parents whose children will be exposed to your latest billboard ad.

Your company does not deserve, nor will it get, my family’s business as a result.  I implore you to consider how your immoral actions affect the youth of our nation.

Please order the removal of your offensive billboard in New York City and cancel any plans to place it elsewhere.

Then give the company a call at 866-513-0513.

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araphrasing the Stones, you don’t always get the placement you want.  Sometimes, like above, ad juxtaposition can turn out pretty darn funny.  At other times, the results can be downright appalling - like the article on the toddler killed in a house fire bumped up against the ad headlined “Burn, Baby Burn!”

See more examples of weird juxtapositions here.

Somehow, this all reminds me of what was supposedly the most nefarious newspaper headline of all time.  Journalistic mythology - or maybe history - says it appeared over a story about an insane asylum inmate who broke out, then broke into a house and raped a woman.  The headline?

Nut Bolts, Screws

Myth? Fact? Who knows? Probably the former.  But here’s one that is real; I can attest to that personally.  Elder Brother spent a summer as a copy editor for The Shipping and Trade News, an English-language Tokyo newspaper full of, you know, news about shipping and trading.  One day he was tasked with editing and writing the headline for a story about a spiffy new sewage barge Tokyo had just put into service, replacing an older barge whose mechanical bucket just wasn’t capable of keeping up with the monstrous amounts of raw sewage waiting to be dumped into the once-pristine waters of Tokyo Bay.  His headline?  For real:

The Rise and Fall of the Turd Winch

Hat-tip for the unfortunately placed ad link:  Incredible Daughter #1

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othing the Democratic party does surprises me any more, as long as it’s something nasty. They’ve shown their worst ugliness in their response to Joe the Plumber and millions of straight-thinking Americans are very angry - as the polls show.

To tap this anger and shame the Democrats, I offer up for free this ad for a conservative 527’s consideration. It features Joe the Plumber in the same setting that made him famous, his front yard, cut with insets of Obama talking about him at rallies:

Hi. I’m Joe the Plumber. As you know, I recently had the opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question about the economy that was very important to me. Boy was that a mistake.

Since then, Obama and Joe Biden have been mocking me at campaign rallies and people there have been booing me. Democratic operatives have been digging through my personal life, and the media is investigating me like they never investigated ACORN or Bill Ayres.

Despite all that, I still have one more question to ask: Why would you vote for a party that would attack a guy like me for just asking a question?

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his ad will no doubt join the list of campaign ads Obama classifies as negative in order to maintain his claim that 100% of John McCain’s campaign ads are negative (thanks to Patriot Room for the link):

Effective, yes. Negative, no. Negative ads assassinate character and misstate records. It is not negative to question the qualifications of someone running for office.

But of course Obama flips out whenever anything remotely negative arises to ruffle his carefully layered and oh-so-pretty feathers.

Speaking of the “100% of your ads are negative, John,” baloney Obama espoused last night, does anyone remember this particular McCain effort?

Show me one thing Obama’s done as classy as that. Especially when you consider that Obama broke his promise to use public funding and is rolling in dough, while McCain used up some of his dear public funds to run this ad.

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ets for Freedom, chaired by former Marine and former Gov. Pete Wilson, is launching a $2.2 million ad blitz in Obama-crazed California, calling the liberal, anti-war Senator out on the surge:

The ad takes three good swipes at BHO - his vote against troop funding, his near-complete failure to visit the war zone, his subcommittee’s lack of hearings - and concludes by urging members of Congress to pass the Lieberman/Graham Senate resolution 636, which recognizes the surge’s success. 636 warns against any action “that jeopardizes those gains or dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of the United States Armed Forces who made those gains possible.”

In a SacBee interview, Wilson said:

Wilson said the media effort is well worth the money in blue state California, where “we’ve got this huge congressional delegation and half of them are opposed to the surge.”

Pointing out that California has the nation’s largest population of military veterans, Wilson said: “They need to hear from constitutents, particularly veterans who have been in combat, that the turnaround in Iraq has been nothing short of remarkable.”

Wisely, Vets for Freedom is not wasting any money buying air time in San Francisco. One of the important lessons you learn early in public affairs is to understand where you can have influence, and where you can’t.

For more on Vets for Freedom, including info on how to volunteer and contribute, click here.

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than Winner showed us how not to use YouTube for political advertising, cranking out a hate-piece based on a lie that was thoroughly disproved before Winner even uploaded his clip.

In sharp contrast is this YouTube clip, Does Barack Obama Favor Sex Education for Kindergarteners? With Winner’s clip, you went to Google to disprove it. This clip, in contrast, merges YouTube and Google to prove that McCain’s ad criticizing Obama’s sex ed bill is without a doubt true.

Here’s the clip:

Any questions? Nope. They’re all pretty well answered.

hat-tip: Jim

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s Winner & Associates’ Ethan Winner admits that he was behind an anonymous, lying, unethical Palin-bashing ad his firm attempted to make go viral, it looks like they’re going to be losing business.

A comment from “Mark” posted on my post about the ethical violations of Winners’ action lays it out:

This is ad and video is really such poor form.  My family, which lives in LA and does regular business with Winner will be suspending all adds and they don’t even support the McCain Palin ticket.

Even if the firm was not behind it, Winner is employed there and this irresponsible behavior really frustrates my dad.  He won’t go out there and post his opinion, but I will.  Winner is just about to lose a good client.

This is as it should be.  Firms like Winner’s (and mine) are tasked first and foremost with protecting the reputations of their clients.  Such work shouldn’t be trusted to people who use unethical tactics to attempt to ruin the reputations of others.

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oe Biden has had to back off an honest statement - using a pretty dishonest excuse in the process.

On Tuesday’s CBS Evening News, Biden criticized the “McCain can’t use a computer” ad released by the Obama campaign, saying,

“I thought that was terrible by the way … if I’d have had anything to do with it, we never would have done it.”

It appears so clear and unobfuscated a statement wasn’t authorized by the campaign, so today Biden was in a familiar position:  backpeddling.  First he asked us to believe that he hadn’t seen the ad before condemning it, then:

“Having now reviewed the ad, it is even more clear to me that given the disgraceful tenor of Senator McCain’s ads and their persistent falsehoods, his campaign is in no position to criticize.” (WaPo)

What about the Obama’s nasty ad on McCain gave him any information about McCain’s ad?  The computer ad wasn’t about McCain’s advertising; it was about shaming him for having war injuries.

That’s the trouble with having to retract an honest assessment: The explanation never makes sense.  If the ad was so terrible that it never should have been run, whatever McCain does or does not do makes no difference in the assessment:  It’s still so terrible that it never should have run.  And Obama’s recent ads have certainly not been beacons of decency and honesty in any case.

So, in trying to clean up the unforgivable gaffe of being honestly, openly critical of something coming out of The One’s shop, Obama’s campaign has had to state that they’re going no holds barred and dirty on their political ads, and that they’ve got no problem with going to the scuzzy, wretched, dishonest pit of bad political advertising. After all, what’s one more broken promise from the politician who promised to be different?

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than Winner, who suddenly became famous yesterday when The Jawa Report busted him for trying to make a shamefully false hit-piece video on Sarah Palin go viral h as issued an apology a statement.

What he owed Palin and the voters of our free, Democratic nation was an apology for deliberately befouling the channels of communication with a video that contained a known lie, this lie:

Sarah Palin and her husband were members of this anti-American organization, which supports separation of their state from the United States.

In Winner’s video, the screen text behind this statement reads:

Alaskan Independent Party

Sarah Palin, Member

Todd Paliln, Member, 1995-2002

Source: New York Times.

Of course, Sarah Palin was never a member of AIP. That’s been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt by a review of her voter registration, and the NYT published a correction eight days before Winner uploaded his video.

So let’s not mince words: It’s a lie, a deliberate lie, a lie designed to dupe the unread into a misbelief about a candidate for VP. In his apology statement, Winner does not apologize for telling a lie:

I believe the American people have a right and a need to know information about candidates for political office and their views. I made this video because I think it is important for the public to be aware of the association between Sarah and Todd Palin and the Alaskan Independence Party. The New York Times has reported that the Alaskan Independence Party website describes the party as seeking, in the words of the party, “a range of solutions to the conflicts between federal and local authority,” including “advocacy for state’s rights, through a return to territorial status, all the way to complete independence and nationhood status for Alaska.”

What the American people have a right to know, and what Winner, as a communicator, has an obligation to tell them, is the truth. Parse Winner’s statement carefully, and you see he doesn’t repeat the exact lie of the video but makes it sound like he hasn’t backed off on iota. It’s the sort of thing really crappy crisis communications managers do - play petty little word games when big issues are at stake. Imagine a statement that close to a lie being issued on behalf of a company responding to a major accident. They would be media vulture lunch meat in minutes.

As for the rest of the statement, Winner says he made the video himself and was not paid for it by anyone - possible, even probable, but he presents no proof and since we’ve already established that he’s a liar, what is his word worth?

As I told you yesterday, I wrote Lou Capozzi, the (former, now emeritus) chairman of Publicis’ PR and Communications Group, of which Winner & Associates is a member. Yesterday evening I received a very nice response from him, promising to look into the matter, but stating that there no longer is a direct reporting relationship between Winner and himself. Still, it seems like dealing with a matter like this is a perfect assignment for someone in the Chair Emeritus role.