Since House “Blue Dog” Democrats might actually save the nation from financial ruin ---by nixing or dramatically altering Obamacare and Ecocapitalism---it behooves us to review the historic origins of this august group of conservative Democrats.

Conservative Democrats?

The context of Blue Doggism is complex; please bear with me, for politics makes strange bedfellows.

Before the Civil War, it was Democrats, not Whig/Republicans, who favored states’ right and fiscal conservatism. Moreover, in the decades immediately following the Civil War, both political parties developed “liberal” and “conservative” wings. Today’s Blue Dogs are descendants of Democrat conservatives (on the Republican side, John McCain, for example, descends from progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, Early Warren, and Nelson Rockefeller).

After the Civil War, Democrats began a century-long effort to cleanse their party of the stain of its pro-slavery origins. In the South, “Redeemer” Democrats reluctantly accepted Emancipation while simultaneously ousting Republican African Americans and white GOP leaders; they “redeemed” the South by enacting Jim Crow segregation laws. Fiscally conservative, militant, and staunchly loyal, the “Solid South” became a key to national Democrat resurgence.

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Surely it is okay to talk about the Wailers on a Pacific Northwest editorial website. And I don’t mean “Bob Marley and the Wailers” for crying out loud. I mean THE Wailers, the Boys from Tacoma. In case you haven’t heard, they’ll be co-starring alongside the Ventures (another Tacoma band) at the Moore in Seattle next Friday night.

Many northwesterners who were teeneagers in the 60s have a Wailers story. Mine has to do with the difficulty of picking up KJR (95am) radio in Ellensburg. At night-time it was possible; in your car cruising down 8th in front of Central Washington State College, the rock and roll waves from KJR came in on pretty strong.

Daytime was harder; the signal came in and out. But where there’s a will…

My best friend, Lloyd Nickel, lived across from the “Big Pool” on Poplar and 6th. On a hot summer day, the Big Pool was about as good as it got in Greasewood City (aka Ellensburg). Lloyd brought the radio outside via an extension cord; he placed it on a lawn chair in the exact right location, antenna extended. Full tilt boogy. Disc Jockey Pat O’Day came on the air prime time, the 2pm to 5pm show.

Everyone knows the Wailers’ “Tall Cool One,” but my memory is the “Seattle” 45rpm. It’s ironic that the Boys from Tacoma would call a signature tune “Seattle,” but Wailer Kent Morrill explains the song was originally called “Dallas.” Its post-November 22, 1963, release found it renamed. Marketing.

They didn’t need to market that song to me, man. It starts out hard with drums, 2 bars, then Buck Ormsby blasts in on bass, then Kent electronc piano; then guitar. They all amp up and continue to rock. “Seattle” is all instrumental, a motif of the Northwest (and west coast) sound at that time. And those drums! I am sure other regions had drummers who could do syncopated push-beats, but this was the first time I had heard any drum kit move like that.

Where did they learn that syncopation? Fort Lewis was 10 miles south and Jackson Street 40 miles north of the Boys from Tacoma. Northwesterners didn’t have to go to Memphis to learn rock and roll; the South came to us.

And all of that blasted out of a tiny (1”?) speaker in an AM radio on a lawn chair in front of the Big Pool in Ellensburg, Washington, summer 1964.

Ed McClanahan once aptly wrote: “It was at this moment that I discovered there was such a thing as art, and I had to get me some.”

Here's an editorial cartoon that hits a little too close to home.

In 1968, an infamous issue of Look Magazine, journalists featured photographs of 200-plus American soldiers who died during one week of the Vietnam War.

Some of those same journalists have now reached their 60s and 70s, and before our Iraq victory, they were anxious to give the 60s "one more go" for old time’s sake. In 2005-06, amidst angry headlines of “Another Vietnam” and “Bush’s Vietnam,” we were treated to the names and photographs of American dead in Iraq served up to us in plagiarized renditions of the Look magazine piece; a favorite motif was pictures of flag-draped coffins.

But there was one big contextual difference between the Vietnam and Iraq pictures: In seven years in Vietnam we lost 55,000; in five years in Iraq we have lost 4,000.

We honor these 4,000 brave American volunteers, and the Iraqi policemen and soldiers who, since 2004, have fought alongside them.

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Iraq actually made mainstream media (MSM) news coverage this week. The most recent Iraqi elections mark yet another success and a step towards more freedom and, incrementally, less Jihadist clout in the Middle East.

This is the first we’ve heard about Iraq in the MSM for months. Why? Because, after all of our initial mistakes, things are going well over there and the MSM has lost interest. For the liberal media, good news is no news….

Besides, liberal (and leftist) reporters have already accomplished their main goal – vilifying President Bush and tilting the 2008 election towards the Democrats. The fact that Bush’s and Petraeus' war strategy ultimately succeeded is irrelevant to that story….

So, Saddam Hussein is dead and his reign of terror is over; democracy is slowly growing in Iraq; Iraqi women at last have the right to vote and hold office; Al Qaeda in Iraq is utterly defeated and has fled to Iran and Afghanistan; and the Middle East balance of power continues to slowly shift in our favor.

Good news is no news.

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Our former cartoonist, Chris Britt (now with the State Journal Register in Springfield, Ill.), has a funny bit on YouTube about Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (UPDATE: Make that former Gov.).

Titled "Cocky," it depicts a boxing match between "Blago" and Abe Lincoln. Check it out.

In his Washington Post blog, Comic Riffs, Michael Cavna writes that he's noticed something about political cartoonists who depict President Barack Obama: many are "bizarrely obsessed" with his lips. He writes:

For every Steve Benson or Mike Luckovich who is zeroing in on a swell, spot-on Obama, there seems to be a cartoonist who invokes “caricature” in the most grotesque sense of the word. Obama’s lips have been rendered in such unnatural tints, and at such dimensions, that somewhere, even R. Crumb would blush. And of course, this physical area of caricature — unlike, say, Obama’s ears — comes freighted with a legacy of racism and cruel, blackface-era mockery.

I hadn't really noticed that as I plow through the cartoons that come in every day. If anything, I get the feeling that the cartoonists overly emphasize Obama's ears (like in the Scott Stantis cartoon above).

Cartoonist Taylor Jones discusses drawing Obama in Obama 101. His comments include ones like this:

As subjects go, Obama is easy to caricature. I wish he were genuinely funny, but at least it’s easy to capture his “essence” on paper. His eyes are dramatic. Not because he’s particularly expressive, like a comic actor, but because his eyes are framed by strong eyebrows and fringed with dark eyelashes.

A nice Inauguration Day cartoon from John Sherffius, editorial cartoonist of the Boulder (Colo.) Daily Camera. I'll probably run a roundup of inauguration-related cartoons on Saturday in the Cartoonists Sketchpad.

In his column today, Leonard Pitts Jr. talks about the slew of editorial cartoons that came out after after the Nov. 4 election showing Abraham Lincoln celebrating Barack Obama's victory.

I think we ran one or two of them. This one, by former News Tribune cartoonist Chris Britt, is one that didn't run at the time. I thought it was a little goofy then, and still do. But it does illustrate the point Pitts is making in his column:

"... when Obama was elected in November, every third political cartoonist seemed to use an image of a celebrating Lincoln to comment upon the milestone that had occurred. Lincoln, they told us, would have been overjoyed.

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Who started it? Where’s the international outcry against Hamas? At this point, should we care?

What matters is this bloodletting stop. Of course it is horrific and untenable that Israel continues to be hit with rockets, but many of the pictures coming across the wire still show many of the Palestinians, walled up as they are, throwing rocks. And then there are the pictures of Palestinian children covered in blood. Right or wrong, call the lack of protests against Hamas here and around the world a failure of PR.

And while it is true the Palestinians are essentially being held hostage by thugs who want Israel destroyed, I can’t help thinking this terrorist group called Hamas, as awful as they are, have given the Palestinians a small taste of self-determinism, something they haven’t had for a very long time.

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