Sunday morning toons: Special "Beer Summit, Blue Dogs, and Bach" Edition

Gates, Crowley, and Obama "drink and make up;" which in turn drew attention from health insurance/health care reform, which in turn was almost derailed anyway by bought-and-paid-for Blue Dog Democrats who are showing congressional Republicans how you really screw with a Democratic president's signature legislative initiative. And amid it all, the Sotomayor nomination, which was Topic #1 only a week or two ago, eased on out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and headed toward a vote by the full Senate and almost no one noticed.

Oh yeah--and I've decided people aren't getting enough Bach.

Let's go straight to Daryl Cagle's toon round-up for this week.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Nate Beeler, Pat Bagley, R. J. Matson, Jeff Parker, Dave Fitzsimmons, , Steve Breen, Brian Fairrington, and Bill Day,

p3 Certificate of Harmonic Toon Convergence: Jeff Darcy, Mike Luckavich, and Jerry Holbert.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium: Eric Allie.

p3 World Toon Review: Paresh Nath (India), Peter Lewis (Australia), Cameron Cardow (Canada), Fredrick Deligne, (France) and Oguz Gurel (Turkey).


Ann Telnaes reminds us: When the Congress finally sets its mind to something, don't get in the way.

And here's a Telnaes Two-fer--one I didn't get included last week for some reason (and you know how much I love the way she draws You-Know-Who).


Seventy million years from now, when the top scientists of the cockroach civilization gather at an interplanetary conference to study why humans became extinct on Earth, perhaps they'll conclude it was something like this, as depicted by Ruben Bolling.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman reminds us that the pain of the current health care mess is being shared by all Americans.


Because you just don't always get enough Bach: For yesterday's Saturday tunes, I featured a Virgil Fox performance of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. A lot of people who know the song--if they know more than the first phrase--know it not because of Fox's relentless touring and preaching of the evangel, they know if from the arrangement for orchestra in Walt Disney's 1940 "Fantasia." The "Toccata" segment of the film was directed by Samual Armstrong, who also contributed to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), "Bambi" (1941), and "Dumbo," (1942). It begins with fairly literal imagery suggested directly by the performance of the musicians and conductor Leopold Stokowski. Then, little by little, the swirling architecture of the piece catches you up, and the images become more abstract and expressionistic, and . . .

(And for those who are counting, this is the third excerpt from "Fantasia" to be featured on p3's Sunday Morning Toons. The other two are here and here.)


p3 Bonus Toon: Jesse Springer notes that, unlike ten years ago, this time it's not the hapless spotted owl that's putting the kibosh on timber harvests in the state (click to enlarge):



And finally, check out Slate's political cartoon of the day for today.