Will the 'blue dogs' count?

One potential source of worry for Democrat supporters in the US and indeed those of us with an interest in ending neo-conservative domination of American politics is that the new Democrats in the House and the Senate are a very mixed bag. A very crude characterisation is that the north-east and western coastal states have tended to elect 'liberal' (which in UK politics speak means centre-left) Democrats, whereas the mid-west and the South have tended to elect conservative Democrats who are pretty much indistinguishable from the conservative Republicans who were willing parts of the Bush coalition in 2000, but have since got totally pissed off with him over Iraq, out-of-control government spending and general incompetence. For example, the narrow winner in the Senate contest in Virginia, Jim Webb, is, according to Newsnight (which I'm watching at the moment) a lifelong Republican and 'gun nut' who only switched over to the Democrats because he opposed the Iraq war.

The term 'blue dog' has been coined for members of this Conservative... (sorry, got to break off for a couple of seconds because Tony Benn has just come on Newsnight. Total genius as always. He is to British politics what Charlie Watts is to drumming. Sorry for the interruption but you can't be disrespectful when DA MAN comes around.) ....of this Conservative Democrat bloc.

I like 'Blue Dog', partly because it reminds me of Martin Amis's near classic novel Yellow Dog, but also because it reminds me of a very strange web site from the primitive net-days of the mid 1990s. I was lucky enough to find my copy of the first(!) edition of the Rough Guide to The Internet, published in November 1995. The guide has about 100 pages of URLs for websites on all kinds of topics in it and it would be a fascinating exercise to find out how many of them still exist, 11 years later. A casual glance suggests not many! But anyway, in the "Weird" section, alongside such forgotten classics as Mrs Silk's Cross Dressing Magazine and Strawberry Poptart Flame Thrower, was a site called Blue Dog Can Count.

The original web address was http://hp8.ini.cmu.edu:5550/bdf.html but good luck finding anything there now. I never tried it at the time unfortunately because it was back in the days when any page with graphics on it took about half an hour to load (ah... dial-up!) but according to the Rough Guide, you could "give the blue dog an equation and hear her bark the answer". Maybe US voters will be able to do the same with some of their newly empowered 'Blue Dog' Democrat representatives? I'm really, really hoping that a conservative Democrat who is in on the joke will set up a rallying site called "Blue Dogs Can Count". Do let me know if you hear any senators or congressmen barking, or indeed using any equations...