Dog Days ...

Jon Stewart and the Daily Show delved deep into the Michael Vick dog-fighting probe and skewered NBC Sports for their coverage, noting that Chris Collingsworth and Peter King were citing sources that the NFL was more concerned with gambling aspects of Vick's case than they were with the 'humane' issues and the ASPCA angle of the story.

The Daily Show cut to the picture above.

I think the show is a stroke of genius.

Today's news brief shows that 'authorities' will 'euthenize' the 53 ferocious pit bull dogs unless they are claimed. So, for the pit pooches, it has been - "give me liberty and give me death."

To save them? I can just picture a family of four heading down to the dog pound to pick up a terrorized pit bull to become the family watch dog. Great job, all around...

I leave you with...(clipped from internet art site)

Cassius Marcellus Coolidge created the whimsical poker dogs, a series of oil paintings made in the 1920s depicting a group not only playing poker but engaged in other usually human activities. It was the poker dogs who achieved national recognition from the 30s through the 60s, by appearing on calendars and in various other advertising media. This was an artistic subspecialty for Coolidge that was preceded by a string of careers. In the upstate New York town of Antwerp, Coolidge worked, almost simultaneously, as a druggist, painter of street signs and house numbers, and founder of the first newspaper and earliest bank - all within the years of 1868 and 1872. It was after a trip to Europe in 1873 that he turned up in Rochester, New York, as the portraitist of dogs whose life style mirrored the successful middle-class humans of his time. Coolidge's first customers were the cigar companies, who printed copies of his paintings for giveaways. His fortunes rose when he signed a contract with the printers Brown & Bigelow, who turned out hundreds of thousands of copies of his dog-genre subjects as advertising posters, calendars and prints. Cassius married late and had one daughter at the age of 66. He died in his nineties in the 30s.