Nice legions of fact-checkers and editors toiling away chez Joel Havemann and the LA Times:
The Blue Dog Coalition was founded in 1995, a year after the election that cost the Democrats the majority they had enjoyed for decades. The name refers to the founding members' sense that they had been "choked blue" by extremists in both parties.
If Mr. Havemann had bothered to check, the Blue Dogs state on their own site that the one who was choking them blue was their own party:
The 35 conservative and moderate Democrats in the group hail from every region of the country, although the group acknowledges some southern ancestry which accounts for the group's nickname. Taken from the South's longtime description of a party loyalist as one who would vote for a yellow dog if it were on the ballot as a Democrat, the "Blue Dog" moniker was taken by members of The Coalition because their moderate-to-conservative-views had been "choked blue" by their party in the years leading up to the 1994 election.
The reporter might want to work the PTA-meeting beat until he gets up to snuff on this journalism gig.
(Login/pswd=latimes@dodgeit.com/password.)
Posted by floridacracker at November 16, 2006 03:51 AM