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A picture book I worked on last year, written by Paul Wood and titled "Here Comes Cousin Albert" is now available for pre-order on Amazon!

Here's the cover as well as a few of the interior illustrations.














CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY!

Steve

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at health-care reform. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

After attempting a pivot to jobs, the Obama administration has realized that a hanging cadence on health-care will not do. Perhaps they should never have started it, but closure is what the administration now must have. An encore after the strident audacity of hope on health-care reform was temporarily dashed after the election of Scott Brown to the Senate.

In the immediate aftermath of that election, Democrats were in danger of exchanging over-confidence for excessive humility. After Obama’s historic election the year before and Arlen Specter’s party switch, Democrats were overtaken by hubris that Obama’s tune of change could be used to overturn Washington and to compel it toward a Progressive utopia. But just as Democrats were foolhardy to think that 60 votes in the Senate gave them invincible power, they somehow thought after the Massachusetts Senate election that 59 made them completely impotent.

In the media, we hear, conversely, about the conservative comeback in hyperbolic terms. On Saturday, Glenn Beck, not Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney, delivered the keynote speech in the largest annual conservative gathering, the CPAC conference. If Beck’s stardom exceeds that of the winner of the CPAC straw poll this year, Ron Paul, it is because the conservative movement, charged as it is, remains a movement in search of a leader. It is also a movement, as Beck’s criticism of Progressive Republicans in his speech reveals, which is not exactly in sync with the Republican party – the only machine capable of taking down liberal dreams.

And so a Democratic comeback on health-care reform is afoot. With one vote shy of a fillibuster-proof majority, Senator Harry Reid has opened the door to the Budget Reconciliaton process that more Progressive advocates of health-care reform like Governor Howard Dean have been pushing for a while. While it is not clear that there are 50 votes in the Senate for the public option, assuming that Vice-President Biden will cast the 51st, what is clear is that Democrats are much more likely to push through a liberal bill with the veto pivot sliding to the left by ten Senators.

In the White House too, we see a coordinated move to bring Reconciliation back as an option. Obama used his weekly address on Saturday to lay the ground work when he warned that “in time, we’ll see these skyrocketing health care costs become the single largest driver of our federal deficits.” He said this because in order to use Reconciliation, Democrats must show a relationship between health-care reform and balancing the federal budget.

No one in Washington believes that Thursday’s Health-care Summit will magically generate a consensus when in the past year there has been nothing but partisan bickering. If so, the President is not being naive, but signali

Here's the cover I did for a children's book called "Here Comes Cousin Albert" written by Paul Albert. It's due out sometime next month from BenToby Books, and a bit of the process in getting to the final design. First up is a basic character sketch. Below that is a rough of the cover, with some really quick-really basic colors thrown in via. photoshop. At the bottom is the completed cover in all it's glory.

More news when the book gets released! Be on the lookout!

Alright, enough with the shameless shilling for the day - back to work - or is it better described as avoiding work?

Whatever the case, time to get back to it.

Steve

2.5 x 3.5
Coloursofts and Polychromos on board
on ebay

I know I said I was going to do black and whites. And I am! I just had to do this first.

Yesterday was such a contrast to the day before, with the terrible storm and wind and rain and all. The sky was blue, and there were these amazing gigantic fluffy clouds all over. They were still kind of ominous, with grey underbellies, but they also had the most beautiful pinks and lavender colors in them. I just had to do a little piece about them. Or try, anyway.

I don't do as well with pastelly colors for some reason. It probably looks OK to you, but I fussed with it a lot. I'm not a pastel person. I like grey and taupe and black and cream and olive and plum and...well, you get the idea. Even as a kid. (Although I was forced to have a pink bedroom. Well, at least until I got up the nerve to ask my parents to let me paint one wall blue-violet (the rest was white) which they thought was the height of teenage rebellion, and which they also thought gave them lots of "cool" points for allowing me to do. Enough said.)

Anyway, this is my little homage to the "post-storm sky".
And I find that the Polychromos work well with just about every other type of pencil. I like to start with the Coloursofts or Graphitints and then do some Polychromo on top.

To see all the Yarn pieces in this series side-by-side, please go here. Or visit my ebay store to see which are available for sale.
All images and content herein are © Paula Pertile and may not be used or reproduced without permission.