The United States isn't a perfect country, but it's a good country, a country I love. What I most revere about the United States are the reformers and radicals who have fought to get this country to live up to its highest values. These reformers and radicals helped give this country a new understanding of what it means to be a country of freedom and equality.

So on this 4th of July I thank Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Paine and our Founding Fathers for giving us the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

I thank Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eugene Debs, W.E.B. DuBois, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Thoreau, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Day, Norman Thomas, Bayard Rustin, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, the Kennedy brothers, Harvey Milk, Dolores Huerta, Larry Kramer, Howard Zinn and other leaders of social movements that have helped women, minorities and the disenfranchised become more of a part of the American promise

From June 16 to June 19, I went to Portland to attend a conference of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. It was a fun time to meet cartoonists from all over the country and to learn more about the state of the political cartoonist trade in the U.S. During the 4 days, I attended many informative panels where various speakers talked about the local cartooning scene, and political cartooning in the web, political cartoons from across the world. We also got to hear from two legendary political cartoonists.

One interesting panel consisted of Mike Keefe, Ted Rall, Tjeerd Royaards, and Caroline Dijckmeester and they discussed possible new business models for editorial cartoonists. This is of special interests to editorial cartoonists, as recent years have seen many cartoonists lose their jobs as part of a larger trend of newspapers folding in the face of declining subscriptions and ad revenue. With the decline in newspapers, political cartoonists have been exploring other avenues to expose their work and earn some revenue. Mike Keefe talked about the website Sardonika as being a possible place to submit cartoons. Sardonika is a fictitious island off the coast of the United States that looks upon the U.S. sardonically and spoofs many of the late breaking news of the country. The Sardonika website is a bit like The Onion or Mad Magazine. I checked it out and found quite a few funny articles, although I couldn't figure out if there was a place that was just for the cartoons.