Images are not found for some congress people

I don't think I like this approach.
Rather than use JS to hide the image, how about altering cd_sunlight_handler_field_congress_picture->render() so that alt text is not added if the image URL starts with 'http://bioguide.congress.gov/'

P.S. You now have commit access. Can you re-roll the patch, then post here, then I'll get you to commit it to both the D6 and D7 branches.

With that patch you actually removed some important functionality that needs to apply even if the images come directly from bioguide (see the inline comments). Instead I think we need to actually set the alt text to '' if the image is coming directly from bioguide.

Do you want another one for 7.x-x.x-dev?

Nope, once we get it right you can apply to both branches.

Less code duplication == better.

How about something like

      if (strpos($image_url, "http://bioguide.congress.gov") === 0) {
        $alt = NULL;
      }

Looking at theme_image, I don't think that's what you want:
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes!theme.inc/function/theme_image/6
That will result in _no_ image being displayed (since it's from an external domain).

I think we need to back up and figure out what we're trying to accomplish:

1) There needs to be dimensions set somewhere so that the layout doesn't break.
2) We need alt text where possible to maintain accessibility.
3) Don't show image placeholders in webkit browsers (I think that's what you're after).

So if all the above are true then I think we need to:
1) wrap the image in divs to do a manual scale/crop (possibly only if the image is external):
http://www.advomatic.com/blogs/jack-haas/faking-imagecache-external-imag...
but using inline styles rather than a stylesheet
2) Add the JS to remove broken images.

But you don't know if the image is missing or not. The image may be coming directly from bioguide because the admin set that in the field settings, or because the server was unable to connect to the bioguide site to pull the image locally (servers that are unable to connect to the outside world is a common issue).

A few thoughts:

- Rather than using $(this) multiple times you could do something like this:

var $this = $(this),
  alt = $this.attr("alt");

- We shouldn't be hard-coding colour values. Instead add a class.

$this.parent().addClass('img-error');

- You can also chain some actions:

$this.parent()
  .addClass('img-error')
  // Add the alt text into the container when image is missing.
  .append('<span class="cd-sunlight-img-alt">' + alt + '</span>');

- Also use hyphens for class/id names rather than underscores.

- This line is the most perplexing, but has no code comments:

$(this).attr("src", $(this).attr("src"));

What does it do? If it is unnecessary then the .each() loop could be completely removed, leaving just

$(".cd_sunlight_picture img").error(function(index)
  ...

- Just a note that we'll need to change this for the D7 version to use behaviours:

$(document).ready(function(){ 

- We shouldn't switch on view-name, but rather the type of view (node, file, congress) so that if people create other views this code is still applied.

if ($view->name == "Congress")

- These sizes seems rather arbitrary. Shouldn't we use the calculated height/width? If not we'll at least need some code comments.
$attributes['style'] = 'height: 250px; width:auto;';
return '<div class="cd_sunlight_picture" style=" height:250px; width: 167px;">' . $themed_image . "</div>";