Another Harbinger Of A Blue Wave

By Sniffles

Gee, from the look of the coverage, Republicans didn't even get a moment to go "Yay!" about their victory last night in Tennessee Seven. All the headlines were gloom and doom. That's what a 15-point swing to Democrats in a deep-red, gerrymandered district will get you.

Preacher of the House Mikey Johnson had to fly out there and appear on Monday with candidate Matt Van Epps and a bunch of other GOP pooh-bahs, accepting a call from Benedict Donald, who is no longer capable of doing his many road "shows" and therefore literally had to phone it in. That was a lot of firepower for what should have been a slam-dunk win for them. Hence the hand-wringing this morning.

We Democrats, meanwhile, are feeling pretty good. Here's why:

Turnout was at eye-poppingly midterm levels — 179,634 (just shy of 181,822 in 2022). This is amazing for a "special" right after Thanksgiving. That means we got our vote out, bigly. Let's do it again in 2026.

What kind of money and resources were the Republicans forced to spend on TN-07 in a panic? We're guessing a lot. It could mean less for other elections down the road, since politics, like economics, is the allocation of scarce resources among competing choices.

Aftyn Behn was a terrific candidate with a great future, and she should run again. In fact, she's thinking about it. Yippee!

Finally, will Benedict Donald have the energy next year to campaign for every House Republican in a district that's less than plus-16 GOP? Will he even be alive then? Hmm! We cats PURR.

New Randy Rainbow!

That journey from cradle to tomb? Trump wants to make sure it isn't that long a stay. We cats HISS at him but PURR at Randy Rainbow.

JD Flunks The Test

By Hubie and Bertie

It's pretty amazing when one of the stupidest people around — RFK, Jr., who has said that he couldn't get decent grades unless he was doing heroin — stumps couch enthusiast JD Vance on the eight Presidents who hailed from (or had ties to) Ohio.

Kennedy was hosting a "Make America Healthy Again" confab that Vance attended, so the subject was unexpected. Still and all, Vance fell down on the job. In case you're wondering, the Buckeye Presidents were (in order of appearance): William Henry Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Warren G. Harding. Vance could only come up with Grant and Hayes.

Several questions spring to mind:

Why wasn't Vance able to rattle off his home-state Presidents immediately? As a former Ohio Senator with White House ambitions, he should be able to do that at a moment's notice. Betcha Tim Kaine and Mark Warner know who the dudes from Virginia were.

Why did Vance feel he could get away with dissing the Presidents he wasn't able to name? He said they came from a "black hole" (jeez!). He slings insults like this pretty constantly — the last time was when he spoke to the troops on Thanksgiving and said nobody likes turkey.

Why wasn't Vance able to cite Big Bill Taft, whose name is storied in Ohio and who was the only President who also served as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court? For shame.

And why, oh why, since Benedict Donald has expressed such admiration for William "King of the Tariffs" McKinley, was Vance unable to ID him? Particularly since, um, McKinley's assassination elevated his Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, to the White House? Double shame.

Just because you've written a book, that doesn't make you smart. What a fraud Vance is. We cats HISS.

Is Pete Sunk?

By Miss Kubelik

We cats sensed a hint of throw-Hegseth-overboard in Benedict Donald's comments to the press about the Venezuelan boat bombings today.

(These would be the same boat bombings that members of Congress from both parties say they want investigated, because despite what our cringeworthy Defense Secretary thinks, killing people like that is not part of a manly warrior ethos but just plain, unadulterated murder.)

Anyhoo, Kegseth is now denying that he ordered our military to "kill them all," which means that someone has told him that his silly tweets could someday be Exhibit A in his upcoming war crimes trial.

And although Donald expressed support for Pete as he flew back from Florida this afternoon, he also told reporters he "wouldn't have wanted...a second strike." Translation: There is still a member of the White House staff who understands, and who has told Trump, that to take out survivors clinging to what was left of their bombed boat was an illegal act at best and a war crime at worst, and Donald is distancing himself. (Can't help wondering, though: Will that person's badge still work when he or she tries to clock in tomorrow?)

We agree with Senator Mark Kelly, whose profile the Trumpsters have raised by threatening to court-martial him. "We have a President who doesn’t understand the Constitution, who installed an unqualified Secretary of Defense," Kelly said. "I cannot think of a Secretary of Defense in the history of our country who is less qualified than Pete Hegseth. He should not be in this position. He should have been fired after Signalgate. Now, he should be fired for this." We cats PURR.

Thanksgiving 2025: Who Looks Better?

It's astounding that after all the uproar in the media last year about Joe Biden's health, reporters aren't asking more about Trump's obvious decline. We can all see it. What's going on, journalists? We cats HISS.

Want To Shop? Think Small.

 

Now that we've all had a lovely Thanksgiving, here's your handy reminder that we're in the thick of the We Ain't Buying It boycott of major retailers that are helping enable the Terrible Trumpsters.

From now through Cyber Monday (December 1), please don't buy any merchandise from:

Target — To punish them for caving to Benedict Donald's attacks on DEI,

Home Depot — Because they keep letting ICE kidnap innocent day laborers and others from their stores, and

Amazon — To protest Jeff Bezos's dollar contributions to Trump's outrages (not to mention Bezos's destruction of the once-respected Washington Post). 

Shop instead at your local small businesses, or support minority-owned businesses online or in your community. For more information and to sign the We Ain't Buying It pledge, click here. We cats PURR.

Republicans In Disarray

By Zamboni

A lot of Republican House members are heading home for Thanksgiving not knowing what the future holds. Will they still be in office come January 2027? If so, will they still be in the majority?

Will they even lose the majority before the midterms because so many members of their caucus are heading for the door?

That's the scuttlebutt that's been flying around ever since Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her January 5, 2026 resignation. GOP members of the House are fed up with Benedict Donald and the Trump staffers who have treated them "like garbage," one angry (and anonymous) Republican leader told Punchbowl News.  

"The arrogance of this White House team is off-putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened," the House leader said. "More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinderbox. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out." Wow! Pretty brutal.

If Republicans do step down early (or decline to run again), the only question is their timing. Will the results of the special election in TN-07 on December 2 be scary enough to make them quit right away? Or will they wait until after the holidays, and blame their decision on the beatings they received from their angry constituents? (Reminder that thanks to Republican malfeasance and incompetence, health insurance costs are set to explode on January 1, so voter anger will only rise.)

Long story short, if you're planning to ask Santa for some schadenfreude for Christmas, you could be in luck. We cats PURR.

Yes, Virginia GOP, That's What You Are

By Baxter

Things are not going great in Trump World. In New York, MAGAts are reeling from Benedict Donald's rapturous reception of NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on Friday. And Elise "Elsie" Stefanik has been forced to double-down on her "jihadist" Mamdani comment after Trump brushed it aside. How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful!

Over the weekend, Trump even started dressing like Zohran. Or, as an interwebs wag tweeted, like an old gay man who owns an art gallery on the Upper West Side. (Don't tell Donald. He'll be furious.)

Meanwhile, down in Virginia, the Republicans are imploding.

It's been interesting to watch the repercussions from Election Day 2025 as they spread through the world of politics. After the initial big shock, the little shocks keep coming — mostly culminating in name-calling and paw-pointing (we cats don't have fingers).

Right now the Virginia GOP is doing all of the above, skewering outgoing Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin for endorsing such a weak candidate to succeed him, and flattening fundraising by his ham-handed handling of the John Reid affair. Party chairs at the county level have issued blistering criticisms of campaign communications and the lack of logistical support at the grass roots. You love to see it.

You can try to say Virginia wasn't a true bellwether because of the large numbers of federal employees who live there. But the problem for the Republicans is that the Democratic wave happened everywhere else on November 4, too: in New Jersey, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and even Mississippi. Democrats captured a whole boatload of school-board seats across the country as well. People are not happy with Trump.

Donald and the GOP have only about 11 months to try to turn everything around. It doesn't look good for them. We cats PURR.

Checking In On Mikey Johnson Like...

MTG resigning? Well, it's not as if anything important is happening in the House of Representatives these days. We cats PURR.

Dick At Rest

By Sniffles

There was an interesting turnout at Dick Cheney's Washington Cathedral funeral today. By now, we all know that Benedict Donald and Couch Enthusiast JD Vance were pointedly not invited. (Yay, Cheney family.) The folks who did attend were a mix of Republicans and Democrats, former Presidents and Vice Presidents, and other blasts from the past. Here are a few observations from our corner of the litter box:

It's awfully good to know that George W. Bush (The Worst Person Who's Ever Lived, until Trump came along) is not suffering from any kind of laryngitis or dementia or other impairment, since he gave one of the eulogies. But that also means we can't figure out why he's been so mind-blowingly silent on the perfidies of Team Trump. Does his nephew's worthless political career really need that much protection?

Any reflection on Cheney's life and career must include a no-holds-barred indictment of his and Bush's prosecution of the unnecessary and stupid Iraq War. Simply put, we attacked a country that didn't attack us. (But yesterday in the tarted-up Oval Office, Trump proudly hosted the prince of the country that spawned 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers. How big a hairball can we hack up?)

It was appropriate (and smart) that Democratic House leaders showed up, since Cheney once was a Congressman from Wyoming: Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Democratic caucus chair Pete Aguilar, plus Jamie Raskin and Bennie Thompson, who served with Liz Cheney on the January 6th Committee. And we hope that the Cheneys had an acceptable red wine for John Boehner at the post-funeral reception.

Oh, and Rachel Maddow was there, too.

So, should we join the party, and try to say something nice about Dick Cheney? After all, he endorsed Kamala Harris last year — but it's still a tough assignment. Perhaps the best thing we can come up with is that if he were still alive and hosting a podcast, he would choose not to platform Nick Fuentes. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.