Want.

This cap is all the rage in Greenland. And maybe beyond. (There's a Canadian version, too). We cats PURR.

Tidtbits And Cat Treats: Trump's Very Bad Week Edition

By Miss Kubelik

It can't be good for the Trumpsters when rumor has it that the Republicans are in trouble in FL-06. It appears that Josh Weil, the Democratic Congressional candidate, is trailing within the margin of error to the repulsive Republican candidate, Randy Fine. This much is clear: If the GOP were sure of a cakewalk, maybe Benedict Donald wouldn't have yanked Elise "Elsie" Stefanik's nomination to be Ambassador to the UN. And it seems a cakewalk they will not get.

That's just one story that broke in the last few days that made for a bad week for MAGA. How terrible was it? Let us count the ways:

1. Signalgate, of course. We have to assume it's not good that people are wondering if the Secretary of Defense was drunk when he ordered airstrikes on Yemen. How long will Hegseth last? People are already posting his photo next to the now-familiar Liz Truss head of lettuce.

2. On top of Signalgate, news broke that Team Trump left their Venmo and other online information public. Goodness gracious, but Russia and China must be having a field day.

3. JD Vance's visit to Greenland was an utter shitshow.

4. Benedict Donald had to go hat in hand to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for a phone conversation. It happened today — after which Carney said Trump respected Canadian sovereignty during the call.  "Perhaps there was a different impression before about how strong Canada really is," he said. For his part, Trump indicated that he and Carney would speak after the federal election. Whoops, guess that means Donald thinks the Liberals are going to win, yes?

5. Neil Drabkin, the Conservative candidate for the NDG-Westmount riding in Montreal, has asserted that his federal leader Pierre Poilievre has the respect of "people close to Trump." Wow, what a death knell. Or, as our favorite Montreal journalist put it, "Neil Drabkin, you screeching fool. You just let the cat out of the bag. PP and the Cons are just stand-ins for Trump and Musk, waiting to do their bidding."

6. Musk has been forced to stop bribing people to vote in Wisconsin. 

Finally, let's remind ourselves again that an Executive Order is not a law. Governing by EO is a sign of weakness, not of strength. We cats PURR.

Elsie Doesn't Take Manhattan

By Zamboni

It's a sad day in the Elise "Elsie" Stefanik household, since Benedict Donald has yanked her nomination to be Ambassador to the UN. As soon as the rumors started flying today, Trump posted on his failing social media platform that she was out. Gosh, that was quick. You have to assume Susie Wiles told Donald he couldn't afford to weather another embarrassing drip-drip news story — not this week, at least.

The Trumpy line is that Republicans were worried that Elsie's vacant seat in the House would endanger passage of their Project 2025 agenda this year. On which we call bullshit because: 

1) When did they decide to actually try to pass stuff like a real Congress, instead of having Trump govern solely by Executive Order?

2) Democrats in Albany had already decided against trying to delay the special election to replace Elsie, and Governor Hochul was poised to name a date in the near future — maybe as soon as June.

3) It's not 2025 that the Republicans are worried about. It's 2026. (Have they seen polling from next week's special elections for districts in Florida? If so, were the numbers portending future doom?)

The question now is what all the GOP hopefuls to fill Elsie's seat will do. They must be crestfallen. One, Dan Stec, just snagged the Conservative Party's endorsement the other day, giving him a big boost to getting support from all the party chairs in the district. The others? Who knows? It's a crowded field of Republican clowns, but one especially moronic goofball, Anthony Constantino, was threatening a third-party run against Stec as the nominee. We were kinda looking forward to that.

Well, no matter. Aside from sending glitter bombs to Stefanik's home in Schuylerville, our marching orders in the meantime are clear: Help Democrats win those two House seats on April 1. You can donate to Josh Weil in FL-06 (Mike Waltz's old seat) by clicking here. You can donate to Gay Valimont in FL-01 by clicking here. We cats PURR.

It's Not Easy Being Greenland

By Baxter

Well, if there's one gift that the first weeks of the Trumpocalypse has given us, it's a lot of information about Greenland. For example, the flag of Greenland is not, um, green. It looks like this. Pretty nifty.

Be honest — you didn't know anything about this gigantic territory of Denmark either, right? It's just been quietly sitting there at the top of the world for ages, without us giving it so much as a by-your-leave. But if you're Vladimir Putin with your eyes on controlling the Arctic, you've got Greenland on your mind. You're also keenly aware that Greenland is home to a US military base, which services NORAD, and as a Danish territory is part of the NATO military alliance.

It's obvious: There is no other reason for Benedict Donald to jabber on about annexing Greenland except that to Putin's bidding. Trump is a Russian asset and traitor who has no business sitting in the White House. But as the saying goes, here we are.

The latest salvo in the Trumpy "Let's Take Greenland" campaign was their attempt to send Usha Vance on a "cultural tour" and charm offensive. The concept was a load of crap, and Greenlanders weren't buying it — firmly closing their doors on any American advance team that asked them to host her for a visit. Now, with Signalgate and her creepy husband JD threatening to join her, the whole idea has become completely toxic — so bad, in fact, that the trip has been scaled down to one pop-in at the Pituffik military base.

Poor Usha! Poor JD! How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful! We cats PURR.

For Republicans, It's Always "Fair Game"

By Sniffles

Remember Valerie Plame? She was the undercover CIA officer whom right-wing columnist Robert Novak outed by name back in 2003. Dick Cheney's chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby, was later convicted of lying to investigators about the scandal. But before he could be hauled off to the hoosegow, George W. Bush commuted his sentence. (Benedict Donald later pardoned him, of course. It's a pattern with him.)

The whole Plame nightmare is just one reason we don't have warm and fuzzy feelings about people named Cheney, by the way. But that's something for another blog post.

Meanwhile, more than 20 years later, the Republicans have clearly learned nothing. Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg said today that in the Signal conversation the Trumpsters carelessly looped him into about their military strike in Yemen, Trump's CIA chief, John Ratcliffe, clearly identified one of his covert operatives to the group. "I withheld her name," Goldberg said. "I didn't put it in the story because she's under cover. But, I mean, the CIA director put it into the chat."

Is that bad? That seems bad.

Once upon a time, Ratcliffe, like nearly everyone else involved in the FUBAR'd Signal thread, was oh-so-stern about protecting our national secrets. He went on FOX "News" in 2019 and bleated, "Mishandling classified information is...a violation of the Espionage Act. It started with Hillary Clinton. It has continued without accountability."

Um, no. It never "started with Hillary Clinton," because no classified information ever turned up on her private server. But the GOP's never-ending hypocrisy led Clinton to weigh in on Twitter yesterday with "You've GOT to be kidding me." (We sense a missing adjective in that tweet — something starting with "f" and ending with "ing.")

We've searched for Valerie Plame on social media, but so far, no luck. Would some enterprising journalist be willing to connect the dots and call her for a comment? It could be interesting. We cats HISS.

Come From Behind

By Hubie and Bertie

It's been a pretty good day for the Liberals in Canada. And with the federal election taking place right around the corner, the Conservative Party can't afford to have a lot of not-great days.

As we've mentioned before, the Tories' previously massive lead vanished since Justin Trudeau stepped down as Liberal Party leader, and especially since Benedict Donald started his annexation and "51st state" threats. As one Trumpy guy at the American Enterprise Institute has whined: "Obviously, [Trump] has unintentionally been the single biggest factor in the comeback of this left-of-center party in Canada." (Ooooooh, a left-of-center party, so scary and awful.)

But now the Conservatives have even more problems.

The Trumpy premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, went on Breitbart a couple of weeks ago and admitted to asking Team Donald to "pause" the tariffs until after her party wins next month. Put another way: She solicited a former friend who's become openly hostile to commit election interference in her country. Incredible. On the other hand, Smith is a Benedict Donald admirer who ran down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring (or his whatever) last November, so she must have assumed she'd have some special influence with him.

Canadians don't seem thrilled. A recent Ipsos poll showed the Liberals increasing their lead over the Conservatives to seven points.

The other reason that Liberals are smiling today? Prime Minister Mark Carney visited Gander, Newfoundland, which famously welcomed thousands of airline passengers who were stranded there on September 11, 2001. "In this crisis caused by the US president and those who are enabling him, we lament a friendship lost," Carney said. "In Gander, Canadians did extraordinary things for Americans when they needed it. Now, we need to do extraordinary things for ourselves."

Brilliant move. So what does Tory leader Pierre Poilievre do now? Does he ignore Atlantic Canada because he's going to get wiped out there? Or does he look like a copycat and show up? We cats PURR.

A Signal Event

By Miss Kubelik

The Ides of March are long past, but a general air of hinkyness lingers — mostly for Trumpsters, we're happy to say. However, we do have some serious collateral damage. Our national security, for one.

As the world now knows, the security breach about bombing Yemen on Signal, which happened March 14-15, roped in Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. Accidentally? On purpose? It's unclear. "It should go without saying — but I’ll say it anyway — that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting," Goldberg said today. "In my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app."

So many fuck-ups here. "The remarkable thing is that no one in the group asked, 'Who's JG?'" Goldberg said. "And when I removed myself from the group, seemingly nobody said, 'Hey, why did JG leave?'" You'd think that maybe some of the Russians on the call might have asked the same questions. (Yes, we're serious — with one of their prime assets back in the White House, you have to assume Team Putin knows everything we do now. See Vlad, above.)

A few thoughts:

Can you imagine how the Republicans would have reacted if the Biden Administration had done this? They would have impeached Biden yesterday. FOX "News" would have talked about nothing else for months (maybe years). Congressional hearings would never end.

We would've loved to have seen Dick Cheney's and Liz Cheney's faces when this story broke. Also Adam Kinzinger's.

Perhaps the only happy Republican in the country today is former Minnesota State Senator Justin Eichorn, who was recently hauled off to the hoosegow for trying to pay a 17-year-old for sex. Things have gotten even dicier for him lately — he's been caught attempting to conceal evidence — but at least the Trump Signal scandal has pushed him off the front pages. (Shades of Gary Condit and 9/11!)

We never want to hear "But her emails" again. We cats HISS.

Best Ad Since The Molson Attack Beaver?

The Canadian election is on for April 28, and a new National Post-Leger poll shows the Liberals three points up. Benedict Donald has clumsily managed to make this PhD-in-economics-white-guy Prime Minister (not to mention his entire country) totally cool. We cats PURR.

Mood.

The Adams Memorial, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC. The sculpture dates from 1891. Please note that the gender of the subject is undefined. We cats PURR.

Delicieux

By Zamboni

It was easy to tell that the temperatures were in the 60s Fahrenheit in Montreal today, because we cats saw a lot of people walking around outside in shorts and flip-flops. And while we haven't seen any campaign posters yet — the PM won't call the federal snap election until Sunday, probably for April 28 — politics are prevalent.

A trip to the SAQ revealed no empty shelves of products from the États-Unis. But it wasn't because they were fully stocked with California wine. It was because the staff had filled in every shelf with wines from France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, New Zealand — and, of course, Quebec — instead. The SAQ clearly has no intention of selling American booze any time soon. They're dug in.

The other adventure of the day was at the Atwater Market, where we met a seller of artisan goodies who had Benedict Donald on his mind and wanted to talk. He thought the tariff war was unbelievably stupide (correct), but his biggest gripe was Trump's disrespect of Canada and Canadians. Yep, he was taking it personally. He thought Mark Carney was very smart. He thought that Pierre Poilievre was phhhffftt. A phony.

Our takeaway? That he was one Quebecois businessman who was definitely voting Liberal next month. How the landscape has changed. Merci, Donald! Our paws are crossed for April 28. We cats PURR.