Murdered Journalists Are More Important Than Your Damn Dinner

By Sniffles

Journalism has always been a difficult and often dangerous job. Reporters have to be the smartest people in the room, not to mention the bravest. From Edward R. Murrow dodging the Luftwaffe in 1940 to Daniel Pearl literally losing his head in 2002, journalists have, down through the decades, put their lives on the line to cover stories.

Today, in fact, 10 of them were killed in twin bombings in Kabul, Afghanistan. But the White House Correspondents' Association is worried about its next black-tie dinner.

Clearly — clearly — nothing is more important to these Beltway journos than their outrage at Michelle Wolf, who as we've noted did nothing more horrendous on Saturday night than tell them the truth. Wolf cut so close to the bone that several WHCA member organizations have threatened to pull their support if the comedy routine doesn't go the way of the dinosaur next year.

We cats have long argued that the White House Correspondents' Dinner is a freak event that needs to be put out of its misery. It wasn't because we didn't enjoy the jokes. It was because we hated the sight of the Washington press cozying up to the people they cover. When the WHCA added the red carpets and news organizations invited celebrities, it became even worse. (Let's not forget that it all started with that 1987 invitation to the document-destroying Oliver North acolyte, Fawn Hall.)

The brouhaha over Wolf was ridiculous to begin with, and now looks even more buffoonish after Kabul. So, WHCA, we have a few suggestions: Hold your event if you must. But lose the celebs, the crimson carpet, the self-important umbrage and the badly punctuated tweets (we're looking at you, Andrea Mitchell). Instead, hand out your scholarships and honor your dead. You could fill a whole evening just with tributes to the journalists Vladimir Putin's killed. We cats HISS.

The Truth, In Wolf's Clothing

By Miss Kubelik

If you're a faithful reader, you know that we cats loathe and despise the White House Correspondents' Dinner. We haven't changed our minds, so once again we treated last night's dreaded return like the Oscars: Why waste precious hours of our nine lives watching the wretched thing when we can read about it in three minutes the next morning?

Our requisite three minutes over Sunday doughnuts and coffee have taught us that the Trumpsters — and, unaccountably, some journalists — are up in arms about Michelle Wolf's treatment of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. You know Sarah: She's that allegedly Christian girl who's in a passel of trouble with Jesus for all the lying she does.

Call us unimpressed. We're not sure what Sanders expected when she agreed to take the slings and arrows for her boss last night, but if she thought she wasn't going to get roasted, she was sadly misinformed. We're constantly amazed at the right wing's inability to take what they routinely dish out. May they be haunted nightly by the ghost of Lee Atwater as penance.

As for the umbrage-y journos, here's our take: They're more upset about Wolf rightly calling them out on Trump. "He couldn't sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric," she jibed. "But he has helped you...sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster and now you're profiting off him." This has gotten deeply under their skins, and they're using the Sanders jokes as a smokescreen.

It's also dawned on us that we could reasonably blame the WHCD for today's entire hideous Presidency — that is, if you believe the stories that Trump resolved to run after Barack Obama destroyed him from the WHCD podium in 2011. Even more reason to never, ever, EVER hold this ridiculous event again. We cats HISS.

Anti-Black And Losing Green

By Zamboni

It's hard to believe that we cats used to complain to each other about how much President Obama played golf. Not because we begrudged him any relaxation, but because it opened him up to jibes from people like Donald Trump — Donald Trump! — and because we thought it made him look out of touch.

But the main reason we complained was: We hate golf.

We hate everything about it. It's Scotland's worst export — a stupid, pointless sport played mostly by Republicans in bad pants and by haters who refuse to go to the White House when Democrats live there. (You thought that that all started with black athletes and Trump? Fie on that. Go back to 1993 and the Ryder Cup team.)

And yes, it was racist. And still is — Tiger Woods didn't solve any of that. Just look at what happened to five African-American women at the Grandview Golf Course in York, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.

It's incredible that something like this would pop right after the nefarious Starbucks incident in Philadelphia, but white, male golf course owners clearly have no emotional intelligence. If they had, the jackass owner in York would have understood the political and economic consequences of calling the cops on the women for "playing too slow." (Um, you mean "slowly," you idiot. Adverb.)

Now the course is losing business. GOOD. Thanks to the ubiquity of cellphone video and social media, the white establishment is being brought to heel on crap like this. It's decades and centuries late, but hey — we'll take it. One of the most potent powers we have is in our pocketbooks, and we shouldn't hesitate to use that power. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.

Louis, Louis

By Baxter

The news buzzed on our phone early this morning: The new royal baby is Louis Arthur Charles.

Our first thought? That this name choice will make the elder royals pleased as punch, since it's an homage to Lord Louis Mountbatten, a.k.a. Mountbatten of Burma, a.k.a. the last Viceroy of India, a.k.a. "Uncle Dickie." Prince Charles, in particular, was very close to Lord Mountbatten — in all his incarnations.

We're also happy to see pretty much everyone in journalism name-checking away on baby Louis, since the House of Windsor's monikers and titles can be kind of confusing. Just ask Amy Chozick, who has kicked up a storm of controversy with her book Chasing Hillary.

Why are we circling around to Chozick, you ask? Because her allegedly fact-checked tome appears to include a passing reference to some Windsor woman we never heard of: "Chelsea's press aide told me they'd studied how Britain's royal family had handled Princess Kate's pregnancy to devise the [Clinton] media strategy."

"Princess Kate"? Wethinks it's really Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Cambridge. Kate Middleton seems nice, but she's not a princess (yet). Chozick kinda shoulda checked that. We cats HISS.

(PHOTO: Uncle Dickie poses regally — how else? — for Yousuf Karsh.)

"Uh-Oh."

By Sniffles

See the incredulous looks on these "FOX & Friends" idiots' faces? That's how the rest of America has felt ever since Election Day 2016. Welcome to the club, kids.

Donald Trump has had another terrible week, piled on top of a whole raft of terrible weeks — but listening to (and trying fruitlessly to control) Trump's unhinged rant today, these FOX jackasses finally appeared to grasp how badly Trump's babbling was damaging his cause. Let's hope they didn't see Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avenatti's later mocking tweets.

We cats would enjoy all this if we weren't so tired. The antics and chaos that have taken over our government have left us just about wrung out, and we need to conserve our energy for the fall. We know that the country can't go back to no-drama Obama, but boy, it sure would be great if we could. America need adults back in charge. Until we have that, we can only HISS.

Tidbits And Cat Treats: Scary Wednesday Edition

By Miss Kubelik

The Trumpsters must be super-mad that James Comey has sold 600,000 books in a week. Which has us wondering: Who will ghostwrite you-know-who's memoirs? We think Tony Schwartz will be unavailable. While we check, here are a few other stories that are getting our attention today.

Ye gods, but the allegations against "Ronny" Jackson are alarming. But even worse is the picture they paint of a White House staff getting prescriptions dispensed willy-nilly. Are the Trumpsters more than just venal and incompetent? Are they also constantly drugged up? Please, somebody, investigate!

We're not forgetting, by the way, that Jackson is completely unqualified to run the VA. He could be the best doctor and the best boss of the WHMU ever, but he still has no administrative experience. Republican support appears to be collapsing — but if Jackson's brave staffers hadn't come forward, would it be?

Meanwhile, there's a lot of suspicious crap happening on social media today. We cats are refusing to engage, because we're convinced that it's Vladimir Putin and Russian bots trying to foment discord among Democrats. Please, everyone, don't fall for this stuff. We need to be united going into the midterms.

Finally, on that note: It's interesting that Putin and the bots ramped up on the day after yesterday's special election in Arizona. Yes, the Republican candidate won that race — but only by five points, in a heavily GOP district that went solid Trump in 2016. Somebody out there is worried, folks. Stay focused. We cats PURR.

This Woman Should Be President

By Zamboni

At the PEN America World Voices Festival yesterday, Hillary Clinton came out and boldly stated this:

"We are living through an all-out war on truth, facts and reason. When leaders deny things we can see with our own eyes, like the size of a crowd at the Inauguration, when they refuse to accept settled science when it comes to urgent challenges like climate change...it is the beginning of the end of freedom, and that is not hyperbole. It’s what authoritarian regimes through history have done.

"Today we have a President who seems to reject the role of a free press in our democracy. Although obsessed with his own press coverage, he evaluates it based not on whether it provides knowledge or understanding, but solely on whether the daily coverage helps him and hurts his opponents.

"Now, given his track record, is it any surprise that according to the latest round of revelations, he joked about throwing reporters in jail to make them talk?"

An American President talking about jailing reporters? We never thought we'd see it. And since the more reasonable person won the 2016 popular vote, we're wondering why she isn't President — especially since the person who's there now is guilty of everything he accused her of. Just sayin'. We cats HISS.

Make North America Hate Again

By Baxter

As the cops search for the naked Waffle House shooter — and we all celebrate his takedown by a good guy without a gun — we cats are paying attention to the sentencing of this jackass, who killed six men at a mosque in Quebec in January 2017.

Check out the hat.

Yep, this creep, Alexandre Bissonnette, is a big fan of Donald Trump. He loved the Muslim ban, which Trump had declared just two days before the murders. Chillingly, his computer later revealed a lot of Internet searches not just on Muslims and immigration, but also on Marc Lépine, an antifeminist who killed 14 women in a Montreal shooting rampage in 1989. Still, since Bissonnette did a lot of reading up on Dylann Roof, maybe his racism outweighed his misogyny.

Canada has a lot of guns, but like a zillion other countries it doesn't have anywhere near the problem with mass murder that we do. We suspect that it has a lot to do with the NRA and the Second Amendment, but clearly, the rhetoric and policies of the current awful President have been fueling the violence and the hate.

By the way: There is no death penalty in Canada. The prosecution is asking the judge to give Bissonnette the maximum: 150 years with no possibility of parole. Just one more way they're more civilized than we are. We cats HISS.

Just Because Trump Is Terrible, Doesn't Mean The Bushes Are OK

By Sniffles

Please, everyone, let's not rewrite history.

George W. Bush is still the President who sent Americans into Iraq on a lie, killing almost 5,000 of them. Jeb Bush is still the Florida Governor who sent FDLE officers in to kidnap Terri Schiavo. George H.W. Bush is still the president who nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Barbara Bush is still the First Lady who called Representative Geraldine Ferraro, a major-party Vice Presidential nominee, a "bitch."

The Bushes are not okay.

To those of you who have no institutional memory, let us cats enlighten you: The Bushes are not good people. We don't care how much they've bonded with the Clintons and the Obamas in the "Former Presidents' Club," which we as former Administration employees understand is a compelling fellowship. (Please note that the President and First Lady we worked for, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, are much less susceptible to the trappings of same. We're proud of that.)

We resist the compulsion to cast Barbara Bush's funeral as a demonstration of "cordialness." We aren't feeling cordial. Want to know why? Because the H.W. Bush presidency gave life to the Lee Atwater era of political destruction. Maybe the Clintons and the Obamas have made peace with that — we haven't.

And while we're amused at Barack sitting next to Melania and making her smile, we are not moved to say nice things today about Barbara Bush. As new New Yorkers, we feel compelled to stick up for Geraldine. In memory of Congresswoman Ferraro, we cats PURR.

Oh, Good "Grief"

By Miss Kubelik

This brilliant 1891 sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens stands in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC. The writer Henry Adams commissioned it after the death of his wife.

We cats have always loved it — but we appreciate it even more, knowing this historical footnote: It was a favorite of Eleanor Roosevelt's.

But not by Mrs. Roosevelt's choice. After she discovered in 1918 that her husband Franklin had been having an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, ER sank into a deep depression. She would go and sit by this statue for hours.

So — will Melania Trump be visiting it soon? Oh, wait a minute, we forgot — you have to care that your husband was unfaithful. And we're not sure if doing it with a social secretary or a porn star makes a difference. We cats stand corrected, and we HISS.

92 Years Young

We don't know if the Queen ranks among our string of "Fearless Girls" photos (although we suppose one could argue that she would). But if we cats had skin instead of fur on our faces, this is what we'd want. Happy 92nd birthday, Ma'am!

Another Fearless Girl

Seven-year-old Havana Chapman-Edwards was the only one to walk out of her Alexandria, Virginia, school today in support of the Parkland kids and gun control. "I know I'm not alone," she tweeted. We cats salute Havana, because she's right. And we PURR.

Two Fearless Girls

When In Doubt, Rely On The Rhodes Scholar

By Zamboni

We cats are proud that we helped Hillary Clinton carry Virginia on Election Night 2016, and we were crushed when we lost. Yes, we partially blame James Comey for that. We'll never forgive him for talking publicly about the FBI investigation into her email server while keeping quiet about the Bureau's investigation of Trump and Russia. And we've yet to see an interviewer get Comey to clearly explain why.

So you can imagine how we've wrestled with the fact that despite all of this, we find Comey's demeanor appealing. Is it because we know he's continuing to drive Trump crazy? Or because he tends to speak in short, complete paragraphs and then stop when he's done, which throws a fair number of interviewers off their game? Is it because he's six-foot-eight? Or a good writer? Or that back in 2004, he stopped Alberto Gonzales — the worst Attorney General before Jeff Sessions got the job — from subverting the Constitution? All of the above.

Which means we were wondering if, by making less-than-dignified stops on his book tour, Comey was starting to seem susceptible to the Trumpsters' charge that he was nothing more than a "publicity hound." Parrying embarrassing thrusts from a surprisingly ineffective Jake Tapper and the ever-unqualified Meghan McCain wasn't helping.

We needn't have worried. Last night, Rachel Maddow yanked Comey out of the cheesiness and restored him to a much-needed higher plane with an incredibly intelligent TRMS interview.

Rachel, who has a PhD from Oxford, would have been great no matter what. But whatever GOP lamebrain chose to leak the Comey memos just before airtime did her a huge favor. It meant that she and Comey were able to pore over the memos together, which was frankly kind of adorable. It also meant that she was able to break some news — for example, that Trump had told Comey he was thinking of suing Christopher Steele over the dossier. "Yeah, that does ring a bell," Comey said, leaning over the printouts that Rachel shoved his way.

Our only gripe was that she didn't ask why he stayed mum on Trump during the campaign. In our minds, only Rachel would have been able to pull an unambiguous answer out of him.

So... maybe we, Rachel and Comey can arrange to meet at a bar soon, and continue the conversation? We cats will even spring for the red wine in paper cups. That would make us PURR.

It's Insidious (And No, We're Not Describing The Steele Dossier)

By Baxter

We cats have had to fire off a few complaints today to news organizations that persist in describing the Steele dossier in negative terms. "Notorious," The Daily Beast called it. "Infamous," NPR intoned.

To which we say, WHUT? Why does anyone in the media feel the need to append an adjective other than "Steele" to the dossier?

The dossier is now well-known enough that there's no need to qualify it. And while words like "notorious" and "infamous" may entice a few more clicks, they do a disservice to a document that's held up remarkably well under intense scrutiny.

The dossier's findings are already disturbing and alarming. We object to reporters, blurbmeisters and headline writers lazily invoking the most sensational aspects of the story to skim over the details of collusion, money laundering, election tampering and treason. And we HISS.

(IMAGE: As everyone knows, this is one section of the dossier that has not yet been confirmed. But we cats have confidence in sunshine. And in showers.)

RIP, Willow Windsor

Or is it Willow Windsor-Mountbatten? Whatever. We cats are cats, but we are not above marking the passing of Queen Elizabeth II's last corgi. The Queen, they say, is shattered. We know she has some other dogs to keep her company, but might we suggest a kitten? We cats PURR.

Scraping The Bottom

By Sniffles

We cats were just marveling at Republican hypocrisy on abortion — you know, that it's okay if a GOP guy's mistress needs one — when we realized anew just how low the Party of Lincoln has sunk.

For example, did you know that a murderer is running for the Republican Senate nomination in West Virginia? That would be Don Blankenship. He's the Massey Energy CEO who went to prison for violating mine-safety regulations and killing 29 Upper Big Branch miners in 2010. (The government called it conspiracy. We call it what it is.)

And did you know that a Nazi is running for Congress in Illinois as a Republican? Or that Paul Ryan, until he dropped out of the running for his Wisconsin Congressional seat last week, had a white supremacist challenging him from the right? Republicans are having a tough time finding someone to run in Ryan's place. They may end up with the white supremacist after all.

While we know that the GOP is worried about these candidates and has scrambled to denounce them, we're sorry — they get no points for that. What are these killers and haters doing in the party in the first place? They own this.

All of these shenanigans are on top of the fact that the Grand Old Party has obviously sold its soul to Russia, which is the most astounding development of all. Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and yes, Joe McCarthy would be appalled. We cats sure are, and we HISS.

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