Say Nothing (Well, Okay, Just This Once)

By Zamboni

There are several topics that we cats have refused to engage on, because they are 1) Republican concoctions, 2) media malpractice and misdirection, 3) needless Democratic worries, or 4) just plain silly. But they keep popping up in our social media timeline, so it appears we must squash them forever. Here goes:

"The Biden crime family." So ridiculous! And so clearly GOP projection. If there's any family that fits the mobster bill, it's the Trumps. And Republican Congress members who keep bleating about "having proof" about Hunter and Joe keep coming up empty. Ignore them.

"There's gonna be a recession! Or at least, no soft landing." As we've pointed out before, Morgan Stanley begs to differ. So our little lips are zipped on this from now on. Enjoy the strong economy, and remember that no Republican voted for it.

"Trump is going to be able delay or defer justice." Nope. For example, today a Georgia judge — "forcefully," in the words of The New York Times — smacked down Benedict Donald, tossing Trump's bid to keep Fulton County from indicting him on overturning the 2020 election. Next week, another bogus Trump attempt will be heard (and tossed). He keeps losing, and nothing's been delayed. As Fulton County DA Fani Willis told reporters yesterday, she and her team are ready to rumble.

"If Trump keeps getting indicted, his supporters will get violent." MAGAts have certainly gotten violent before. (Capitol Hill police still aren't over it.) And goodness knows they're heavily armed. But we still don't lose any catnaps over it. First of all, Trumpsters are mostly cowards. Second, a lot of them are in jail. But even if they haven't been hauled off to the hoosegow, they might be dead. Thanks, COVID.

"Elon Musk is killing Twitter." Unlike the others, this one seems to take on more weight every day. Musk's latest bizarre attempt to erase the brand is the first time that we've seriously wondered whether we can wait him out. But we haven't left the platform yet. He had to take his stupid "X" off the Twitter building in San Francisco today. Now, if only we could get it off our phone. We cats HISS.

Temperate

By Baxter

Upstate New York was braced for severe weather today, but it didn't happen — just a few hours of steady rain, after which temperatures have dropped into the 60s.

This coming week, it's supposed to be in the 70s and (maybe) low 80s.

So we're still trying to figure out why people are moving to Phoenix, where the average temps were 110F and more these last several weeks, or even the mid-Atlantic, which was pummeled by severe storms today after highs of 97F in Washington, 98F at Dulles and 99F in Baltimore. And Florida? Fuhgeddabout it.

There's no escaping climate change until we convince Republicans to do something about it. But in the meantime, the Northeast seems to be the place to ride it out. We cats PURR.

(UPDATE, July 31: It was 54F this morning! We cats PURR.)

Doing Good For Girls

By Sniffles

Having Dark Brandon as President is almost like having Hillary. Has anyone noticed that?

Women and women's rights appear to be at the forefront of his Presidential brain. He started out, of course, by picking Kamala Harris as his running mate (And what a stellar job she's done as the nation's first female Vice President.) But that was just the beginning.

He worked with Congress to reauthorize and strengthen the Violence Against Women Act. He issued a Presidential memorandum to revoke the global gag rule on abortion counseling and services among nongovernmental organizations. (He has always supported codifying Roe into federal law, but we need Congress to do that.) He appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US Supreme Court, and just named the first potential female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And more.

Today, Dark Brandon took prosecution of rape in the military out of the chain of command. How great is that? "Senior Biden administration officials said it was the most sweeping change to the military legal code since it was created in 1950," PBS reports.

Why is he so good for women? Has he been trying to make up for his ham-handed handling of Anita Hill when she testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Clarence Thomas? We're not sure — but whatever his motivation, American women have benefited. Including, perhaps, Vice President Harris, who could be on a path to election to the Presidency. Get back to us in 2028. Meanwhile, we cats PURR.

The Decency Of Dark Brandon

 

By Hubie and Bertie

Mitch McConnell is an evil POS who helped steal the Supreme Court and is therefore responsible for the death and suffering that American women in red states have endured since Dobbs. But you didn't see any Democrats gloating over what appeared to be his TIA at the Senate lectern today. Compare that to the Trumpsters who raked John Fetterman over the coals for his stroke and for seeking mental health support. They are monsters, and we are not.

Want more proof? McConnell told the press that President Biden called him today to check on him. Biden is a good guy. Although we can't pretend to be in his league, we're glad he's our President. We cats PURR.

Things Are Looking UP(S)

By Miss Kubelik

Anyone who mainly shops by Amazon is happy today that there will be no UPS strike — the company and the Teamsters Union have reached a settlement. This is good for the UPS employees, who will get a pay raise, and good for the economy. So, yay!

We cats wasted absolutely no time worrying about an impending strike, because it just didn't make sense to fret about something over which only the union and the company had control. In fact, we've been ignoring a lot of doomsayers lately. They're all in the mainstream media, the members of which are in a constant state of hand-wringing, fearmongering, and anti-Biden frenzy.

The latest was the crew of Cassandras who were already predicting that a prolonged UPS strike would not just tank the economy but obliterate Biden's re-election chances. So, once again, they've been proven wrong. Never mind — they'll just start hunting for the next sparkly object that will magically destroy the Biden campaign.

It's all amusing, except for the media's irritating habit of portraying Biden-Harris as "getting lucky breaks" when it comes to the economy. Truth be told, most of the country's current economic state — cooling inflation, record-low unemployment, and fading fears of recession — is due not to good fortune but to the Administration's deliberate planning and choices. Elections matter, you see. We cats PURR.

Fighting Elephants

By Zamboni

This is interesting — despite (or maybe because of) the source, the right-wing National Review. It's also the kind of story that many journalists are too lazy or too uninformed or too lacking in institutional memory to care and/or write about.

"In at least a quartet of key states," the magazine reports, "the state Republican parties are collapsing — going broke and devolving into infighting little fiefdoms. Even worse for the GOP, these aren't just any states — Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota all rank as either key swing states or once-purple states that would be tantalizing targets in a good year."

If 2024 ends up being another GOP letdown, NR avers, it will be because these states replaced "competent, boring, regular state-party officials with...blustering nutjobs who have little or no interest in the basics of successfully managing a state party or the basic blocking and tackling involved in helping GOP candidates win elections."

All four parties are controlled by Trump loyalists. The Arizona and Minnesota Republican parties have no money, and Colorado's and, most famously, Michigan's are consumed with cat fights and circular firing squads. (And also broke.) Colorado is even talking about canceling next year's GOP primary. Just imagine the coverage if this were happening in blue states. You'd never hear the end of it (because as we all know, "Democrats" and "disarray" both start with the letter "d").

This bodes well for sane Americans like us. It's just another reason that we're choosing not to freak out about mid-2023 national polls, or endless predictions of a recession that's not going to happen, or even about the idiots behind the so-called "No Labels" group. Because behind all the third-party chatter lurks this ever-present question: Are they doing the work? Organizing in key states, getting on ballots, etc.? (It's overwhelming, and a grind.) Or are they just holding silly events, lending themselves out as talking heads on TV, and prattling away on social media? We suspect the latter. We cats PURR.

(IMAGE: Wyoming Tribune-Eagle)

In The Pink!

 

Dark Brandon loves the right's freakout over the Barbie movie, because nothing's more threatening to the Trumpsters than empowered women. And didn't Brandon just appoint the first woman to lead the Navy? Indeed he did! No word on what Admiral Lisa Franchetti's favorite color is — but once she's confirmed, she'll be the first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We cats PURR.

He Made Every Town Paris

 

 

Was there ever a time that we didn't love Tony Bennett? We cats PURR.

It's The Economy, Stupid

By Baxter

Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the US economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for the US gross domestic product.

Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief US economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote.

As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%.

“The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote. We cats PURR.

Republicans Cannot Erase History

 

The Vice President's speech in Jacksonville today is worth a listen. There are no "benefits" to slavery. We cats PURR.

Arrivederci, Anthony

 

You pretty much knew this one was coming, given that Tony Bennett was 96 and suffering from Alzheimer's. But he never forgot the Great American Songbook lyrics that he sang for so many years. (And he was a devoted Democrat!) We cats will miss him, and we PURR.

(IMAGE: Aislin, Maclean's magazine)

The Scene At The House Oversight Committee

Politics is nuts now. Until a few days ago, we had no idea who this "Jason Aldean" person was. (Ignorance was bliss.) And then yesterday, Marjorie Taylor Greene unveiled explicit photos of Hunter Biden at a House hearing. Life sure was a lot better when Democrats were in charge and Greene was stripped of her committee assignments. But Speaker Hakeem Jeffries will take care of that, won't he? We cats PURR.

Harbingers Of Doom

 

By Sniffles

The big news today was Benedict Donald's announcement that he'd received a target letter from Jack Smith on Sunday night. If true (and you always have to ask that where Trump's concerned), he must appear before Smith's January 6 grand jury or decline to do so — in four days. Donald's in quite a snit about that.

The other huge story was state Attorney General Dana Nessel's charges against the 16 fake Trump electors who tried to overturn the 2020 election results in Michigan. As you can see from the list above, if proven, the charges carry some pretty serious prison time. One of the defendants, Meshawn Maddock, is a former state GOP co-chairwoman. Goodness gracious, as a high-ranking party person, she should have known better than to commit election fraud, yes? (Poor Meshawn! How simply frightful. How humiliating. How delightful!)

So, does Nessel's action mean that we can expect a slew of other fake-elector charges in the other battleground states where the Trumpsters tried to stage a coup? Turns out that the AGs in at least five of those states are Democrats: Kris Mayes in Arizona, Aaron Ford in Nevada, Raul Torrez in New Mexico, Michelle Henry in Pennsylvania and Josh Kaul in Wisconsin. (The Attorney General in Georgia is a Republican, but as we know, Fulton County DA Fani Willis has things well in hand there.)

Let's just say that if we were any of those Trumpy fake electors, we'd be quaking in our boots right now. We cats PURR.

Dark Brandon Does It Again

We kid you not: Team Biden has come out with a new campaign ad that's unspeakably close to perfection. Let's just say that it touts all the fabulous things the Administration has accomplished, and that Marjorie Taylor Greene plays a starring role. Click here and enjoy. We cats PURR.

Rough Times For Rhonda

By Hubie and Bertie

Although this post is about the woes of a certain Republican candidate, we thought we'd lead with a nice photo of Dark Brandon, looking decidedly not-dark on National Ice Cream Day. (That's the same Dark Brandon who just raised $72 million for his re-election last quarter — twice as much as Benedict Donald, and more than all the other Republican nitwits combined.)

It's also World Snake Day, which brings us to Ron DeSantis. Or Rhonda, as many like to call him. 

This weekend (when he probably thought no one was looking), Rhonda, or should we say wife Casey, sacked 10 to 12 campaign staffers, thinking that would help turn things around. Unfortunately, the problem may be the candidate, not the staff.

Even if DeSantis didn't need a personality transplant, he has some real challenges ahead. For example, he reported raising $20 million last quarter. Not bad, but there are two caveats. First, he's reliant on major givers, many of whom have already maxed out. And he doesn't have a lot of small donors to make up the slack — they're still with Trump.

On top of that, he has to tamp down his burn rate. Maybe that's why they fired a dozen people? But they're racing through money like crazy, with nothing to show for it. Perhaps spend less on those silly vests? Or cut Casey's eyebrow pencil budget?

But the most pressing problem for DeSantis is that he must, must change the media narrative. This won't be easy after having been fluffed so ridiculously by a craven press that was looking for a race to boost eyeballs and clicks. But how will Rhonda turn that storyline around unless or until he wins something? Iowa and New Hampshire are months away, and the first Republican debate isn't until August 23. That's five weeks to fill with nothing.

Until, of course, Jack Smith or Fani Willis hands Benedict Donald his third and fourth indictments, in which case all the oxygen in right-wing media will be used up with people defending Trump and decrying the deep state. It'll be pretty hard for Rhonda to break through that.

So, not a great scenario. Obviously, anything can happen in politics — but at this point, you couldn't be blamed for wondering if DeSantis is secretly praying for a hurricane to hit Florida. That would let him run home and try to be a hero — at least until Dark Brandon shows up. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.

Hauled Off To The Hoosegow

By Miss Kubelik

This January 6th defendant was just sentenced to six years in prison.

She could have received less, but she decided to ignore her defense team and instead stand up in court and scream at everyone and point fingers, which made the judge place a terrorist enhancement on her sentence. On January 6, she assaulted police officers, and encouraged others to do the same. Today, she just made it worse for herself.

As with other insurrectionists, we can't help but wonder: Don't these people realize that Donald Trump has ruined their lives? This woman is nuts, but she's going to prison. Six years! Doesn't she get it?

In the best spirit of Melania, we cats really don't care (do you?), but as always, we're curious. And we PURR.

Friday Night Gratitude List

By Zamboni

We cats aren't in the habit of quoting Ernest Hemingway (we much prefer F. Scott Fitzgerald), but with rainstorms, floods, heat domes, sea temperatures, and other phenomena hitting us like slaps upside the head, we're reminded of this passage from The Sun Also Rises:

"How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."

It feels like climate change has been creeping up on us, until, in the last few months, it's abruptly here.

This week alone, in addition to the inundation we've seen in Vermont, New York State has had serious rainstorms and floods. And Montreal had a twister yesterday. You don't usually think of Quebec as Tornado Alley, do you?

It's easy to read about stuff like this and get freaked out and depressed. So let's accentuate the positive this Friday night, shall we? Here are things we're grateful for right now.

The planet's on fire, but Trump is not in office. Eighty-one million of us fired him in November 2020.

NATO has been strengthened, and Putin is just getting weaker. And oh, goodness — didn't Joe Biden prove during the whole summit that he could wear a tailored suit well?

Biden-Harris raised $72 million last quarter. That's twice as much as Benedict Donald raised (and most of his $35 million will go toward his legal fees). Rhonda Santis only raised $20 million, followed by Nikki Haley ($7.3 million) and Tim Scott ($6.1 million). Peanuts.

Finally, Mike Pence got hit in the head by a water balloon today. Let the rainbows begin. We cats PURR.

Tidbits And Cat Treats: Grab Bag Edition

By Baxter

Quite a number of fun things going on in the news these days. Here are a few.

A crazy insurrectionist who attacked police at the Capitol on January 6 — and permanently ended the career of Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who as a result was stuck with more than $20,000 in medical bills — just got sentenced to more than seven years in prison. He's the latest in a long line of Trumpsters who have been hauled off to the hoosegow, which is a wonderful thing. (Mind you, if they had been Black, they wouldn't have lived to be arrested and tried.)

Ray Epps is suing Tucker Carlson and Fox "News." Epps is the MAGA moron who Carlson and the Fox nutcases told viewers was a plant by the government to get them to break the law on Insurrection Day. Epps got so many death threats that he had to sell his business in Arizona and high-tail it to an undisclosed location in, they say, Utah. We're rooting for his lawsuit, of course, but you can't help wondering whether he understands that Donald Trump has ruined his life.

Republican Eli Crane of Arizona is a racist POS and he learned today not to mess with Ohio Democrat Joyce Beatty. Go, Joyce!

Hunter Biden is not silently taking Donald Trump's slings and arrows, and we're kinda here for it.

Finally, an appeals court has just ordered New York's Congressional map to be redrawn. This is good news because the previous map, a travesty, led to four seats getting flipped from blue to red in 2022. (Lyin' George Santos's seat on Long Island was one of them.) So, thank you, Marc Elias and your intrepid team of democracy-defending legal beagles. The decision will probably get appealed to the state's tippy-top court, but our paws are crossed for ultimate victory — except please, map gods, don't take us out of Paul Tonko's district and put us back into MAGA idiot "Elise" Stefanik's. That would make us cats HISS.

Biden Scores, GOP Self-Goals

By Sniffles

Dark Brandon is having a really, really good week (and it's only Wednesday). The inflation rate has cratered to just 3 percent, the best in two years. Gas prices and airfares are down. The jobs reports continue to impress. And the NATO summit in Vilnius went super-well. Sweden's in, there's a wall of righteous opposition arrayed against Vladimir Puttin, and even perpetually stressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is going home happy.

And Team Biden keeps getting big assists from the Republicans. You know them — the ones who unanimously voted against the Inflation Reduction Act of 2002? Now, the GOP is not only clinging still more tightly to Benedict Donald — who's about to come up against his third and fourth set of indictments — they're leaning hard into the culture wars that turn so many voters off.

Abortion, LGBTQ issues, "wokeness" (whatever that is), book bans — Republicans are just obsessed, aren't they? And instead of trying to dial it all back to appeal to moderates, they're barreling forward. Just look at what's happening in Iowa, site of the first meaningful event in their 2024 nominating contest. This Friday, Republican Governor Kim Reynolds is expected to sign a six-week abortion ban into law. Which means that every GOP candidate who competes in the Iowa caucus will have to endorse the six-week cutoff (or forced birth).

What a gift to Democrats everywhere, from Biden-Harris to our House, Senate and state house candidates. That's why, even as he was wrapping up the NATO summit, you saw President Biden tweeting about codifying Roe today. The campaign ads just write themselves. We cats PURR.

Cat Mom Extraordinaire

By Hubie and Bertie

President Biden is at the NATO summit in Europe, but he wasted no time today declaring the state of Vermont a federal disaster area after their heavy rains and flooding. Good thing, too, because everyone's keeping their eyes on the Wrightsville Dam near Montpelier — it's just a foot away from spilling over.

Some context for you: We got maybe one or two inches of rain in our corner of Upstate New York, and we're still pretty soggy. But the town of Barre, Vermont, just southeast of Montpelier, got five to 10! It's no wonder that Alexis Dexter, the owner of the Kitty Korner Cafe in downtown Barre, became frantic when she saw the water rising up.

Knowing that getting her 50 (yep, 50) cats out of the cafe would be impossible, she refused to evacuate. Instead, she moved the cats to higher ground inside and then broke a hole in her cafe floor to direct the flood to her basement. It worked! After coming super-close to the top of the basement stairs, the water stopped — and when the power came back on, the sump pumps went to work. Whew!

Alexis Dexter sustained a lot of damage to her business, but surely the Kitty Korner Cafe will rise again. When Vermont recovers from this climate-change-exacerbated disaster, Alexis and her cats will be the first folks we'll visit. That's a promise. We cats PURR.

Grooming

 

Who knew there would be so many nutcases running around these days? Benedict Donald has inspired the worst of America to crawl out from under its rock — but at least we have great cartoonists to call them out for the fascists they are. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.

(IMAGE: Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press)

Schmoozing At The Stampede

By Miss Kubelik

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau loves Western Canada, even if it doesn't always love him back. His mum's family is from British Columbia, and he spent a lot of his Wonder Bread years there. As PM, he seems to never miss a Calgary Stampede — the determined suitor who just won't take no for an answer.

Because the answer isn't really no. Or at least, not an across-the-board no. As we pointed out a few weeks ago, the Conservative Party's victory in the provincial election showed some rips at the seams, with the left-of-center NDP reducing the Tories' margin by 15 seats. (The NDP is really the only electoral game in town for anyone in Alberta who isn't right-wing. And nationally, the party is in a governing partnership with Trudeau's Liberals through 2025.) While the usual aggrieved, white-male MAGA types turned up to protest PMJT at the Stampede yesterday, his welcome was overwhelmingly warm.

That must have annoyed federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who also attended the Stampede to show off his recent makeover. Someone told him to ditch his glasses for contact lenses, lose the suit, and get a new, less dweeby haircut. However, no style advice can cancel out his putrid policy positions, which still render him revolting.

Back in the day, JFK famously avoided wearing any kind of hat if he could help it. He was reportedly haunted by a photo of Calvin Coolidge, who posed for a 1927 photo op in a Native American headdress. (Michael Dukakis should have followed Kennedy's example, but sadly, he put on that helmet, climbed onto that tank, and promptly — well, tanked.)

And Justin Trudeau? He's always game. Occasionally, it doesn't work out very well. But this weekend was not one of those times. He sure looks nice in a chapeau de cowboy, doesn't he? We cats PURR.

Getting The Cold Shoulder

By Zamboni

You do know that if a bunch of conventions pulled out of Philadelphia or Baltimore because of — oh, let's just say, as an example — gun violence, we'd never hear the end of it, right?

But we haven't yet seen much mainstream media coverage of Florida's loss of business under the reign of Rhonda Santis. Maybe it's just cranking up. Black, Hispanic and LGBTQ+ groups have issued travel advisories, and now hard money seems to be at stake.

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, an education group, has just bailed on the Hyatt Regency Miami. "While no place can be 100% safe, Florida this fall did not feel like the best place to gather for our annual conference," the ACSP's president said. "Despite myriad assurances from the Florida hospitality industry, members of all ACSP interest groups expressed significant concerns."

Orlando is feeling the pain, too. A "Game of Thrones" fan confab previously scheduled there in August has just canceled. So has the National Society of Black Engineers, which would have brought 15,000 attendees to the Orange County Convention Center next year. The American Education Research Association is going to Denver instead. And the ACSP? They're going to Chicago.

It's all thanks to the draconian anti-gay, anti-education, anti-civil-rights, anti-women and — let's just say it — anti-freedom policies championed by Florida's intensely unlikable Governor. Oh, and that new open-carry law isn't making people feel very sanguine, either.

So we'll wait to see when journalists figure out how much dough DeSantis is costing Florida businesses. Can we hear from you, Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Business Journal? We cats HISS.

Yesterday's Winning Tweet

Team Trump probably didn't have a very pleasant Independence Day. Because Indictment Summer is looming. We cats PURR.

More Drones, Please

By Baxter

It's the night before Independence Day, and we can already hear people in the distance setting off firecrackers. Ugh. Fireworks is something we've grown to hate.

Speaking strictly for ourselves, we cats aren't too freaked out by them. But dogs and other animals are — and we feel sorry for military veterans whose PTSD comes roaring back with every boom and pop.

Other objections include air pollution (something very familiar these days, unfortunately), plastic pollution from falling fireworks detritus, and, of course, the danger of sparking wildfires. So the idea of drone shows as a safer, saner alternative is wildly appealing.

Besides, has any Trumpster in a trailer park gotten drunk and blown off his hands setting off a drone? We cats PURR.

WTF?

By Sniffles

The Trumpsters and Republicans are all about projection, right? Their shtick these days is "Biden corruption" and "Biden treason" — which is pretty funny when you consider how the Trumps used the federal government as their personal piggy bank and how Donald shared national security documents with people who had no business seeing them. So when they toss about accusations like that, they're just proving they're worried about what's coming down the pike.

That said, who knows what to make of this extraordinarily bizarre DeSantis ad? Is he trying to hint that he's secretly gay? One of those heavily closeted, self-loathing homosexuals? That's a lazy trope that we try to avoid, but this thing is a head-scratcher. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg kind of sums up everyone's puzzlement here.

Whatever the answer, the ad is a huge misfire. Rumors are flying that Team DeSantis has had to spend the holiday weekend working the phones to placate upset donors. But Rhonda can't take it down — that would be admitting a mistake, for which Benedict Donald would endlessly mock him. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy! We cats PURR.

Happy Heavenly Birthday, Dame Olivia

We cats made it a tradition to wish Olivia de Havilland a happy birthday while she was still alive, at large and residing in Paris. (Did she have good taste, or what?) And just because she crossed the Rainbow Bridge at age 104 in 2020 doesn't mean we have to quit — particularly when we've seen plenty of people on social media doing the same thing. Bon anniversaire, ODH! We cats PURR.

Another Crack In E Pluribus Unum

By Hubie and Bertie

No doubt about it — yesterday's Supreme Court decisions were pretty darn depressing. And unreal. In 303 Creative v. Elenis, the so-called Christian website creator had never even been asked to do a site for a gay wedding: The case was entirely hypothetical! Nevertheless, it's just opened the door to the repeal of Obergefell.

So hang onto your hats, everyone. Unless Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Biff Kavanaugh manage to get in fatal car accidents soon, it's always going to be like this. We'll spend every June riddled with anxiety about what rights are about to crater next.

On the other hand, this out-of-control Court has just guaranteed a high Democratic turnout next year — particularly with Biden v. Nebraska, in which the Supremes struck down student loan forgiveness. People who thought they'd gotten relief on their loans are madder than wet cats. We saw tons of posts on social media from young folks pledging not just to vote against Republicans in 2024, but to vote against Republicans for their entire lives. (And since the Court — surprise! — did not decimate voting rights this week, they might be able to make good on that.)

Are we the only ones who thought the GOP and the Court played right into Dark Brandon's hands? Joe Biden has been around the block a few times, and he knows how politics work. Surely he knew that student loan forgiveness would rile up the Republican crazies, and that SCOTUS would strike it down. Look how prepared the White House was yesterday with a workaround. We cats were impressed, and we PURR.