Another One Of The Gazillion Things Donald Trump Doesn't Understand

By Sniffles

Donald Trump convened a commission a few weeks ago to study the opioid crisis in America and make recommendations about what he should do. Their advice: Declare a state of emergency and get addicts help before they all OD in their cars with their children in the back seat.

Today, Trump interrupted the 17-day vacation he swore he'd never take and basically said, nah, not doing that emergency declaration thing.

"The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place," he opined. "If they don’t start, they won’t have a problem."

Ummm... He does know that the cat is out of the bag — the horse has left the barn — or whatever animal-related metaphor you want to come up with... right?

Well, maybe not. Maybe he didn't understand what his commission meant when it reported that the opioid scourge — which has its seeds in pharmaceutical companies' greed and doctors overprescribing the drugs back in the '90s — was now logging a death toll of "a September 11 every three weeks." Maybe Trump doesn't actually know how many people died on September 11. Or anything about anything.

Well, look on the bright side: If we have a nuclear war with North Korea, none of us will have to worry about opioid addiction any more. We cats HISS.

And Now, A Little Education For People Not Of Color

This online spot by Procter & Gamble is terrific. It does everything a good commercial should: Grab your attention, make the people in it real and relatable, and cause you to think. We cats are sorry that lowlifes like Stephen Miller keep making ads like this necessary. But in the meantime, we applaud P&G, and we PURR.

Purity Is For Milk, Not For Politics

By Miss Kubelik

In addition to Sinclair Media, "Trump TV" and voter suppression — all vile, anti-American efforts to freeze Republicans' hold on power — the right wing is trying to gin up fights within the Democratic Party.

These are dangerous times, and we cats urge our fellow Democrats not to fall for it.

Example: The Daily Caller and other righties are stirring the pot about Senator Kamala Harris. Sure, she was a prosecutor, and yes, some folks on the left are hesitant about her. A very, very small group of folks on the left. Our party has had more serious disputes before, about things a lot more important than one Senator's CV. Like, oh, the Vietnam War.

So let's keep our perspective and not fall prey to, in the words of one of our favorite pundits, whining. Because you know what? That's what Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, Kris Kobach and all the other clowns in this hideous administration want us to do.

We're reminded of the day in 2009 when then-Governor David Paterson of New York announced that he would appoint US Representative Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. Hey! — hadn't upstater Gillibrand been endorsed by the NRA? Rumblings and grousing ensued.

We cats loathe and despise the NRA. But you know what? Nobody has cast more "NO" votes against Trump's House of Horrors nominees than Kirsten Gillibrand. That makes her aces in our book.

So let's all take note of where most of this is coming from. And remember what we Democrats have always believed: Political fights should always be about what's good for the country, not us. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.

Not Impressed.

By Zamboni

So Jeff Flake made the rounds of the Sunday shows today to hawk the silly book that he wrote as his Hail Mary pass to try to get re-elected Senator from Arizona next year.

It appears he's in a spot of polling trouble and he's trying to grab some of the mavericky pixie dust that his colleague the senior Arizona Senator is famous for. Flake seems to be thinking that he'll look all buck-the-party brave if he swats at things like birtherism and makes unflattering comments about the short-fingered vulgarian his party so cynically enables and coddles, future of the country be damned.

Sorry, Senator. This is August, 2017 — not 2016. Your timing's way off.

Not only that, but complaining about birtherism looks a whole lot less courageous and a whole lot more opportunistic when someone votes to confirm a birther-y blogger from Kentucky to the US Court of Appeals — as Flake just has.

So, like all Republicans who try to pass for reasonable, acceptable people but who are in reality heartless, soulless, Ayn-Rand-loving hypocrites who have nothing but contempt for most of their fellow Americans, Jeff Flake is a fake. And his protestations today are falling on deaf kitty-cat ears. We cats HISS.

#ObamaDay

By Baxter

So this will drive the short-fingered vulgarian crazy: Somebody on Twitter decided that today should be national #ObamaDay, and the tweets are steadily mounting. Not just to wish 44 a happy 56th birthday, but to throw major shade at Donald Trump.

We cats are taking the day as an opportunity to laugh every time Trump claims he inherited a mess. Mess, what mess? You want mess — check out what was facing Obama when he took office in 2009. Thanks to the Bush 2 crowd, we were facing another Great Depression. Obama knew that he needed a superstar to handle foreign policy so he could focus on stuff at home. And he knew whom to ask.

Can you picture Donald Trump, with his narcissism and fragile ego and insatiable neediness, to be confident enough to do that? Nope, we can't either. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.

Bad Timing.

Robert Mueller convenes a grand jury and issues subpoenas — The Washington Post publishes transcripts of phone calls that show Donald Trump for the idiot he is — the Republican Congress is going home with no legislation to brag about — four Senators are introducing legislation to keep Trump from firing Mueller — and West Virginia Governor Jim Justice picks today to switch to the GOP? We cats GRIN.

UPDATE: By the way, since Justice insists on using the noun "Democrat" as an adjective — a grammatically incorrect, Republican pejorative — we cats say, good riddance.

We Love Leaks

By Sniffles

We cats disagree with the folks who are clutching their pearls over the leak of Trump-Turnbull-Peña-Nieto transcripts. Au contraire: Thank God for leaks like this — it's the only way any of us would ever know how bad things really are.

And while we're at it, a few other reasons:

1. Donald Trump lies. Constantly and without remorse or hesitation. Any time he's caught in a lie, he screams that it's "fake news." So leakers have a patriotic responsibility to put the truth on the record.

2. No matter how we voted for President, we all need to be reminded how utterly unprepared and colossally unsuited Trump is for the job.

3. Anything that forces elected Republicans to answer for Trump's failings is good for America.

4. Any news that makes it even a little bit harder for talking heads and pundits to treat both parties with a false sense of equivalence is good and appropriate news.

5. It's not the leaks that are unpatriotic. It's the Republican Party knuckling under and nominating this Trump clown in the first place. Everything else just pales in comparison. We cats HISS.

Stephen Miller Versus The Statue Of Liberty (Spoiler: Liberty Will Win)

By Miss Kubelik

We cats just want to state here and now that we will never post a picture of Stephen Miller on this blog. So many of the Trumpsters are physically repulsive — but Miller, ICK. That guy makes us hack up a hairball and scurry under the bed.

So you'll just have to imagine (or find elsewhere online) the exchange that Miller had with CNN's Jim Acosta today about the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus. You know Emma: the poet who wrote about "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? Miller said the poem was "meaningless" and that Lady Liberty stood for other things. We assume French President Macron will call him up and rip him a new one.

But what's really foolish about the Trumpsters dissing Emma's sentiments is that keeping people out of the United States is terrible for the economy. So say nearly 90 percent of economists surveyed by The Washington Post. Slicing immigration in half, they predict, would result in a long (and we presume painful) recession.

And the English-ability requirement is dumb, dumb, dumb. Like their clueless colleagues on the alt-right, the Trumpsters constantly portray English as under siege — when in reality, with a billion-plus people speaking it around the world, English rules. It's the language of international business and culture, and — Donald Trump being the exception — anyone wanting to be successful has to learn it. (Just ask all those ambitious kids in China.) Heck, when humans shot Voyager into space, seeking new life and new civilizations, the probe contained 55 languages, but its primary message of greeting was in English. 'Nuff said.

So we advise the knaves and fools in the White House not to pick a fight with Lady Liberty. She has fierce claws and sharp little teeth, and will come back to bite them in the end. We cats PURR.

Another Huckabee Sanders "Fashion Don't"

Ruffles on the shoulders? Pearls? Hey, Sarah — big girls like you can't pull that poofy stuff off. Plus, Mooch is gone, so you can stop trying now. We cats MEOW.

Unholy Policy

By Zamboni

No state legislature has fought the Affordable Care Act more fiercely than Texas's. No two US Senators have kicked and screamed harder to save their constituents from the evils of Obamacare. And now, it looks like Texas is about to lose a passel of rural hospitals.

It's due to a combination of factors — like, there are huge stretches of the Lone Star State in which nobody lives — but one reason is the rate of the uninsured. Oh, and the fact that the Republicans running the state refused to accept the ACA's Medicaid expansion, despite the fact that Washington would be footing the bill. So with all the other pressures bearing down on rural healthcare providers, shouldering uncompensated care can simply push them past the breaking point.

Like the hospital in tiny Trinity, north of Houston. It's closing this month, wiping out dozens of jobs and forcing residents to go 20 extra miles for emergency and other care. You know, if you're having a heart attack or a stroke, a lot of bad things can happen during those 20 miles.

And when a report by Texas A&M suggests that telemedicine might be one answer to rural residents' plight, it bears remembering that one of the projects that President Obama's 2009 stimulus package proposed was to fund broadband expansion into rural areas. Of course, the Republicans fought that tooth and nail as Communistic and un-American. So, never mind.

Oh, well! At least the Republican Governor and the GOP state legislators are protecting the right of Texans to be free from the tyranny of Obamacare, right? Losing a Trinity cardiac patient who could have been saved at a closer hospital is just one small result of their political courage. How inspiring (NOT). We cats HISS.