Messaging

By Sniffles

We cats rarely concern ourselves with the well-being of Congressional Republicans, but the twelve members who were given the green light by Paul Ryan to vote against the tax scam must be in a jam.

That's because some dude named Corry Bliss from the "American Action Network" (i.e., Republican super-PAC) says the only way for the GOP to campaign in 2018 is on the huge giveaway that the party just gave to the top one percent.

"Every member of the Republican Party should be spending all of their [sic] time selling the tax plan," Bliss burbled. "Everything else is a waste of time and money."

Really? So what's an endangered House Republican who voted against it to do? Hope that the middle class is so in love with its $1.50-a-week raise that it looks the other way and votes GOP?

Or does a Republican House member — like Elise Stafanik, John Faso or Lee Zeldin, to name three from New York — not talk about the tax cut? If so, what should they talk about, exactly? The EPA Administrator who's trying to melt the polar ice caps? The Education Secretary who wants to destroy public schools? A State Department that's filled with empty desks while the Doomsday Clock ticks closer to midnight? A White House that wants to blow up the FBI? An Oval Office occupant who hires wife beaters and who's confessed on tape to assaulting women himself?

We despise these House Republicans who try to skate by on their alleged moderateness while they take marching orders from their odious Speaker. And there's so little that's positive for them to pivot to on the campaign trail this year that we're tempted to feel sorry for them. But we don't. We cats HISS.

Burying The John Kelly Lede

By Baxter

The media gave a total pass to John Kelly when he became White House Chief of Staff — first, because he was supposed to rein in the malevolent toddler who occupies the Oval Office, and second, because he's a retired four-star general with a son who was killed in Afghanistan.

John Kelly didn't deserve that pass. And we'd like the punditheads to wipe those gape-jawed expressions off their faces, because guess what? John Kelly is an awful person, and always has been.

Here's a quick list of why:

1. As DHS secretary and in his current role, he's proven himself to be no better than your garden-variety racist and hater — a hard-liner on immigration who says vile and untrue things (some just this week) about DREAMers and others who come to America for a better life.

2. He blamed the Civil War on a "lack of the ability to compromise." We can only assume that he means that the North should have compromised with the South on slavery. No, thanks.

3. He insulted a long-serving African-American member of Congress over Donald Trump's botched call to a soldier's widow, and then refused to apologize for it.

4. He helped place a minion in his old job at DHS who, just as vile and racist as Kelly is, recently had to submit to a well-deserved tongue-lashing by Senator Cory Booker.

5. Now, he's passionately defended a wife-beater and is lying about his involvement in keeping said wife-beater's access to classified materials without a security clearance.

Journalists are hot on Kelly's trail now, and we're glad. But that doesn't come anywhere close to making up for their credulous treatment of him before. We're sick of reporters and TV talking heads buying these phony narratives. We cats HISS.

C'est Ironique, N'est-ce Pas?

Par Mademoiselle Kubelik

Here's a trip down Memory Lane for you kittens out there: In America's dark past (okay, 15 years ago), we had a terrible President who invaded a country that hadn't attacked us. Like many nations around the world, France did not support this. Republicans went chauve-souris-merde.

Things got so dicey that our favorite French restaurant felt compelled to hang a huge American flag in its front window. Thankfully, the national madness faded — generally, around the time that everybody figured out the Iraq war was an embarrassing blunder and that France was right.

Why the fond reminiscing? Because the current occupant of the Oval Office — who makes that awful Iraq invader look good — has decided that the French are onto something when it comes to military parades. Emmanuel Macron had one, so now he wants one.

We advise "Wee Donald" to tread cautiously. Military parades are really more the hallmark of dictatorships, not democracies. North Korea, Russia, China and Nazi Germany come to mind.

You know, maybe people would stop comparing Trump to Hitler if he would stop acting like Hitler. We cats HISS.

Ohhh, Noooo... It's Olympics Time Again.

via GIPHY

By Zamboni

We cats will not be watching the Olympics. If you're a faithful reader, you know we have a long, proud history of hating the games. You should hate them, too. Here's why:

1. The IOC is one of the most corrupt, evil organizations ever to walk the earth. They grease each other's palms, give dictators a platform on which to preen themselves, make cities jump through stupid hoops to host, bankrupt the ones that are chosen, and refuse to cancel games in the wake of murders and other outrages. They make the Republican Party look decent and honorable.

2. The Olympics are in Korea. They eat dogs there. Okay, we cats don't like dogs much, but that still grosses us out.

3. Russian athletes are being allowed to compete even though Russia is supposed to be banned from the games. See #1.

4. NBC is covering the games again, which means more insipid athlete profiles, commercials that pose as "news," and endless, endless jingoism. But at least, no Matt Lauer.

5. That doctor in Michigan who abused Olympic gymnasts — which everyone seemed to know but nobody did anything about. We cats HISS.

Enemies At The Gaetz

By Sniffles

Is Matt Gaetz an overt racist, or just one of the dumbest guys ever to darken the halls of Congress?

In the news already for a wily Democrat's billboard against him, Gaetz is now under fire for inviting an avowed anti-Semite and white supremacist to the State of the Union. (And with a Holocaust denier about to get the Republican nomination for an Illinois House seat, we cats are sensing a GOP pattern here.)

Gaetz at first claimed he had no idea who Charles Johnson was. (Yeah, we get it — you totally invite people to the SOTU without knowing them.) Now he's claiming "poor vetting" and vowing not to do it again.

We hope that someone in the media has already put in a FOIA request for any and all correspondence between Gaetz and Johnson about the speech. It should make for interesting reading. We cats HISS.

What? No Executive Order To Reverse The Score Of The Game?

The Tweet He Can't Delete

By Baxter

Paul Ryan, whose heart is filled with unwashed socks and whose soul is filled with gunk, has yet to learn an important fact: Nothing goes away on the Internet.

So his hapless attempt to scrub this silly tweet failed. But reading it, you can see why he tried.

Not only is it utterly ridiculous to tout a $1.50 weekly raise (yeah, that'll help a lot when this woman loses her healthcare coverage), but Costco is a Democratic company headquartered in the highly Democratic state of Washington. So this tweet just served a whole bunch of missions — none of which we think are dear to the Speaker of the House's heart.

Well, never mind. Whatever 22-year-old Ryan staffer made the mistake of tweeting this "boast" from the Speaker just raised a ton of money for the Iron Stache, Randy Bryce. But surely he/she will soon land a job at the Make America Great Again Political Action Committee, yes? We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.

Six More Weeks Of Winter? Okay By Us.

We cats love the change of seasons and are happily preparing for more snow in Upstate New York this weekend. We don't have to drive anywhere, so what's not to love? PURRS all around.

Devin's "Bombshell" Memo ... Bombs

By Miss Kubelik

"It is telling that Chairman Nunes put out this memo without bothering to read the underlying materials, and that he ordered changes to the document without informing his own committee members. It is a terrible lapse in leadership that Speaker Ryan failed to intervene and prevent the abuse of classified materials in this way.

"It is tragic, if all too predictable, that this President would allow the release of the memo despite FBI and DOJ’s expressions of 'grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the [Republicans’] memo’s accuracy.' But most destructive of all may be the announcement by Chairman Nunes that he has placed the FBI and DOJ under investigation, impugning and impairing the work of the dedicated professionals trying to keep our country safe."

—Adam Schiff, D-CA, Ranking Member, 

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, February 2, 2018

"The Tories Said WHAT?"

By Zamboni

If you think right wingers in America are nuts, check out the Conservatives in the Canadian Senate, who think that changing one word in the lyrics to the national anthem is "trampling upon democracy."

The O Canada line in question is "true patriot love / in all thy sons command," and dates to 1914. Yep, more than 100 years ago, right before women even got the right to vote. More recently, "in all of us command" was proposed, and yesterday, after multiple readings, the Senate finally approved it.

Over the objections of the Tories, who saw Armageddon approaching.

What the hell is the matter with these people? Conservatives are crying foul on the Liberals' parliamentary tactics, but we sense a bigger grievance at work. So we have to ask: Why do right wingers, in both Canada and the US, find the concept of "us" so alarming? We're not sure we want to know the answer. We cats HISS.