Will Democracy Survive? Will Grammar?

A quick note for our friends on cable TV news: Clothing is hung. People — even Mike Pence — are hanged. Unless, of course, the Trump insurrectionists fail, and he escapes with his life. We cats HISS.

Bad Luck

By Miss Kubelik

By our reckoning, Joe Biden had a pretty good political week. The media won't say so, because they're hell-bent on gloom and doom for the Democrats (to prove that they're not "liberal"). But Gavin Newsom resoundingly defeated the California recall, which paved the way for an effective strategy for 2022, the world learned (once again) just how bonkers Donald Trump is, and now, the GOP's leading candidate for Governor of New York says he has leukemia.

Maybe it'll make a difference, maybe it won't. Still and all, it's not a headline you want to see if you're a Republican.

As if that weren't enough, the "Justice for J6" rally in Washington today was a total bust.

Now, you might argue that Republicans like Kevin McCarthy are relieved. None of their treasonous firebrands deigned to attend, and only a few hundred people showed up (and the Capitol survived unscathed). But it just goes to show you that these folks are way, way outside the mainstream. The fact that the GOP pretends to clutch them to their bosoms is, in the end, irrelevant.

How long will the Republican Party be able to get by without this contradiction ripping it apart? We don't know, but we hope that next year's midterms will sound the death knell for them. If California was any indication, all Democrats have to do is tie every single member of the GOP to Donald Trump. Benedict Donald will do the rest. That will make us cats PURR.

Alberta Apocalypse

By Zamboni

The polls in the Canadian federal election are neck-and-neck between the Liberals and the Tories, so tight that even the US has noticed. (The True North isn't on American journalists' radar screens very much.) But something happened last night that may shake the race up a bit.

Alberta, a mess of a province that we've blogged about before, declared a public health emergency. COVID-19 is so out of control there — thanks to some very DeSantis-y responses to the pandemic — that Tory Premier Jason Kenney was forced to reimpose lockdown-like restrictions.

Proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to go to a restaurant. No more than 50 people at weddings and funerals. Social distancing at outdoor events. Mandatory work-from-home. But muh freedom!

All this and more, because Kenney and his Conservative provincial government have tried to out-Trump Trump in pandemic mismanagement. They lifted restrictions too early in the summer and opposed vaccine passports, and now, Albertans are paying the price. "I've never seen a government this incompetent," Mayor Naheed Nenshi of Calgary said.

You'll be interested to know that in the past, federal Tory leader Erin O'Toole has lavishly praised Kenney's COVID approach. Today, though, he ducked questions from reporters and refused to even mention Kenney's name. (Until now, they were political besties.)

Note to Canadians: If you think Justin Trudeau and the Liberals have done a good job fighting the coronavirus pandemic, please turn out on Monday to give them your support. But if you're thinking of voting Conservative and events in Alberta haven't convinced you otherwise — well, enjoy your lockdown. We cats HISS.

(IMAGE: @JasonKDiary)

If The Book "Peril" Had Pictures

 

(IMAGE: Mike Luckovich, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Sorry, Not Sorry, Sorry Again

By Baxter

Do you feel overwhelmed by the recent wave of articles about anti-vaxxers who have died from COVID? It's hard not to wonder if you keep reading the same report over and over. Nope! A lot of Trumpy idiots have campaigned against coronavirus shots, masks and vaccine passports — and a lot of them are dead.

This website, in fact, collects their stories. Take a look if you want the death details of such right-wing fools like Bob Enyart, Marc Bernier, and, especially, QAnon nutcase Veronica Wolski. Ah, Veronica Wolski! Social media is full of videos of her brazenly accosting innocent mask wearers in retail stores, juxtaposed beside a horrifying photo of her in the hospital just before COVID killed her. Team Q is very upset that the hospital did the right thing and refused to give her ivermectin, which would have caused her to check out sooner.

All in all, an incredibly satisfying web browsing experience — if you're hopeful that with all these conspiracy theorists committing avoidable suicide, the national IQ will rise a few points. But it does get a bit overwhelming. How is it possible that among the Trump fanatics and Q-y nuts, you find high school science teachers, expectant parents and even healthcare providers in the mix? In what unique way has America failed in order to produce people like that? It's depressing. We cats HISS.

She Wears It Well

There are some really wild outfits at the Met Gala tonight, but we like this one best. Oh, and it's pretty groovy that "Jared" and "Ivanka" are apparently nowhere to be seen. We cats PURR.

Getting Very Trumpy North Of The Border

By Sniffles

We cats have enough on our plates without adding Canada's federal election to the list: the California recall tomorrow, Republican perfidy, George W. Bush suddenly seeming sensitive and reasonable. But goodness gracious, it seems like every time we check in on the news from the north, all we see are people behaving badly.

They're throwing gravel at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a campaign stop. Defacing Liberal yard signs. Staging silly rallies with vulgar banners (yes, because their vocabulary is limited, they include the F word). Worst of all, they're demonstrating against COVID vaccines outside hospitals, and harassing healthcare providers as they arrive for work. And you guessed it: They're mostly white males.

There's absolutely no way that these idiots represent the majority of Canadians. It's just that, like MAGAts in the United States, the noise they make is disproportionate to their numbers. And it doesn't help that the lazy media love to cover their antics.

As one very smart Montreal columnist has speculated: "I suspect that at least half the males who hate Justin Trudeau do so because he's all the things they are not: handsome, smart, capable, rational." Amen to that. Although we're still hoping that no matter what happens September 20, Justin's beard comes back. That would make us PURR.

What We Choose To See

By Hubie and Bertie

A few of our nine lives ago, on 9/11, we cats were living in Shaker Heights, Ohio. We remember that on September 12 — or maybe it was the next day — The Cleveland Plain Dealer published this shot by photojournalist Richard Drew. At the time, as shocking as it was, we thought that it was the most important picture of the entire event. The newspaper, of course, got a lot of heat for it.

(Drew was no stranger to controversy, since he was standing right behind Robert Kennedy when Kennedy was shot in 1968. He got Kennedy's blood splattered on him, and continued taking photos even when Ethel Kennedy begged him to stop. "He has never not taken a picture," they say.)

The Falling Man has never been positively identified. Spike Lee explores the question in this weekend's installment of his documentary on 9/11 and the COVID pandemic, and leaves it elegantly undetermined. But it remains a conflicted topic of the World Trade Center attacks: How many people chose to jump rather than burn (the media disagree), and why is it still so taboo to discuss, speculate about, and look at?

If video and social media had been around during the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, we would have had the same debate, except maybe more so. Nearly all the jumpers in that disaster were women, since the Triangle employees were overwhelmingly female. There are pictures of their bodies laid out in the morgue after the event, but nobody took a photo of a jumping shirtwaist girl. Similarly, all the photos and videos we've seen of people falling from the Twin Towers are men.

Our sensibilities are weird and out of sync. We're eager to invade countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 (which is why we can't truly appreciate George W. Bush's speech from yesterday, because, you know, Iraq), and we excuse those that did because we buy oil from them. But we can't steel ourselves to look at photos of people falling 100 stories to their deaths? We cats will never understand it. And we HISS.

Lest We Furr-get: 20 Years On

 

They say Benedict Donald had the chance to join the memorial service at Ground Zero yesterday but declined. That's okay — we cats see four Presidents here anyway. More later.

She's Left Home

The harpist on "She's Leaving Home" by the Beatles has died. We cats believe in saluting female artists and artists of color, so let's take a moment to recognize Sheila Bromberg. We've all heard her. We cats PURR.