Talking Points For Pundits — As Clear As Black And White

By Zamboni

Last week was so momentous and satisfying that we cats are still doing our happy dance and feeling like we've barely recovered. But even though we're quaffing champagne and throwing confetti and sucking up every ounce of news coverage we can, we're nevertheless aware of what the pundits aren't yet saying. Here are a few points that we'd just like to get on the record.

Everybody is agog over President Obama's singing during that remarkable eulogy for Clemenza Pinkney on Friday, and we cats concur. But although the video has gone viral, is anyone focusing on the real eloquence of his sermon? ("Sermon" because, well, that's what it was. Thank you, Reverend President.) We cats were so impressed when Obama tied the immortal line "I was blind, but now I see" to white America's sudden understanding of how black Americans feel about the Confederate flag. Sheer, sheer eloquence — and a reminder that preaching can be uplifting when it's done by someone with intelligence and perspective.

As for the little prick who killed all those warm and welcoming people on June 17, has anyone mentioned when his trial(s) will be? It looks like he'll be tried by South Carolina for murder and probably also by the federal government for a hate crime to end all hate crimes. So most likely he'll be back in court first in October, and then in February 2016 — right in the middle of Presidential primary season. Heck, the South Carolina primary is February 20! The Republican Party can't be looking forward to that.

As for the so-called backlash against the removal of the Confederate flag, we cats say, piffle. Who's "renouncing history"? Not us. (In fact, we wish Americans understood more of their history. Can PBS rerun Ken Burns's "Civil War" any time soon?) That battle-flag rag belongs in a museum, or maybe in a Confederate cemetery, but nowhere else — especially on public lands. We cats applaud the gutsy woman who scaled the flagpole in Charleston and ripped the damn thing down from the state capitol grounds. It's a symbol not only of race hatred but of an armed insurrection against the United States — and we're surprised that all those faux patriots who defend it (and the opinion leaders who wring their hands over "renouncing history") don't understand that.

So that's it for the moment, although we're sure that more pointers will occur to us as the days go by (and the champagne wears off). Meanwhile, let's just say that we hope Pundit World will get more thoughtful about a lot of this stuff. They should stop bouncing between left-right and thinking that they do their jobs if they merely present both sides, and maybe inject a little nuance into their coverage instead. For inspiration, we suggest that they read, and reread, Obama's Pinkney eulogy. And we PURR.

Tonight, Our Union Is A Little More Purr-fect

An astonishing day. There's too much to cover in one or even 10 blog posts.

So we'll take a catnap and come back to it all, we promise. Because aside from that great Supreme Court decision today, we also had a Presidential performance extraordinaire. And that was after his remarks this morning in the Rose Garden.

Good night for now — and may we wake up tomorrow still striving to embody the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion... and all that other stuff. We cats PURR.

Even MORE Evidence For RBG's Good Mood

By Baxter

On the day that the Supreme Court affirms gay marriage nationwide, it feels good to quote a queen.

No, seriously. We're talking about England's late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Her most magic moment may have come during the Second World War, when Buckingham Palace, previously unscathed, was blitzed. "I'm glad we've been bombed," she said, surveying the damage. "Now I feel I can look the East End in the face."

Amen to that, Queenie. When we cross the border into Canada this weekend, we'll be happy that, for the first time as Americans, we can truly look that tolerant, diverse, marriage-equality-affirming country in the face. We cats PURR and PURR and PURR.

Obamacare: Who's Smiling, Who's Not

By Sniffles

Surely the millions of Americans (some leukemia-ridden) who would have lost their Obamacare coverage if today's Supreme Court decision had gone the other way must be raising a glass tonight. And whew, we don't blame them. What a relief it must be to know that the GOP wasn't able to snatch their healthcare away!

Then just for fun, we started to wonder who else must be celebrating. Which led us to think about who wasn't. Here's who we came up with, on both sides.

Everyone knows how Antonin Scalia feels. He made it abundantly clear with all that bile and colorful language he spouted from the bench. ("Jiggery-pokery"? What century is he from?) But as long as we're on the subject of vocabulary, we'd like to say that it's highly amusing that the name "Scalia" is so close to the word "sclerotic." (As Casey Stengel would say, you could look it up.)

And of course our teabaggy friends over at Free Republic are definitely not putting on a happy face. In fact, they've been raging all day — not knowing whether to impeach John Roberts or move to Costa Rica first. But if there's a heaven, and if Ted Kennedy is there, he's one grin-bearing angel right now. (Would President Obama have pushed so hard for healthcare reform early in his first term if Kennedy had not died when he did? We wonder.)

We cats have heard all day that, behind the scenes, the Republicans are relieved that they don't have to deal with the fallout of an adverse SCOTUS ruling. Horrors — they might have had to come up with an alternative! But balancing that out, we think, is the big headache they're going to have in the 2016 clown car race. The words "litmus test" come to mind. (And just imagine how rigid that litmus test will be if the Supremes uphold marriage equality nationwide!)

Finally, of course, we cats are thrilled. Sure, it might have been fun to watch Paul Ryan and his fellow House goofballs try to cobble together an ACA replacement by the middle of next week. But thanks, we'll take today's King v. Burwell decision over that any day. Many Americans will sleep easier tonight, thanks to the Supreme Court, and that makes us PURR.

First Evidence For RBG's Happy Mood

"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them."

—Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.

We'd Like To See Fewer (Not Less) Republicans Like This

By Miss Kubelik

Sigh. Once again, we cats are trying to decide what to be more outraged about: Some idiotic South Carolina Republican making crass remarks about a national tragedy, or using bad grammar doing it.

The jackass in question, State Representative "William Chumley," is all bent out of shape that the nine Mother Emanuel shooting victims in Charleston didn't pack heat, or at least resist. We guess. What else could he mean when he burbles the unbelievably insensitive statement that his fellow state legislator, Clementa Pinkney, and the eight others "waited their turn to be shot"?

How does "Chumley" know? Was he there? Does he have hard evidence on how fast the white terrorist fired and reloaded? Is it possible that the white terrorist fired first shots to disable everyone, and then finished them off while they lay helpless or maybe already dead? Has "Chumley" spoken to the one eyewitness the white terrorist allowed to live? Is "Chumley" a cretin and a fool?

Yep to that last one.

And here's the icing on "Chumley's" very unappetizing cake: If the victims had had guns or fought back, he said, "We'd have less funerals than we're having."

When a Republican like "Chumley" says incredibly stupid things to disparage the dead and wound their already suffering survivors, we cats want to SNARL and claw his face off. But when he mangles the English language at the same time, we simply have to echo this uneducated South Carolina lowlife and ask: Why doesn't somebody just do something?

UPDATE: Oy, here's another baddie from a silly Republican flag defender in Topeka, Kansas: The head of the state division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, he said, "should be knocking heads together instead of just laying [sic] down and rolling over." FAIL!

Flag Facts

By Zamboni

We cats love the province of Quebec. We love Montreal and Quebec City, adore Quebec wine and cheese, and wish we spoke the beautiful French language better. But we don't fly the Quebec flag, even for fun.

Why? Because people might think we are separatists. Which we are not.

See, that's the thing about symbols. They can carry meaning and messages that are not only powerful, but perhaps completely different than their creators intended. Quebec's provincial flag is a pretty one. But because the Parti Quebecois and the folks who want to split from Canada wave it for a cause we don't support, we avoid it.

We bring this up as a helpful illustration to America's current national discussion of the Confederate battle flag. Of course, there's one crucial difference: The designers of the Confederate flag clearly never meant their banner to be anything but a symbol of the dissolution of the Union. Later, it was seized upon by Southerners vehemently opposed to civil rights. (We've never seen Quebeckers flaunting the fleur-de-lis as they burn crosses, bomb churches, and shoot or string up innocent black people.)

We cats just want to go on the record that both notions — slavery, and separation from the American union our founders worked so hard to craft — are repugnant. And we HISS at anyone who would wear, bear or defend a flag that, like it or not, symbolizes either one.

Lest We Furr-get: The GOP And The Racists

By Baxter

One of the most heartening developments in the wake of the awful, awful event in Charleston last week is that the business community has seen the light on the whole Confederate flag thing.

Sears, eBay and Walmart shoppers looking for Stars and Bars paraphernalia will have to go elsewhere now. eBay will stop selling it, too. And it appears that the driving force behind Nikki Haley's call for the flag's dismantling in South Carolina was chamber of commerce types who — envisioning millions, maybe billions, of dollars in sales and corporate relocations slipping through the Palmetto State's fingers — frantically burned up the phone lines to both her and Lady Lindsey Graham.

It's a perfect microcosm of the Republican Party's ongoing dilemma: How to satisfy the more pragmatic, let's-just-make-a-buck businesspeople who traditionally support the GOP but at the same time not piss off the ferociously emotional right-wing ideologues who are forever looking for an excuse to leave it. All it takes is one glance at the furious comments on sites like Free Republic to know that this current incarnation of the Republican conundrum isn't going very well.

And we cats say: May it haunt them forever. After all, the racists and the bigots and the lynching defenders have found a comfortable home inside the GOP ever since Richard Nixon launched the Republicans' Southern Strategy in 1968 and '72. That's because the Democratic Party, led by Texan Lyndon Johnson, recognized that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement were on the right side of history, and were willing to enact legislation that brutally punished Democrats at the polls for generations. (John F. Kennedy didn't live to see it happen, but that's what we cats call a profile in courage.)

Meanwhile, Republicans have coddled and courted racists, excused them, reframed their roles, and have even spoken at their events — all while trying to maintain the fiction that GOP is somehow acceptable to soccer moms and other mainstream voters. It has made us ill for years, and we cats are thrilled that perhaps at last the charade is over.

Here is the God's honest truth about the Confederacy and its silly emblems. We can't say it any better, so we'll just quote Sally Jenkins in today's Washington Post. (And maybe not drive on Jeff Davis Highway for awhile.) We cats PURR.

"The Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime. The Confederacy was treason in defense of a still deeper crime against humanity: slavery. If weaklings find racial hatred to be a romantic expression of American strength and purity, make no mistake that it begins by unwinding a red thread from that flag."

Note To Nikki: Cancel Those Vice-Presidential Aspirations

By Sniffles

Well! Now that Nikki Haley and her fellow Republicans are caving left and right on the Confederate flag (which gives us HUGE Cheshire cat smiles), a new item has vaulted to the top of our to-do list: Get Terry McAuliffe to put the kibosh on Virginia's CSA specialty plates.

(Not that we see a lot of them around here. Our theory is that they've been supplanted by Virginia's Gadsden flag plates, which came on line in 2012 or so. Those, we see a lot of. Funny how cars with those plates always seem to have a fat white guy behind the wheel.)

But we digress — which we don't mean to do, because as soon as we could, we raced to the paranoid teabaggy corner of the Internet known as Free Republic to see what they were saying about Governor Haley's 180-degree spin on the battle flag of the Old South. Funfunfun, because boy, are they mad! We cats will step back now and let the Freepers do the rest:

"Nikki, you are dead to me. RINO."

"She apparently likes to sleep around."

"I hope she took a shower after hugging Clyburn."

"All white men must die. That’s the goal."

"This may the worst week for Western civilization in a while. We may see both the criminalization of the Confederate flag and Christianity this week."

"Governor Nimrata Randhawa... the adulteress slut."

"Women in leadership. Hmmmm..."

"She sure ain’t no southern belle."

"The time has come for Nikki H. to be voted out of office. She has no roots to South Carolina and obviously respect for or interest in our history."

"Half the people who vehemently oppose the display of the Confederate flag(s) don’t even know who their daddy was was [sic], much less who the [sic] great grandfathers [sic] or great grandfathers [sic] were or what they did or what they fought for. Those of us who know should, and will, remember."

(Meow! Why do we think this last little Freeper was already deep into the moonshine when he posted? We cats PURR.)

Casey Back At The Bat

By Miss Kubelik

Looks like a big abortion case will go back before the Supreme Court for the first time since Planned Parenthood v. Casey. This is thanks to foaming-at-the-mouth Republican legislators in Texas, who are doing everything in their power to keep a Constitutional right literally out of the reach of women by forcing most of the clinics in the vast Lone Star State to close.

How are they accomplishing this? By a dastardly tactic that Ken "My Fetus Is Better Than Your Born Woman" Cuccinelli tried to do here in Virginia — but which, thank goodness, Governor McAuliffe and other statewide Democrats are rolling back: enacting regulations that require abortion clinics to be as elaborately outfitted as hospitals.

"We're doing this for women's safety! We're doing this for women's health!" they bleat.

We cats say, piffle.

If the Republicans are so worried about women's health and safety, that concern would surely show up in their overall legislative record, right? But somehow, outside of abortion, which they hatehatehate, we're not seeing any GOP interest in or concern for women's welfare.

For example, where's the Republican-backed legislation for:

• Maternal and infant health clinics for underserved populations?
• Maternal nutrition programs for the poor?
• Tuition forgiveness, scholarship, residency and fellowship programs to encourage OB/GYNs or ARNPs to practice in poor, rural areas?
• Breast cancer screening programs?
• Subsidized access to birth control?
• Sensible, science-based programs on sex ed and birth control in middle schools and high schools?
• Support for FMLA? For equal pay?

And on and on... you get the idea.

So, mendacious members of the not-so-Grand Old Party, we cats call you out on this. And we dump a thousand dirty litter boxes in your underwear drawers. And, of course, HISS.