"I'm so glad you're freed," Sen. Jeff Merkley told the pair of rescue felines.



Two lawmakers are the cat's meow on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D.-Ore, and Rep. Brian Mast, R.-Fla., who were instrumental in ending the Department of Agriculture's so-called "kitten slaughterhouse," were visited on Thursday by two cats who were spared when the government program was shut down earlier this year.

"I’m so glad you're freed," Merkley said in his Senate office while holding survivor Delilah, who was brought to the Capitol along with another cat named Petite by the organization White Coat Waste Project.

The group is a non-profit that combats wasteful government spending on animal testing, and issued a report earlier this year showing U.S Department of Agriculture's lab in Maryland had been performing gruesome and fatal testing on cats.

Merkley told NBC News that he'd been unaware of the USDA's decades-old program until advocates presented the information to him.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/cats-saved-gov-t-kitten-slaughterhouse-visit-capitol-purr-thank-n1034811

Ever notice that the trolls who call you "cuck" are the ones who want to let Russia come in & screw America while they silently watch in the corner?
#MoscowMitch

https://twitter.com/JohnFugelsang/status/1154745654138331137

McConnell objects to a Democratic effort to move forward on election security legislation, calling it a “highly partisan” move and “not a serious” effort - adding that it comes from same Dems pushing “conspiracy theory” on Trump and Russia

https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1154419365326049282

Schumer calls for Senate to pass election security bill

McConnell objects: "Partisan legislation from the Democratic House of Representatives"

See you same time next week

https://twitter.com/burgessev/status/1154418799195643904

...

I worry that we — the media, voters, Congress — are dangerously unserious when it comes to preservation of our democracy. To spend hours of airtime and write hundreds of print and online reports pontificating about the “optics” of Mueller’s performance — when he confirmed that President Trump accepted help from a hostile foreign power and lied about it, that he lied when he claimed exoneration, that he was not completely truthful in written answers, that he could be prosecuted after leaving office and that he misled Americans by calling the investigation a hoax — tells me that we have become untrustworthy guardians of democracy.

The “failure” is not of a prosecutor who found the facts but might be ill equipped to make the political case, but instead, of a country that won’t read his report and a media obsessed with scoring contests rather than focusing on the damning facts at issue.

...

Trump reads from the same hymnal of disinformation and recites the same slander of democratic institutions that 20th-century totalitarians deployed, yet too many in the media call him the “winner” because Mueller did not pass their ridiculous tests (e.g. add new information, persuade Republicans).

Trump’s authoritarian liturgy, like that of many 20th-century despots, also co-opts religion, abandons universal liberal values including a free press, substitutes corporate cronyism for democracy and excludes from the body politic those who disagree with the government. Given his druthers, this president would exile critics just as dying colonial regimes would send off dissidents without hope of physical return.