TGIF: Justice for Bear 402

I’m back! Nellie promised that I’d never have to do this again but it’s one of those Jewish holidays where they aren’t allowed to blog (it’s in the Torah), so she scrolled through her phone looking for goys and somehow I was the first. Shana Tova! And TGIF.

→ Hurricane Helene ravages the Southeast: Residents from Florida up through Virginia are digging out from the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, a 350-mile-wide storm that left millions of people without water or power and killed more than 200. Nearly a week after Helene hit, hundreds are still unaccounted for and the death count is rising daily. 

The scale of the storm and its destruction are truly biblical: Creeks and rivers that are normally just a trickle this time of year grew to twice the size of Niagara. Roads and neighborhoods became lakes. Entire towns are now in ruins. Schools and businesses are closed indefinitely, almost no one has clean drinking water, and hundreds of roads are impassable. Those who can find enough gas to get out are fleeing, unsure when or if they’ll ever go home again. 

While most of the attention has focused on Asheville, an artsy, crafty city that runs on craft beer and kombucha, the devastation goes well beyond the urban areas. The Blue Ridge Mountains are a patchwork of roads winding deeply into isolated valleys and ridges, and many of those areas are now completely cut off from the rest of the world as residents wait for rescue that may never come, or try to survive on their own. By now, the recovery effort is well underway: FEMA is on the ground, as is the National Guard, and crews from all over the country are volunteering to dig people out. But it’s going to take not months but years for this little slice of Appalachia to come back from the storm. Some places probably won’t. 

On a personal note, I grew up in western North Carolina, most of my family lives there, and I live there part-time myself. While I’m extremely lucky not to be there right now, all of us who know and love that area are deeply worried for family and friends and grieving for our homeland. The horror stories are endless and will certainly mount in the coming weeks as phone service is restored and more information comes out. The one thing that’s given me heart these past days is that those mountains are as resilient as the people who live in them. We’ve heard this so much this week it’s become pat, but it’s also true: Mountain people are survivors. Of course, those mountains have as many transplants as natives these days as the area’s natural beauty has beckoned waves of newcomers—many of whom thought of Asheville as a haven from climate extremes—but I suspect that mountain spirit has spread to the newcomers too. And if not, hey, they can always go back to California and Florida. Where it’s safer. (If you want to donate or volunteer, there are resources for western North Carolina, east Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, and GoFundMe is sending out grants.) 

Meanwhile, FEMA lacks sufficient funding to handle the remainder of the hurricane season, which lasts until December, and President Biden has hinted that lawmakers may be recalled to Washington to secure additional disaster relief funding. A lot of people on the right are suggesting that FEMA funds get reallocated from aid to Ukraine, a lot of people on the left are suggesting we take it from aid to Israel, but I don’t want to get political at times like these so I think we should take it from the least worthy cause of all: school lunches for underprivileged kids. 

→ Veep debate is nothing like the TV show: On Tuesday, vice presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz faced off for their first and only debate. As a committed libtard, I hate to admit it, but J.D. clearly won and I’m not just saying that because he (kill me) has pretty eyes (need his eyeliner rec). He knows how to command the camera while Tim Walz looks as if Uga the bulldog got busted humping a stuffie. What Vance has really mastered is the art of the pivot. When asked about Donald Trump’s repeated contention that climate change is a hoax, did Vance admit that, yes, his boss has in fact said that? No! Of course not. He pivoted, blaming Democrats for not doing more to increase manufacturing and energy production in the U.S. Does it make sense? Not really! Climate policy is about much more than manufacturing solar panels, and actually believing that climate change is real is a good starting point to, you know, do something about it. That said, Vance did at least mention nuclear energy, and because I came of age in the Dubya era, it’s always a pleasant surprise when a Republican politician knows how to pronounce it. 

Vance’s finest moment came toward the end, when he was asked about his own past criticism of Trump, who he has described as an “idiot” and “Hitler.” I was curious how he’d manage to handle this one, but he batted the claim away and immediately blamed the media. “I’ve always been extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump,” Vance said on Tuesday night. “I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record.” You could almost hear Trump’s inner monologue from his fourth TV room at Mar-a-Lago. Good boy. Good J.D. You got ’em. 

And yet, even though Vance is the better debater, it’s not because he’s a better person. Sure, Walz may have lied about being in Tiananmen Square, but who hasn’t told a story to impress, say, a new date. . . or the entire nation? I once told a new date that I’m a Gemini when I’m actually a Taurus. Things happen! What matters here is policy, and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have one (they do have one, right?). 

Probably the lowest point for the Dems was when Tim Walz, who has repeatedly shown himself to be constitutionally illiterate, dropped the old you-can’t-yell-“fire”-in-a-crowded-theater canard in response to J.D. Vance’s (correct) opinion that both Democrats and Republicans should oppose censorship. “That’s the Supreme Court test,” said Walz. The thing is, it’s not the test and you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater. The Supreme Court has never heard a case about yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. The quote itself is a paraphrase from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion in a 1919 case, and that case was effectively overturned in 1969. So you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater. What you can’t do is talk on your cell phone. 

Overall, the debate was largely civil, somewhat substantive, and frankly, kind of dull. Maybe I’ve just been living in Trump’s America for too long but can we at least get a couch joke around here? Some name-calling? Or, even better, they could save us time by acting like real debaters and spreading, which is debater slang for speed talking (they’re a cool crowd). 

→ Trump pens boring op-ed in Newsweek: Okay, there’s no way that Trump himself wrote this thing because RANDOM WORDS were not PRINTED in ALL CAPS. But either a human being or mildly sophisticated AI did publish an op-ed under his name in Newsweek, and it was mostly a repetition of the economically illiterate tripe he’s been pushing for years about how tariffs on foreign goods will somehow benefit American citizens. Trump is a moron (sorry, comments section, it’s just true), but you’d think even he would be able to understand that taxes on goods get passed on to the consumer. But don’t take my word for it (again, libtard). Take Grover Norquist’s. Or Chuck Grassley’s. Or the Tax Foundation’s. Or the Cato Institute’s. Or Goldman Sachs’. These are not poor people or Marxists or socialists in disguise. These are free-market capitalists who love money, want the economy to grow, and who realize what Trump somehow does not: Tariffs are not taxes on foreign countries. They are taxes on the American public. That’s you, commenters. Actually, when you put it like that, tariffs don’t sound so bad.

→ Court rules couple can’t sue Uber after shitty driver nearly kills them: A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that Georgia and John McGinty, a couple who were injured after their Uber driver ran a red light and T-boned another vehicle, cannot sue the company in court and must resolve their dispute through arbitration. Why? Because it’s in the Uber terms of service that no one ever reads. The couple argued that they never signed the terms of service and that their minor daughter had accepted the TOS when ordering food through Uber Eats. The court, however, ruled that Uber’s arbitration clause is valid and the agreement is binding. Let this be a lesson to us all: Always, always, always read the terms of service. Just kidding. I’d rather walk. 

→ Doug the Dog: The Daily Mail reports that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff has been accused of assaulting an ex-girlfriend. The unnamed ex declined to comment, but three of her friends reportedly confirmed the story, claiming that she told them of the alleged assault years ago. They say the incident took place during the 2012 Cannes Film Festival in France, when Emhoff accused his then-girlfriend of flirting with a valet and then slapped her so hard she literally spun around. Emhoff has yet to comment on the allegations, but in August he did admit that he cheated on his ex-wife and the mother of his children with the nanny, which is a bit at odds with his persona as chief “wife guy” and supporter of women. Of course, without eyewitnesses, it would be impossible to know exactly if this happened, but in the words of Kamala Harris, we here at TGIF world headquarters #BelieveSurvivors. No word yet if her husband’s (alleged) survivor counts.