Me fail English? That’s unpossible!

And this was only like the 3rd worst thing to happen to O’Brien that day

Checkmate.

That train left the station a loooooong time ago, Johnny boy

I think the judge gives him an extremely stern last-chance warning tomorrow and if he does it again, he gets cited for contempt. Doesn’t have to be much, chuck him in a private cell in the Manhattan Detention Center for 1 night with Secret Service outside the door, but it seriously hurts the rule of law to have him able to get away with this sort of crap with no consequences.

The other side of the argument is that McCarthy is the GOP’s greatest fundraiser, and getting rid of him would help Democrats take back the House. No replacement for McCarthy would have the same set of relationships and the donor network and political operation.

This is, to me, the winning argument - it hurts them politically, both by taking away their best fundraiser and by replacing him with somebody who’s likely to be even more extreme and so do even more dumb things the Democrats can campaign against. A McCarthy replacement is even likely to shut down the government in 45 days than McCarthy is, and for Democrats that’s probably a good thing - Republicans screwing up air travel right before Thanksgiving and taking away government employees’ paychecks right before Christmas.

Is it good for the country, maybe not, but Republicans losing the House in 2024 will do several orders of magnitude more good for the country than whatever harm might be done by that short-term idiocy.

41 percent of Democrats have an at least somewhat favorable view of Kennedy

Yeah, no. I’d guess that only a single-digit % of Democrats - mostly Extremely Online ones - have any idea who he is; this is a survey where they pressed for lukewarm responses from mostly-uninformed voters and then pretended that it actually reflected public opinion in a meaningful way.

I almost planned a trip to DC with the kids for Columbus Day, glad I didn’t.

(probably not a good idea to plan to fly anywhere in October, actually - possibly November too)

Single-issue anti-vaxxer voters might trust him more than they trust Trump. (and none of them were going to vote for Biden anyway, so probably at worst a wash for Biden)

Vonnegut wasn’t a Too Good For This recluse like Pynchon or Salinger or whoever, and the content of his books made him fairly well insulated against charges of being a sellout; they probably offered him a bunch of money and he shrugged and said sure.

The tourist-y parts of it are pretty much all newly rebuilt anyway; there’s not much of the original wall left at Mutianyu or Simatai or wherever.

They very well might, but Biden has already had 3 years of appointing judges, and he’s already gotten probably the only Supreme Court appointment he’s going to get for this term. Refusing to let them replace Feinstein now gains them little - maybe a couple of extra unfilled district court slots - while if a Republican wins the White House and then Grassley dies in 2025/2026, the consequences for Republican judicial confirmations could be catastrophic.

Placeholder Senate seat isn’t so bad, you still get to be a Senator even if only for a little while.

They only said they’d do that if she took a leave of absence. The next 4 oldest Senators are Grassley (90) - who’s on Judiciary, Bernie (82), McConnell (81), and Risch (80 - Republican from Idaho); if they start playing the “no committee replacements for dead senators” game it’s likely to come back and bite them in the ass very quickly.

Here’s a video of her arguing with children about climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu-VzZ45MwI

Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don’t forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.

Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.

Ginsburg was worse; Feinstein at least was doing this in a situation where if she did keel over, a Democratic governor would replace her with somebody whose politics were broadly similar to her own, but Ginsburg knew perfectly well that her replacement might undo everything she accomplished and she refused to retire despite that.

I feel bad that she spent her final few years Weekend At Bernie’s-ing for her staff instead of getting to retire + relax a bit.

I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.

(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)

Connecticut is especially dicey because they have a 1:4 ratio right up to age 3; if you have 2 kids under 3, like one of the mothers in this article, you’re effectively paying 1/2 of a full-time employee’s salary plus your share of all of the other costs (rent, utilities, insurance, supplies, administration) associated with running a daycare.

Childcare is an absurdly labor-intensive business and I don’t know how to make it work for non-wealthy people without massive subsidies.