I don’t believe in hell, but if I did Reagan would be enjoying a golden shower there for the rest of eternity.

Jonah Hill. Or Josh Gad. Or Daniel Day-Lewis comes out of retirement and acts the fuck out of a fat 30-year-old man-child crypto scammer.

xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words

Being incredibly guilty and having a jury that’s going to have to come back next week if they don’t finish by 8pm is a dangerous mix.

Me fail English? That’s unpossible!

Not really, no - there’s not really any scenario where this ends up with a Speaker who’s significantly to the right of McCarthy, and in fact it seems likely that whoever does come in next will have much less reason to compromise with the far right, because it’s clear after this experience that they’re unreliable partners; better to act maybe 20% more polite to Democrats than McCarthy did and get them to provide the necessary abstentions to defeat a future Motion To Vacate (or the necessary votes to take away the ability for random members to make those motions).

Second worst McCarthy in the history of Congress

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.

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)

Kissinger is outside the frame, scowling at the scoreboard as the Grim Reaper’s total goes up by 1.

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)