Congratulations to South Carolina on being the first state to elect two gay Senators.

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

This… doesn’t seem like it would work - “Senator blahdeblah voted for 300 military promotions and also abortions are bad and for some complicated reason we can’t explain in a 30-second clip those two things have something to do with each other, so anyway please vote for me, a sentient pair of truck nuts, instead”

Me fail English? That’s unpossible!

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

Well that’s why they demand the Republicans hold up their end first - the would-be Speaker and a couple of his/her allies sign a discharge petition to implement whatever it is they agreed to, and only after that passes do the Democrats support them.

An under-appreciated point here is that with McCarthy gone, the math for somebody else to become Speaker is that much harder, and the odds of that person needing to rely on Democratic votes - and to make major, major concessions to get them - commensurately higher; in other words, just because McCarthy wouldn’t make a deal with Democrats to remain Speaker, it doesn’t mean that somebody else won’t eventually make one to become Speaker.

Checkmate.

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

This is great + well-deserved, plus it has the side benefit of making some of the world’s worst people really, really mad.

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.

My point is that the likelihood of the Democrats immediately turning around and using that new standard themselves is quite high here. It would be equivalent to what would happen if Thomas or Alito dies in the next few months and the Democrats promptly announce that they’re going to go ahead and confirm his replacement in an election year just like Republicans did for Ginsburg, except with the actuarial odds of a 90 year old instead of a 75 year old.

Chuck Grassley is 90, and he was just re-elected in 2022, which means he’ll still be there when he’s 95. The life expectancy of a 90-year-old man is 3.72 years. And, thanks to Senate seniority bullshit, he’s on Judiciary.

So it is more likely than not that Grassley will keel over (or resign) before he completes his term, which means that breaking this precedent now would have almost certainly backfired on them in the next few years.

Congratulations to rat #1, may your journey away from the sinking ship be slightly less cold and wet and miserable than the next rat’s.

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.

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)

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.

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.