Kissinger is outside the frame, scowling at the scoreboard as the Grim Reaper's total goes up by 1.
Ertebolle
joined 2 years ago
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.
Posthumous trials may be rare, but aren't there an awful lot of creditors / banks / tax authorities / etc in a position to make claims against the estate? (debts certainly don't go away just because you're dead)
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.
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)