No, I would hardly say "little chance." Either could become incapacitated, or die in 4 years. You are aware that Scalia and Kennedy would be 80 in 2016? I wish them very good health!
Life expectancy:
Suppose Kennedy or Scalia retires in 2017 due to health problems after a Romney POTUS is such a disaster that Dems take the WH and Senate again? See?? It's not so easy to forcast.
Good point. I did think of such possibilities too. In my post I accidentally put "We might lose the chance for a GOP POTUS better than Romney to replace conservative justices who left between 2013-2016" in the wrong place. I meant to say that if Romney wins in 2012 and they retire in his second term, we might get mediocre justices or worse from Romney, but if Obama won in 2012 and we elected a conservative POTUS in 2016 (the years that would have been Romney's 2nd term), that might work out better. Or Romney might appoint better judges than we think, who knows.
But I never said anything to lead anyone to believe that it's easy to predict the future, and certainly not that we elect a GOP POTUS and we live happily ever after. One of the major points of my post was that it is NOT easy to forecast what will happen. For example, I wrote, "This is an extremely complex probability problem, not a logic problem."
It's not just Scalia and Kennedy. Have to think About Thomas, Ginsberg, Souter (who is a reminder of what kind of appointments a "compassionate conservative" might make, but Bush 1 also appointed Thomas).
I could try to think of a lot more possibilities and include them, but nobody would want to read the extremely long post that might result.
Bottom line, even if Romney beats Obama, the SCOTUS could still turn out badly. I won't vote for O, but I don't know if Romney would be good either. Sometimes I wonder if the GOP aristocrats even suspect how deeply I resent what GWB did.