Scott Walker has been trying to get reelected, in spite of driving his state's economy straight into the shitter. If you are undecided as to whether or not his policies work, just compare his state to Minnesota. One state has seen meaningful economic recovery under a liberal governor, another state has been watching everything crumble under the leadership of a conservative governor. Walker is in need of some help, so the GOP sent some top brass to one of his rallies :

... certainly, calling voters stupid will give Walker the help he needs.

If Ronald Reagan's son is a liberal, then there is no reason why Joe Biden's son can't be a republican. Hunter Biden just matched George W Bush's military career and PR record in one fell swoop. He's old enough to run for POTUS, maybe the GOP will field a Biden-Bush ticket in 2016?

I must admit, Smitty, when you give up on an argument you really give up on an argument. You don't just walk away, you turn up a distraction to 11 and rock out with it until the rest of the band has all gone home. Then after the band has left and someone comes in to tune the piano for a completely different genre of music you are still thrashing on your distraction as if the party was still at its peak. I guess this might explain your hearing loss... and come to think of it it might explain some other things, too.

I'm getting the "excessive bad posting from this subnet" message when I attempt to post from work (but not from home). My karma is still excellent (indeed I even get the "karma bonus" checkbox choice when writing from work). This disables me "temporarily" from posting from work.

Oh well I should probably post less from work anyways. Being as I don't click on the conservative advertising on slashdot they aren't making any money from me reading their site right now either.

My dear friend decided to keep the verbiage to a minimum today with this short joke. Some of his jokes are subtle, but this one is a cream pie right in the face. Thank you, friend, my week was getting a bit long and needed something to break up the monotony.

Google news suggested this news story to me this morning: George Zimmerman thinks he's Jason Bourne . I can say it is as well sourced as most of the conspiracy theories that are posted as political news here on slashdot so it should fit right in.

Actually, it cites an article from talking points memo , which itself cites an interview from GQ , so this is actually (at least) several orders of magnitude better rooted in reality than most of the conspiracies we see here.

Really, who else would be willing to push this garbage to the front page? Granted, it has been almost a full three weeks since his last catastrophic failure pile of conservative FUD but that is hardly something to get excited about.

Seriously, is he moonlighting for townhall.com or something?

This week brought us the resignation of another government official, yet the GOP is strangely quiet. Where are the conspiracy theories on this matter? I am disappointed that we haven't even seen any of our slashdot conservatives trying to claim this is a Wag the Dog maneuver to distract us from something else...

However, before the conservatives start celebrating, pay attention to this

In other words, you're stuck with him until you confirm someone to take his place. So if you hate him, the best thing you can do to get rid of him is to encourage the senate to actually hold a vote on his replacement. Even if the senate flips in November, they won't be able to push him out until they vote to approve someone else.

Eric Holder To Resign As Attorney General (source chosen because it has no paywall)

Some dumbass in Korea is desperately trying to gain access to my home system. In less than 6 hours, the system has made over 5,000 unsuccessful attempts to get in. I'm not sure if "phone book" is the right term or not, but they are going through a (very) long list of usernames and attempting to log in with them. One IP address the whole time, just not giving up.

Not that I expect it to make a difference, but I sent an email to their ISP.

This is an interesting change from the distributed attacks that I was used to seeing. Not sure if the two are related or not but I do seem to be seeing a larger number of attacks since being issued a new IP address at home.

Nothing engages (enrages?) the crowd here on slashdot like pointing out what a tool samzenpus is when he posts whackjob conservative FUD to the front page. My first comment has so far drawn twenty-six moderations. Of those 26, the tally is currently:

• 6 troll
• 5 flamebait
• 2 informative
• 9 insightful
• 1 interesting
• 1 funny
• 1 underrated
• And 1 insightful that was undone

What actually surprises me the most is that not one of those moderations were "overrated".

Although if I could ask anything to change here on slashdot, it would be that they give us a way to actually view all these moderations in a way other than having to read the poorly-formatted comments that they send to our slashdot "inboxes". Clicking on my comment tells almost nothing useful about how it was moderated.

The article that this links to has nothing to do with wasting food. The point of the Seattle City Council's action is to get people to compost. You can throw as much food as you want in the compost, that is just fine. This goes with their earlier ordinances to encourage recycling, they are just trying to reduce the amount of material that is disposed of as "regular" trash.

This is in response to the atrociously miswritten Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food. Even the worst editors on slashdot usually read at least a little ways in to an article before attempting to summarize it. However, once in a while samzenpus is so engrossed in beating off to fox news that he allows this kind of garbage to slip right in.

Well done, samzenpus. You showed us that just when we thought the front page crap here couldn't get any worse, you can still one up the crappiness. For those with short memories, I will remind us that he also posted these awful gems: NBC apologizes for editing Zimmerman 911 call

school sends child's lunch home after determining it unhealthy

Tesla will discontinue the Roadster

... and the cherry on the turd sundae:

California May Reduce Carbon Emissions By Banning Black Cars

I know I've missed plenty of great samzenpus failures along the way, but these are just some highlights. Really, why the fuck is this idiot an editor? I know some people who work for google, I'm sure they have a decent algorithm that could replace him.

Funny how we didn't do anything about this problem. After Surgery, Surprise $117,000 Medical Bill From Doctor He Didnâ(TM)t Know (new york times, 9/20/2014).

Oh, wait. We didn't actually do anything - aside from handing out the largest government handout in the history of government - with the affordable care act. If you want to know who owns the congresspeople and senators that are supposed to represent you, look only as far as the insurance card(s) in your wallet.

There has been a character limit for article headlines on the front page for ... well, I presume it's been there as long as slashdot has been in existence. For some part of that time, slashdot had editors who ... actually knew how to edit text (we long ago replaced them with people who randomly mash buttons in exchange for stock in dice.com).

Yesterday, there was an article that had a title that just couldn't fit under the limit. At least one comment pointed out that "rollout" was truncated to "rollo".

Now, we could have edited the headline to fit under the limit. Or we could have just buried the story as it wasn't relevant to the scope of slashdot anyways. Yet neither of those options were acceptable. So somehow a patch was devised to allow for this to make it to the front page with its full headline.

Don't try to tell me anymore that this site doesn't cater to a deeply conservative base. No sensible site would have gone to such lengths to get this crappy article up.

I had a little bit of downtime yesterday afternoon with my phone in my hand and decided to see how awful slashdot is with the default browser on Android. It is - as one might expect - rather bad. More so, the front page actually had conservative advertisements on the page (beyond the usual collection of conservative stories). The first ad was touting Paul Ryan being scheduled to appear at a conference about medicare and medicaid. Being as I was not logged in to slashdot through my phone at all, this appears to be part of the new default set of ads served up to newbies.

Well done, slashdot. Might as well cater to your own base. You wouldn't want people to think that other opinions are welcomed here or anything.

PS - I liked it better when we had ads for mail-order-brides on the front page. At least that was something that performs a useful service. The GOP can't claim that.