When she burst into public consciousness, stealing the show in Speed 15 years ago, Bullock was hailed as the thinking man's starlet, a smart, tough wise-cracking throwback to Jean Arthur or Katherine Hepburn. And the residual good will of her "not a bimbo" persona still lingers on.

Well, no performer has done more to squander the public's good will than Sandra Bullock. In the decade and a half since Speed, she has accumulated a lifetime Rotten Tomatoes score of 28 (and that is helped by Oscar winner Crash in which she was only part of an ensemble.) Reading through the list of her films is like visiting the site of some epic, senseless battle and reciting the names of the fallen.

Read aloud with us then, the list of the films Sandra Bullock has inflicted upon society since her great moment (with Rotten Tomatoes scores): All About Steve (6), The Proposal (43), Premonition (8), The Lake House (36), Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous (14), Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (44), Murder by Numbers (30), Miss Congeniality (40), 28 Days (30), Gun Shy (24), 
Forces of Nature (46), Practical Magic (21), Hope Floats (23), Speed 2: Cruise Control (2), In Love and War (12), Two If by Sea (12), The Net (30),

Simply awe-inspiring. Note that Bullock has appeared in three films that achieved Tomatoes scores of under ten, a fate that should not befall any actor more than once. (Nicole Kidman, for comparison sake, has made plenty of clunkers in her time but has never been in a movie that scored below 19.)

Not only are none of the movies above anything resembling good, none at first glance are even memorable as big-money makers. The list looks like a roll call of the kind of showbiz-mill cannon fodder which surfaces every weekend and vanishes without a trace.

While most of her peers — the actresses of the 90's — have already been used up and cast aside by Hollywood, somehow Bullock's reign continues. After the mawkish-looking Blind Side comes and goes this weekend, she has five more films queued up in development; five movies which, given Bullock's track-record, seem eminently judgable by their titles. So get ready for The Sprinkler Queen, Kiss & Tango, One of the Guys, Jingle and Bridesmaids.

How does this keep happening? Why does the Bullock nightmare go on and on? Let's look at some possible explanations:

• Actually, they aren't all bombs. Her latest film The Proposal was, in fact a fairly gargantuan hit, earning almost $300 million worldwide on a modestly budgeted comedy. Even Miss Congeniality 2 made more than $100 million domestic before it was done. And the rule of thumb is that if you make a hit, you get three years of moviemaking to try and get another one before you are relegated to sitcom stunt casting.

• Foreigners. Unlike many comedy stars, the Bullock brand plays well overseas where presumably people don't understand in translation how much these movies suck. Her films routinely match or top their domestic hauls while playing abroad. Congenialty 2 and The Propsal for instance, made another $100 million overseas. Even The Lake House made $62 million overseas. Compare that to Will Ferrell whose films never travel. Talledega Nights, for instance earned $143 million domestic but only $14 million abroad. His last four films have each earned less than $30 million overseas.

• She's cheap. Bullock was sixth on Forbes list of this year's highest paid actresses, earning in an estimated $15 million per film, well below what Angelina Jolie would ask to dress up your little horror film.

• She'll be in anything. As seen in the list above.

• People still like her. ."She just seems like good folk....it's that totally intangable likability factor," one still devoted fan said to me. There seems to be a teflon factor at work in Bullock in which her onscreen choices do not rub off on the public's overall sense of her. Part of that may be due to...

• She's kept down the offscreen noise. While she's been in some high profile relationships, she has not turned her personal life into the sort of tabloid soap opera that generates some heat for a while, but soon enough leads to overexposure and fan hangovers.

So with all that behind her, there's no reason why the Bullock reign can't go on forever. The more interesting question perhaps, is why does someone who appears not-completely-stupid continue to make such ghastly choices? Yes, its certainly no easy feat to find decent parts for a grown up woman, but could she really have found worse ones? Unlike most of her peers, Bullock has never felt the need to prop up her acting bona fides with any prolonged stints in indie movies or low budget drama — Crash perhaps being the notable exception.

Which leads one to the conclusion that maybe she doesn't care. She's come to Hollywood haul off as much loot as she can, audiences be damned. Sandy, there's many people still, amazingly, waiting for you to prove that that's just not so.

Back when establishment Democrats (like Obama!) were trying to convince us loony internet liberals not to campaign against Joe Lieberman, you heard a lot about how Lieberman is only a conservative on foreign policy, and not domestic issues. (How his full-throated support for any bombing campaign against any Muslims anywhere in the world is supposed to be not as big a deal as the fact that he doesn't want to publicly execute gays or whatever has always been beyond us, but that is what we were told.) Now he's pissed that distinction away.

We all know that Vinegar Joe Lieberman is a sanctimonious, thin-skinned, self-satisfied monster. And a pious, amoral scumbag. And a narcissistic, deluded underminer who represents everything that is wrong with the United States Senate. And a war-mongering, concern-trolling religious zealot. And, generally, a bastard. And probably a racist. But why would this weasel-human hybrid who is actually literally slowly receding into his own asshole a little bit every day suddenly pipe up on health care reform with a position at odds with most Connecticut residents and a vast majority of the Democrats he claims to represent?

Because no one had been paying attention to him! (And also because he is owned by the various insurance companies of Connecticut. Like he is literally Aetna's personal offensive Jeff Dunham puppet. Well, they have to share him with AIPAC.)

This is the thing, Joe. The opt-out public option is a conservative compromise. It is a compromise from a non-opt-out public option, which is a compromise from a non-opt-out public option tied to Medicare rates, which is a compromise from a non-opt-out public option tied to Medicare rates and open to everyone, which is a compromise from single-payer. You would like a further compromise, to "no health care reform, at all, unless the Democrats all kneel down and blow me, as I will demand they do whenever they might need my vote, from now until I finally decide to caucus with the Republicans, which will only happen if the Republicans take the majority and the Democrats stop blowing me periodically."

And, obviously, his literal, stated objections to the bill are not based in any way on reality.

So the question basically is, what is his end-game here? What the fuck is he doing?

Whether Joe Lieberman will run for reelection in 2012 is currently a mystery. He has $1.4 million in the bank, which is a lot, but not as much as he had in 2006.

He also is polling rather terribly in Connecticut, where Democrats and independents both prefer real Democrats. He could run as a real Republican, but, as we said, those independent voters he needs to win do not like him, at the moment.

So our "what is Joe Lieberman doing" possibilities are:

• He is just following the golden path of his own of self-delusion, thinking he will be remembered as a mavericky hero who bucked the status quo once he retires in 2012.
• He's going all-in as a Republican in the desperate hope that a 2012 GOP landslide will win him one more term.
• He is just trying to sink health care completely for his insurance company friends, who will give him a lucrative post-Senate job.
• He is just trying to force Harry Reid to pay him fealty once again, because it makes him feel nice.
• He is just a prick.

Weirdly, Lieberman said he'd vote to bring the bill to the floor, and then he'd support a GOP filibuster. A GOP filibuster is decidedly not a sure thing, though it certainly moves one step closer to a sure thing every time Joe Lieberman opens his mouth. Christ, what an asshole.

A spec ad—at least the ones you hear about—is basically an unofficial ad that will never get officially sanctioned by the brand represented. Often because of too much sexiness! For example, that JC Penney pro-teen sex ad that caused such a ruckus last year, on the blogs, turned out to be a spec ad. Ad people make spec ads for many reasons: to audition their work in hopes of winning an account, for ad competitions, or just because they are bored and horny.

So next time you see an supersexy ad featuring ill-concealed blowjob jokes or overt appeals to teen sexuality, don't just run out and declare that Brand X has gone crazy; ask yourself first, "Is this a spec ad? And if so, why are they all ill-concealed blowjob jokes or overt appeals to teen sexuality?" It'll save everyone a lot of gasping.

Of course, PETA produce sex spots and Burger King blowjob ads are real.

Update: Here's the statement that the corporate PR department at Coca-Cola is putting out about the ad: "This video was NOT produced by or for The Coca-Cola Company or any of its brands. The use of our Sprite brand in this video is completely unauthorized. We are doing everything we can to determine the source of the video and will take appropriate legal action."

"2) And can Percy Harvin lead the vikings to a superbowl championship, as some fans here would like to believe?"

Mom:

Reconciliation was intended to be a procedure used to pass special budgetary measures with a simple majority. It can't be filibustered. Theoretically it was only for "deficit reduction" (i.e. anything attached to the budget had to be cost-neutral or pay for itself) but that rule was lifted in the 90s. Clinton used it to pass his first budget and Bush used it to pass his (decidedly not deficit-reducing) tax cuts.

So senators like Robert Byrd get pissed when you try to use reconciliation for anything other than budget stuff, because that is what it was "meant" for, but there is another type of senator who hates reconciliation for a very different reason. That would be a senator like Ben Nelson, who hates it because they are going to use it to take away money from his precious, precious student loan sharks. That type of senator is way more common.

Frankly the senate is so broken that any rule that allows a straight up-and-down simple majority vote is a good thing, because this idea that you can only pass anything through the senate with 60 votes is not what the Founders actually had in mind, right?

So until they finally ban the filibuster, reconciliation is a legit way to try to pass a bill. Senate Democrats might be too pussy/powerless/infiltrated by quislings to actually get health care through like that, though Obama has set a deadline for health care reform that, if not met, will lead to the big reconciliation showdown. So that's cool.

For more on reconciliation and the best correction of the year, read this.

Percy Harvin will be hated by everyone in Minnesota because he is black and he smoked the demon weed. They'll ride him out of town in 3 years and then he will win a Super Bowl with the Redskins or something. Sage Rosenfels will throw him lots and lots of exciting screen passes in the meantime though.

Related: "Love, Mom" is available now.

Eric Garland, CEO of an online piracy research firm, told the Wall Street Journal Disney's investment in 56.com is "ironic" and "shocking." John Ball, Steamboat's managing director, says the company invested in part to help 56.com curb pirated videos. But 56.com is just one of six Chinese companies in Steamboat's portfolio, all of which aim to distribute movies and videogames online.

And that's the dirty secret of Disney and other media companies. They don't ultimately care about shows like Hannah Montana. What matters is their channels of distribution, through which such evanescent fare courses — and 56.com promises to be another one. Viacom isn't suing YouTube for $1 billion because it's upset about piracy. It's upset about piracy happening on a channel it doesn't own.

Here's some back of the envelope math on Facebook's burn rate. Figure the company's operating expenses are divided roughly half in labor, half in operations like running its servers. Count $100,000 in salary per employee, and double that in benefits and other overhead; double that again to account for the company's non-labor costs. You end up with an annual cost structure of $400 million. Facebook's revenues for this year are projected to be $300 million to $350 million; if the company isn't already operating in the red, it's headed there fast.

Microsoft's $240 million investment? Most of that is already gone towards buying servers — and it's not like Facebook can stop buying servers as usage of its site continues to boom.

Publicly, Zuckerberg has talked about the company making growth its priority. But a $400 million a year ship can sink fast, especially if the advertising market faces a hard contraction and media buyers cut back on their more experimental ad buys. And none of Facebook's new ad formats have proven to be a breakout hit, as Google's AdWords was earlier this decade.

That's why I think Facebook's braintrust is talking about whether they can afford to keep hiring — and whether they need to cull their existing ranks.

Here's where Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, the law-and-order type Zuckerberg hired from Google, comes in. She's already made hiring considerably more bureaucratic, instituting new requirements straight out of the Googleplex, like a 3.5 GPA from a top school.

Getting strict on recruiting is just the start. Facebookers should expect to see more rules, rules, rules. And even the slightest violation will prove cause for firing — especially for employees who are within weeks of vesting their first batch of stock options, which only come after a year on the job.

Sandberg's very savvy about keeping up appearances. Google thrived in part because, in the darkest days of the dotcom crash, from 2001 through 2003, it was the only company hiring. Until it bought DoubleClick, Google had never done a layoff. That's part of Google's image, and I'm sure Sandberg wants it to be part of Facebook's image, too.

So we won't hear about a Facebook hiring freeze. We certainly won't hear about layoffs. Whatever happens will be quiet: Candidates won't get called back about jobs they applied for. Managers will find their hiring requests tied up in bureaucracy. And employees will quietly box up their things and go.

The sad thing is that those Facebookers will think they screwed up. They won't even have the saving grace of a layoff — the corporate kiss-off that says, "Hey, kid, chin up — it's not you, it's me." A layoff would be the honest thing. But it's the one cost-cutting move Facebook can't afford.

Why, Google did, according to Davos party correspondent Meghan Asha, the sometimes girlfriend of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who got her in. Google's affair included Norman Jay, a British house-music DJ. There you have it: Larry and Sergey are at fault for distracting the world's best and brightest from preventing the meltdown we now face. If Schwab is serious about keeping thing's serious at the next WEF, we recommend disinviting Page and Brin. And Arrington and Asha.

"Follow spam" is what happens when a Twitter user sets up an automated script to subscribe to thousands of individual users' feeds, found by crawling Twitter's pages. Follow-spammers aren't interested in reading all those people's updates. They're actually hoping their new pretend-friends will follow them back in exchange, creating an opt-in list for their messages. These may be marketing, or just personal drama.

It seems like a victimless crime, but there are two problems caused by comment spam:

• 1. Each user gets a notice whenever a comment spammer starts following them. If you're getting Twitter on your cellphone, it means frequent interruption by annoying "TotalStranger is now following you on Twitter" text messages. If you don't have an unlimited messaging plan, the messages cost you as much as 15 cents each.
• 2. Williams's servers are already overloaded. "In extreme cases," he writes, "these automated accounts have followed so many people they've threatened the performance of the entire system."

That's it. I know, hardly a crisis. White people need something to be uptight about, and Ev Williams has delivered. I give it another three months before there's a service mag called Twitterer at my local Borders.

Russia's intention just might be to actually topple the democratically elected, adorably pro-American government of Georgia. (They say they won't go to Tbilisi, but they also said that about Gori!) George W. Bush's intention is to not get involved and hope a ceasefire happens soon. That funny little dance he did is not so cute anymore! If it spreads to Ukraine, what then? NATO gets involved at some point. That's a big problem. A big problem called the Cold War!

Then what? Then we get President McCain. Because he's still stuck in the Cold War. And Obama dithered and hemmed and hawed in his response to this mess, while McCain said he would personally go to Moscow and deck that paper-hanging sonuvabitch Putin (more or less). Which is dangerous crazy rhetoric. And what does America like to hear during times of international instability in far-off places? Dangerous crazy rhetoric!

Also fun to ponder right now: Russia's growing friendship with Iran, Georgia's oil reserves. Surprisingly, Dealbreaker of all things has a terribly informative roundtable on the entire situation that will allow you to sound reasonably intelligent at a cocktail party until you finish your third cocktail and find yourself unable to pronounce any of the names involved.

And finally, if the John Edwards scandal had been reported on by the MSM back in 2007, none of this would've happened.

The standard cultural arbiter of what Real Americans do and what they are like is someone like Chris Matthews. He's a loud, brash Irish Catholic guy, getting up there in age, with an admittedly solid blue-collar history (former DC cop!) who's been in a bubble of wealth and privilege just long enough to make him utterly deluded about the people in this country who live outside the wealthiest enclaves of the Eastern Seaboard. Over the last decade or so, he's come to decide that Real Americans are, basically, Nixon's "silent majority"—aging white men of modest means. Sadly he barely even understands what these modern-day Angry White Men are like, so he's extrapolating from his own time in their circle, decades ago. This is why he is pretty sure he knows that Real Americans drink like this, and hey, no one plays pool anymore!

But let's look at Obama's famous "body man," Reggie Love. The kid introduced the candidate to Jay-Z, popularizer of the shoulder-brushing phenomenon. He's a black kid, from North Carolina. The standard analysis would be that a kid like this will TERRIFY THE VOTERS. But the guy's a former athlete who went to Duke on scholarship. At Duke, he partied with white frat kids—all of whom almost certainly listen, maybe exclusively, to hip hop and R&B.

These are kids (meaning "18-35-year-olds across the entire nation), white and black, for whom respect knuckles are second nature. And Obama's bump and shoulder-brush, probably simply because he's such a natural actor, don't reek of pandering. Pandering is when, say, Representative Jack Kingston inexplicably and incorrectly appropriated "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp."

Obama's acting cool, but relatably cool. Like a Cool Uncle! He's younger and hipper than dad, but still serious and Grown Up. And this is probably his best defense against crazy old Grampa McCain.

(And lest anyone accuse us hero-worship, we did think it was totally cool when Hillary downed that boilermaker. If the old rumor of her drinking contest with McCain is true, that is ALSO cool. But absolutely nothing else about her is cool, in any way.)

It doesn't necessarily sell more hardware but it does provide end users with a richer browser experience, said Jeff Klaus, marketing director for Intel Mash Maker, who admitted that the product is a bit of a departure for the company.

"VC fund raising is very cyclical," said Emily Mendell. "A lot of firms have gone out in the last two or three years and fewer firms in the fund raising mode — that's why there aren't that many new funds." Put another way, VC firms would be foolish to go out hat in hand seeking money now. Their customers, largely pension funds and other large institutions, have other worries right now. And there's not much for VCs to brag about in their sales pitches: Only five venture-backed companies went public last quarter, and in those three months, only 56 companies were acquired, compared to 83 in the fourth quarter.

For starters, more Web applications mean more pages running Google-brokered ads. App Engine also runs on Google's preferred programming language, Python, not PHP or Ruby — meaning the developers of tomorrow now know definitively what scripting environment to work in, and the company's talent pool will grow. But ZDnet might have the winning theory: it will make the cost of acquiring startups much lower for Google.

Take YouTube, for example. The company succeeded partly on the merits of being able to keep its databases running. While other video sharing services wilted under their popularity, while YouTube remained online. But once Google purchased YouTube, it had to invest engineers and time into translating the company's backend into something that would work in their other systems. Next time, the transition will be nearly seamless.

So for the startup ecosystem, developers can either go Google or go elsewhere. And if they go Google and build something successful, there will be a threshhold of traffic where they'll be presented with two choices — either pay to play on Google's servers, or sell to Google. In any but the first scenario, Google is all up in your balance sheet. Doesn't look good for Amazon.com and Oracle, which powers Amazon's SimpleDB.

One possible explanation: Viebranz's immediate superior, AOL chief operating officer Ron Grant, is vulnerable under the new Time Warner regime of Jeff Bewkes, who took over as chief exec of the media conglomerate at the start of the year; Grant's intelligence may have won him a moniker, the "human computer", but Bewkes is thought not to rate his management ability. The bloody dismissal of Viebranz is not necessarily a sign of Grant's strength; but his weakness.

PayPal "has gone to great pains to ... not be a bank" according to Christa Quarles, managing director of Thomas Weisel Partners. Some users think the company is holding the cash to make money on the interest, but it's a small enough amount — an estimated $10 million a quarter, tops — that it doesn't make a significant impact on eBay's bottom line. (If it hadn't taken a massive writeoff for its Skype purchase last year, eBay would have made more than $1 billion in net profit.) Instead, PayPal's move is likely an attempt to reduce fraudulent purchases by keeping money in de facto escrow until the purchase has been finalized. Sellers may not like it, but the alternative — PayPal letting sketchy transactions go through, and then recovering the money later — sounds worse.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

That early IPO — a preemptive strike against long-forgotten competitors — was a blessing and a curse. It was great PR, but it also meant that Yahoo had to please shareholders from an early age.

In the '90s, it did so with aplomb. No one personified Yahoo's cockiness more than its president, Jeff Mallett. A former soccer player, Mallett was more often the public face of the company than its reticent CEO, Tim Koogle. He often was quoted when Yahoo struck a large advertising deal; he was an expert at squeezing cash and stock from startups desperate to get traffic from Yahoo. Mallett had his share of mistakes, like the $6 billion purchase of Broadcast.com from Mark Cuban in 1999. But he was, at the least, bold and decisive.

Terry Semel became CEO in 2001, pushing Mallett aside. A new management team came in, full of ad-sales specialists. From 2001 through 2005, Yahoo patiently courted Madison Avenue, building a formidable banner-ad business with blue-chip clients.

Semel also got Yahoo into the search business, buying Inktomi and Overture. But he failed to capitalize on their promise. Many insiders blame Sue Decker, then Yahoo's CFO, now its president, for milking those businesses for cash while Google was investing millions in its algorithms. Semel's other big acquisition push into user-generated content brought it properties like Flickr and Del.icio.us. But it stalled when prices started to rise in 2006. Semel balked at paying big prices for YouTube and Facebook, and they slipped from his grasp.

The rise of Sue Decker roughly parallels the decline of Yahoo. Decker is — no, was — an expert at catering to Wall Street, and a killer at board-room politics. Insiders believe she edged out Dan Rosensweig in a 2006 reorganization. She then, they say, lobbied the board to oust Semel as CEO, using Rosensweig's departure as part of the rationale. Cheeky, but clever.

Both moves backfired on Decker. She'd hoped to put Rosensweig in a lesser role, but he balked and left the company without anyone running its content businesses. Semel left, but Decker did not get the CEO job she'd hoped for. Instead, the company was left looking rudderless, with founder Jerry Yang stepping in as CEO.

Another Decker mistake: Her disgraceful treatment of Wenda Harris Millard, the company's beloved U.S. sales chief. When Millard told Decker she was leaving for Martha Stewart, Decker reacted furiously, locking Millard out of her office and issuing a press release that suggested Millard was out of touch and had been fired. Unsurprisingly, Yahoo's banner-ad sales have suffered since Millard's departures.

Which brings us, more or less, to the present. It's not surprising that Microsoft seized this moment to issue its $44.6 billion offer. Yahoo's poor earnings and gloomy forecast provided one opening; management's incompetent dithering over layoffs provided another.

It's possible that Yahoo might somehow escape Microsoft's grasp. But whatever course Yahoo takes from here, it's clear that it will be even further diminished. Yahoo will be best remembered in business schools, where it's taught as a case study: How quickly tech empires can fall.

Most of those people know how to use Tumblr responsibly and only post when they have something worthwhile to say. Others don't. First execution: Julia Allison. 40 posts a day? Are you f—-ing kidding?

Just three easy steps and it's off with their head. Click where the arrow points.


And now they're dead! Yay!