KeepHip.com

"Box Office: Alice Turns Damon a Sickly Green."

I don't think I want to see either movie.

From the Rachel Maddow Show:

"iPad Swapped if its Battery Fails, Apple Says."

Oh, I just thought of a simpler solution! User replaceable batteries. Maybe I can patent that before Apple thinks of it?

I try to keep the subjects I talk about on this blog appropriate for public browsing. By that, I mean I don't talk about myself much: what I'm doing, where I work, the personal things I might discuss with a friend. I tend to limit the subjects I bring up here to things I feel comfortable talking about with strangers.

That being said, I'm going to reveal that I always loved reading Ann Landers or Dear Abbey, mostly because people write to them with problems like this one.

"Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love."

God, the first half of that is a whiny screed.

Looking over the shoulder of other people surfing the web, especially those who use IE, is now a really weird sight. Most sites look ridiculous with their banner ads, it's a totally cluttered looking landscape. It bugs me so much now it would probably be very hard to go back.

All that being said, I've white listed a few sites I'd like support for a while now.

Matt Taibbi: "Rush on ‘Massa’"

The Onion: "Global Warming Skeptics Growing In Numbers"

"I don't think he gets a pass."

Whenever I take one of those online surveys where they match up your political positions to presidential candidates, I always end up with Dennis Kucinich as my #1 or my #2. The weird thing is, I've always found Kucinich to be unelectable . . . enough so that I'd never vote for him, as I'd consider that to be a waste of my vote.

"ABC Leaves Ideology Out of Investigation Into 9/11 Truthers: 'They Come From All Over the Political Spectrum'" says NewsBusters. And because they don't use the Truther label as a alternate pejorative to 'liberal', that's a bad thing.

Nightline's Chris Bury on Monday investigated the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, but made no effort to look at the ideological make up of those who believe that the government was behind the 2001 terror attacks. Reporting from the group's convention, he asserted, "Over the weekend hundreds of Americans calling themselves 9/11 Truthers gathered at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. They come from all over the political spectrum."

However, according to a 2007 poll by Rasmussen, 35 percent of Democrats believed that President Bush knew about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in advance. Yet, Bury blandly explained, "They are an eclectic group with widely different agenda, including war protestors, first responders who feel neglected and families of some 9/11 victims."

NewsBuster's use of the word "however" here is proof that's the whole operation is just a propaganda enterprise. Like many conservative organizations, they're not interested in exposing a double standard, they're interested in implementing one.

If you read the entire article, they consider how many Democrats believe stupid stuff like Bush knowing 9/11 was going to happen, but nowhere does the article consider how many Republicans do. Worse, they call out Nightline for positing the possibility that Republicans can.

This is not the thought process of someone interested in fairness. The irony of calling out Nightline for saying "They Come From All Over the Political Spectrum" and only looking the beliefs of Democrats to "challenge" that statement is completely lost on these simpletons.

Reading conservative blogs, the feeling I'm getting is that conservatives are breaking out their kabuki masks of outrage again just because Rather is a target they want in their crosshairs permanently. He gave them another opportunity to sight their scopes last Sunday:

Far more real, measurable and blatant examples of racism get no traction in the conservative blogosphere, naturally. Questioning the importance or even the existence of environmental, workplace or other types of racism are the norm. Yet their ears perk up and they pretend to care over an offhand comment, that at it's absolute worst could be described as "unfortunate."

Of course, today sees the inevitable and probably unnecessary apology from Rather. It's horribly shallow to think that uttering the word watermelon and mentioning Obama devoid of any racist context is automatically a bad thing, but here we are.

"Lohan sues eTrade for $100M over ad with ‘milkaholic’ Lindsay."

This is my favorite e-Trade commercial yet, and it in no way made me think of Lindsay Lohan:

For the record, eTrade is denying the allegations.

True hard-core libertarians want damn near everything privatized, including our public schools:

The Washington Post ran an incisive op-ed yesterday by Kelly Amis and Joseph Robert on the DC voucher program. As they noted, Sen. Joseph Lieberman is calling on the Senate to restore funding for the program which was terminated on a nearly party-line vote by Congress last December.

A few Democrats (Dianne Feinstein and Robert Byrd) have joined with Lieberman, but the rest of the party has apparently decided that producing better educational outcomes for poor kids at one quarter the cost of public schooling is not politically advantageous.

I couldn't help but notice that last link. Better education for 1/4 the price? Sounds awesome! If that was the case, you'd think politicians would be all over that.

But they aren't.

It's not hard to figure out why. If you actually read the link, the article argues that the voucher program was cheaper than public schools, but the case is not made (or even addressed!) for voucher education being better.

I have to wonder why not?

"Postal Service Doesn't Need To Cut Delivery Days."

Political Animal: "Courting Disaster."

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Black Damsel In Dating Distress

Think Progress: Bachmann To Vote For Resolution Promoting Census After Leading Campaign To Smear It

If this goes anywhere I'm going to do a complete about face and join the right-wing nutjobs in stocking up on ammunition, denouncing the government and whatnot.

My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse. Believe it or not -- this was in the '60s -- we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse. I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn't that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada.

--Sarah Palin

"Republicans scold Liz Cheney."

If you haven't seen the ad that provoked this reaction, I highly recommend watching it:

The thing I don't get is how everyone is focusing on how shameless she is. Now I'm not saying she isn't shameless: that's already been proven due to her forceful rejection of the truth.

What I'm wondering about that very few people are talking about is simple - what about her and her opinions makes her someone worth putting on TV? Her resume seems to consist simply of her last name, which she inherited from one of the least popular politicians alive. Every job she has ever had could be explained as nepotism, what has she done to stand out in any one of them? She's not particularly insightful or even basically truthful, so why's she on my TV set so often?

I'm a huge Dwayne McDuffie fan, and it's a sin and a shame that I've let this blog go on so long without ever having mentioned him.

The Atlantic has a wonderful interview with McDuffie up, covering a lot of his work in the DC Comics animated universe and his career as a writer for both Marvel and DC Comics.

But the highlight of his work for me was his hand in the creation of the Milestone comics universe. Other than Garth Ennis's recent run on The Punisher, the Milestone lineup was the only time I've been truly excited by reading comics in the last two decades. The fact that they're not around anymore is probably the largest reason I really don't read many comics these days. With Milestone gone, they literally don't make them like they used to. You're all the poorer if you haven't had the chance to read those comics. (Especially this one. Dwayne didn't write that, but it's one of the best single issue comics I've ever read.

Let me plug his work on the absolutely awesome Justice League Unlimited show. "Panic in the Sky" and "Divided We Fall" easily rival Star Trek's "Best of Both Worlds" for best sci-fi story to ever cross the TV screen. And that's not hyperbole. It's that good. Buy the whole show though, it's easily worth the money.

"INTERVIEW: Chomsky Post-Earthquake."

"Program Will Pay Homeowners to Sell at a Loss."

Sounds all well and good, isn't a large part of the problem that nobody's buying? Who's the prospective buyers here?

AlterNet: Controversy Grows over Study Claiming Liberals and Atheists Are Smarter

NewsBusters: "Bill Maher Wishes Glenn Beck Had Been Killed at Pentagon Thursday."

OK fine, it's not funny, it's disgusting. When are they calling Ann Coulter out for saying the exact. same. thing? Never, of course.