I considered posting a song, and maybe I will at some point today, but there are many things to rant about first. I wasted some time paying attention to the Grammy Awards last night. Once again, the voters showed how out of touch they are with the general population. The Krauss and Plant project was record and album of the year? I would have been at least somewhat pleased if album of the year had gone to Radiohead (obvious bias) or Lil Wayne. Either of those would have been much more deserving. That ends this, as the Grammys don’t deserve any more space.

Onto the stimulus package! The ineptitude displayed by the fantastic Democratic controlled congress is wonderful. Oh, and the Republicans certainly aren’t helping either. I am personally of the persuasion that no amount of government spending will really halt a recession of this magnitude. Economy goes in cycles, etc… Maybe such a package, if done well, could help things slightly. There’s a great David Brooks column (too lazy to link) on how this package moves away from what Obama’s own advisors suggested: temporary, targeted, and timely. I’m not sure you can argue that in its current form the stimulus is any of those things. As a nerd, I was truly pissed off to learn that they removed the $2 billion for broadband funding. The United States is behind many other countries in the developed world in broadband access and speed. That money would have ACTUALLY HELPED. Money would be spent building new infrastructure, and researching new technologies. But since Congress is full of idiots, they removed it. Fantastic. So far, I don’t think this is going well for the White House, but who knows, maybe the economy will bounce back?

Last note. The new Kindle (Amazon’s book reading thing) still sucks. Why am I going to carry that around? It still looks ugly, is overpriced, and that keyboard certainly doesn’t help with Amazon’s “the page should be the only focus” thing. I’ll continue to buy real books, thank you.