Over on the left, you'll see a feature called "News Junkie." This is where Sandeep Kaushik mouths off about the days headlines.

We're still mocking up the page, but it's  worth taking a peek inside right now. Based on an editorial  in Sunday's Seattle Times (that generally contradicts the Seattle Times' own Rossi-nomics nattering),  Sandeep's got a head full of theories.

Leave aside the obvious contradiction between the fact that the Times has been enthusiastically advocating for sharp cutbacks of state government, while now raising the idea of a billion-plus dollar federal government bailout of daily newspapers. The timing of this piece makes me suspicious that there is something going on behind the scenes. It’s just rumor and speculation at this point, but this situation bears watching.  

 

Right below Sandeep's punditry, you'll find our Obama correspondent's column, OMG!Obama.

He's currently in DC for the inauguration: 

Afterwards, folks started to pour out of the barricaded National Mall to head to the nearest Metro station and they were all in this postcoital-like dream state.  I might have been overly tired, but I swear I saw a unicorn prance across the Smithsonian with a rainbow shooting out its ass.  I don’t think it was Speaker Pelosi.  She’s not feeling very O-magical these days.

We're not just political nerds around here, though. Today we've got a post from TechNerd on the death of DRM.

And in the days ahead we'll be hearing from our full stable of nerds: MusicNerd, FoodNerd, FilmNerd, SportsNerd, and NerdNerd.

Here's TechNerd Glenn Fleishman:

This news makes 2009 the year music freed its ass: When you buy a song on any of the top four digital music outlets now (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or Walmart), you can choose to play that song on whatever device you want, as often as want.

The industry wanted us to believe that when we paid for and downloaded an MP3, we had only licensed it—with a limited set of rights—instead of bought it. This jarred against the sensibility of many music fans. When we bought an LP or a CD, we had a palpable object with which we could have our way. When we bought a digital music file, we tacitly agreed that it wasn’t ours, and the music industry tried to make the list of acceptable uses smaller and smaller.

Now they’ve changed their tune: Nearly all digitally downloadable music will be sold in the U.S. starting in April 2009 with no protection enabled