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PCMAG: Is it finally time to take the Twitter plunge? The free service that lets users micro-blog 140 characters at a time had accumulated around 1.9 million users as of December 2008, according to comScore. If you are just now jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, or are intimidated by your inexperience with Twitter etiquette and acronyms, allow us to share some Twittery tips that will make your experience easier and more enjoyable. MORE
HOPE: Let The Stimulation Begin!
WASHINGTON POST: President Obama ventured 1,700 miles from Washington Tuesday to sign into law a $787 billion stimulus package aimed at reviving the nation’s moribund economy and “keeping the American dream alive in our time.” Obama signed the massive, nearly 1,100-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act before an audience of 250 business and community leaders seated on folding chairs in an atrium of Denver’s Museum of Nature and Science. The setting was intended to underscore the new law’s role in creating clean-energy jobs. Before the signing, the president toured a solar panel installation on the museum’s roof. MORE
NEW YORK TIMES: DENVER — President Obama has not ruled out a second stimulus package, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said on Tuesday, just before Mr. Obama signed his $787 billion recovery package into law with a statement that it would “set our economy on a firmer foundation.” The president said he would not pretend “that today marks the end of our economic problems.” While the bill has been criticized by conservatives as bloated with pork-barrel spending, it has also been criticized by the left as too tepid and not bold enough to jumpstart the economy. Mr. Gibbs’s remarks on the plane seemed to echo that concern. In describing the package, the press secretary called it “a strong start towards economic viability” and “the beginning of getting our economy back on track.” MORE
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Ever since Barack Obama was elected, Mayor Michael Nutter and his big-city 
counterparts nationwide have held out hope that a promised economic stimulus package would inject much-needed cash directly into their battered municipal budgets. But most of the funding in the $787 billion package approved by Congress is being filtered through federal, state and county programs — not directly to cities. That leaves Nutter and other city leaders worried about how much they will get — and how long it will take after Obama puts his signature on the stimulus bill.
“The concern about that is when dollars go up into state Capitols and get kind of subsumed into the vortex of state politics,” Nutter said in an interview with The Associated Press. “The dollars end up getting spread wide and thin.” Cities are destined to benefit once the money trickles down, but officials predict it will take longer for them to see funding for things like police officers, infrastructure improvements and health programs. MORE
FINANCIAL TIMES: Nationalisation, long regarded in Washington as a folly of Europeans, is gaining rapid ground among US opinion-formers. Stranger still, many of those talking about federal ownership of banks are Republicans. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator for North Carolina, said that many of his colleagues, including John McCain, the defeated presidential candidate, agreed with his view that nationalisation of some banks should be “on the table”.
Mr Graham said that people across the US accepted his argument that it was untenable to keep throwing good money after bad into institutions such as Citigroup and Bank of America, which now have a lower net value than the amount of public funds they have received. “You should not get caught up on a word [nationalisation],” he told the Financial Times in an interview. “I would argue that we cannot be ideologically a little bit pregnant. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but we can’t keep on funding these 
zombie banks [without gaining public control]. That’s what the Japanese did.”
Barack Obama, the president, who has tried to avoid panicking lawmakers and markets by entertaining the idea, has recently moved more towards what he calls the “Swedish model” – an approach backed strongly by Mr Graham.In the early 1990s, Sweden nationalised its banking sector then auctioned banks, having cleaned up their balance sheets. Mr Obama made it clear last week that he favoured this model over the piecemeal approach taken in Japan, which many would argue is the direction US public policy appears to be heading. MORE