They're milking this presidenial-race stuff for all it's worth; "and I'm reaping all the benefits."

Two articles I found thought-provoking:
Lose the BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

At the risk of sounding like some young and naive "digital native," um, what? The president doesn't have a computer in the Oval Office? What in. the. hell. does he do? I mean, if that's the case, then fuck all these technology-laced lesson plans I'm writing for my kids so as to better prepare them for 21st Century careers. They can be President of he United States and not have to type, apparently. Apparently, that's even the rule.

Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies program at Georgetown University, said presidents were not advised to use e-mail because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.

“They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked,” said Ms. Owen, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. “The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him.”

I'm wondering if maybe he can keep his BlackBerry, just for messages like these that help him maintain his awesomeness:

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

and

Mr. Obama used e-mail to stay in constant touch with friends from the lonely confines of the road, often sending messages like “Sox!” when the Chicago White Sox won a game.

and the other article is The Wild Wordsmith of Wasila

I suppose it will be recorded as among political history’s ironies that Palin was brought in to help John McCain. I can’t blame feminists who might draw amusement from the fact that a woman managed to both cripple the male she was supposed to help while gleaning an almost Elvis-sized following for herself. Mac loses, Sarah wins big-time was the gist of headlines.

Again... um, what? Just FYI: Feminism is not about "crippl[ing]" men. Not even a little bit. Honestly, I think it would be more difficult to locate a feminist who supported Sarah Palin's candidacy for VP than it would be to find one who sees Palin as participating rather loudly and proudly in the dominant mysoginist ideology. I'm one, for example.

He continues,

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

(A cynic might wonder if Wasilla High School’s English and geography departments are draped in black.)

There's nothing more annoying to me -- hyperbole -- than people whose first response when I tell them I'm a high school English teacher is, "Ugh. I hate grammar." Except maybe the not-so-few-and-far-between people who say, "Oh good! We need people teaching kids to speak English, and not Spanish! This is America; they should speak our language!"

One thing that Sarah Palin has in common with my students, btw: Ask about Africa and receive some well-intentioned but problematically under-informed "Let's save those poor people... :(" rhetoric.

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UPDATE: I'm feeling pretty cool because one of my favorite profs just blogged about the no-BlackBerry thing, too. He says:

"George W. Bush gave up the chance to digitize the White House by giving up email when he took the oath of office – something to do with executive privilege, the imperial presidency, and not being able to type and chew gum at the same time."