I have to agree…there are way too many bigger fish to fry.

the Secret Service detail and the staff that will be around him at all times aren’t carrying enough equipment. Do I need to mention the guy carrying the nuclear “football” that is always in sight?

But I guess The One™ needs his shiny toy or he’ll throw a hissy fit!

This is exactly the reason I’ve been making an issue of the Blackberry. It has NOTHING to do with the cost or device itself but one of INTEGRITY… honesty and openness… and all those things!

How else is Scarlet going to text him orders from the SAG. How else is Bill Ayers going to secretly control the direction of Indoctrination (er… sorry… Education) in America… etc….

The RADICAL-in-Chief has to have a way to communicate with all those “Casual acquaintances” that “just happen to live in the neighborhood” he knows.

This IDIOT is worse than the average Spoiled Child and there are far too many of them. Is he going to cry when he finally wakes up to learn our enemies aren’t gonna Play nice/fair and not wanna “SHARE!?!?”

All hail the Child-n-chief

has a “phone” and no one gets to direct dial him, save maybe Michele. All calls are going to go through the White House Secretary’s Office and then through his regular communications gear.

I think this is more for email and all of those will probably go through the White House server and probably be “screened” by his secretary before being forwarded (encrypted) out to his “Blackberry”.

And I have to say, I really don’t see what the big deal is here, the price of the First Blackberry is nothing compared to Air Force One, Marine One, Cadillac One, Camp David, etc. etc. If it helps Obama escape some part of the White House bubble, it can’t be a bad thing. I mean, maybe Bush should have tried harder to avoid being handle so much by his handlers.

Talk about Much Ado About Nothing. Come on guys, I understand wanting to criticize every move Obama makes, but if we all want be taken seriously, we should focus on stuff that actually matters. Like closing Gitmo.

Besides, I’ve always thought it was stupid when Presidents refused to use emails. They put their own comfort over the country when they refused to get more efficient in the name of dodging subpoenas.

That paper-trail can make you much less effective in the long run, when all your 5 second blackberry emails are getting dragged out in front of a Congressional witch hunt. Overall I think it is a dumb move given the kind of environment a President operates in today. Allowing him to keep his civilian blackberry (for whatever purpose) would be even more stupid.

I will freely admit in my younger years having fun sending friends email

From: God@heaven.pearly-gates.org

or some such. Email is in absolutely no way a secure medium; despite efforts to secure it, it’s still a security risk. I just hope it’s some kid trying to impress his friends that is the first to break into the presidential Blackberry, not the Russian or Chinese government.

they won’t be filing FOIA’s

they won’t be filing FOIA’s

is one of our problems… is that we have government employees who think that what they say in an email should not be on the front page of the newspaper. I’m finding it hard to believe (that will certain exceptions like national security and privacy) that all government emails should be made available to the public sometime shortly after they are sent. And government workers who have problems with that should go work for corporations that don’t read their employees email… if they can find any.

Alaska has a very expansive public records act which makes almost anything a public officer or employee records in any form a public record; the exceptions are few and very explicit. When there has been controversy, the courts have always come down on the side of disclosure.

Either somebody didn’t tell Gov. Palin this or she didn’t listen and she and her staff as well as Todd Palin were constantly on the Blackberries. When the whole Monegan/Tpr. Wooten thing came down, there were all sorts of requests for her records and communications. There was an avalanche of requests after her nomination for VP. Her Commissioner of Administration tried to give her some cover by getting an AGs Opinion embracing the notion that there is some “private” use of State emails etc., a notion that has always been explicitly rejected. When we set up the policies for use of email, cell phones, lat tops etc. in the ’90s we made a virtue of necessity and countenanced de minimis personal use but the price of getting the grocery list or flirting on email was the knowledge that your grocery list and flirtatious conversation would be public record if anyone asked for it.

Anyway, Gov.Palin continues to assert that a large number of email by and between her, her staff, and Todd Palin are not subject to disclosure since they are private or are covered by executive privilege. I thought she would just use this to hold on to them until after the election and then give up and let them go, but so far she is holding out. It is before the Superior Court in Anchorage now and there is NO WAY she is going to be able to keep whatever that stuff is private.