Does Barack really send his own e-mails?

At Panera's where I buy my morning coffee there is a new desk with a computer next to the coffee and cream bar. It's for employee training, not the customers. They log-in, put on their head phones, and learn about all the latest products and procedures (nice photos). I'm sure it's a way to have all employees, particularly new ones, cover the same ground, but it also helps the long term employees catch up. We had something like this in the OSUL for training our student staff, but it was so primitive (in late 90s) I don't think my staff ever used it.

However, sitting at a computer is not too useful for senators, presidents or representatives. Better they should have to put the budget or census reports on their lap and experience the heft. In fact, government staff in general have gotten themselves in deep doo-doo sending e-mails, which causes our tax money to be used to hire battalions of lawyers on both sides to figure out what was purged, what was meant, and who sent it. Little jokes on the side when you think you're chatting with staff in on the background, sound pretty dumb when parsed by the hostile media or blogosphere.

I'm thrilled John McCain doesn't send e-mail. I'm not impressed at all that Barack Obama sent a text message (did his little pinky really press "send?") to his Gen-Next supporters to announce he's added an old guy, Joe Biden, a long time senator who with him holds down the ratings of Congress, to the ticket. Let them write long hand the way George Washington and John Adams did. If Barack writes the way he talks (multiple parenthetical and clarifying phrases per sentence), it could fill libraries of the future.

Update: Hot Air reports that this appeared in the Boston Globe and Forbes in 2000:

"McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.
After Vietnam, McCain had Ann Lawrence, a physical therapist, help him regain flexibility in his leg, which had been frozen in an extended position by a shattered knee. It was the only way he could hope to resume his career as a Navy flier, but Lawrence said the treatment, taken twice a week for six months, was excruciatingly painful.

”He endured it, he wouldn’t settle for less,” said Lawrence, who rejoiced with McCain when he passed the Navy physical. ”I have never seen such toughness and resolve.”

Another update at Hot Air points out he regularly reads his e-mail even though typing is difficult, and was chair of the Senate telecommunications committee--probably knows more than Obama. Does not having served in the military disqualify Obama from being Commander in Chief, it's asked, since sending e-mail seems to be a qualification? I'm betting they pull that ad if it's not gone already! Sort of like Joe Biden asking that guy in a wheel chair to stand up, innit?