Obama faces new challenge

President Obama is facing a surprise mid-term electoral challenge from Apple’s iPad, with the device planning to contend congressional seats across all 50 states. The iPad, which has already hit the campaign trail, can communicate with voters 24 hours a day through its sleek touchscreen interface, and functions as its own support team. Using specially designed apps, the machine will email local action groups, take pictures of itself with babies, and recut footage from the day into professional campaign adverts that will automatically be uploaded to YouTube.

David Plouffe, the President’s recently re-recruited election strategist, is thought to be considering a negative campaign to ‘cut the bas****s off at the knees’, claiming them to be little more than ‘glorifed Kindles’ or ‘silly little televisions that you can’t watch football on and break all the time’. The President will address the nation tonight on the danger of ‘electing digital machines for an analogue world’ but it is thought that most Americans will now be feverishly pining for the seductive lines of Apple’s latest gadget.

The iPad: A little bit o’Star Trek

The iPad is a tricky device. Who wants to carry a ten inch screen in their handbags or manbags? Especially a screen that is easily scratched or cracked. You don’t spend a big chunk of change on something like that just to dump it in your carrybags next to the can of hot dogs. Something like that needs to fit in your pocket – as such, it needs to fold or simply be small enough to fit naturally. This is why newspapers are still useful – they fold, and don’t break. And you’re unlikely to need more than one newspaper on the average commuter’s bus journey (although that does depend on the newspaper).

No, the iPad’s home seems destined to be the coffee table – a handy way of persuing all the Sunday papers without having all the mess of the actual papers everywhere. Fancy a chapter of that new book you’ve been reading as a break? Just switch over. No getting up for you. It’s the equivalent of the remote control for your library, and will doubtless enlarge the size of many behinds. It’ll probably deal with video and music too, so there’ll be no getting up ever. Soon it will even wipe your behind. Most importantly though, it looks a bit Star Trek – and if you could call up things by voice, wouldn’t that be pretty cool? ‘Computer: Hamlet, Act 3.’ And there it is. It’d be like being Commander Data.

An instructive link on the machinery of controlled corporate leaks. And you thought it was just the politicians…