Yeah…those were invented in Canada.

I’m Gob-founded, or Dumb-smacked.  Or…I just don’t know how to react. 

And, yes, RIM is a Canadian company.  Ooh, this should be fun.

John McCain is aware of all BlackBerry traditions.  All your PDAs are belong to him.

I don’t usually say ‘to be fair’ these days but to be fair, McCain’s adviser was simply talking about McCain’s role in facilitating the development of communications networks, just like…

...Gore was saying…

...about the internet. Never mind, go get him.

Dude, there is NO way to spin this any way that makes sense.  RIM is Canadian.  It runs on the fantastically ubiquitous GSM standard… which was standard is every country in the fucking world before it made its way to the U.S.  There is litterally not a single technology in a Blackberry that can really be called American.  In fact it is the perfect poster child for why the U.S. is dead last in telecommunications innovation, and a-holes like McCain made it possible for U.S. Telecoms to keep it that way to stretch out their monopolies in many markets and drain taxpayers twice.  Jesus, what an idiot.

—TP in UT

Somewhere in Tennessee, Al Gore is laughing with revenge.

Ahh, how lovely!  I was waiting for a Palin Eagleton Moment, but now I can throw the tired old “Al Gore invented the Internet” canard at wingers.  What fun!

What was also a lot of fun was the NPR Mornig Edition interview with Holtz-Eakin.  When pressed on what specific regulation McCain would favor (after prefacing the question with McCain’s own words about how he favors de-regulation) the poor guy was left floundering.  I half expected the NPR reporter to apologize for humiliating the poor fellow.

John McCain invented the lolcat.

What’s doubly annoying about this is that McCain has done nothing from that powerful Commerce post to correct the problems in the American patent system.  RIM recently had to pay out about 600 million on patents which would have been rejected in a functioning system.

The current American patent system creates a massive disincentive to innovation.  Patent trolling (which is a form of extortion, really) is out of control.  Amongst other things it can result in infringement lawsuits which necessitate payouts even if the bogus or hoarded patent is subsequently tossed by the patent office.  Investment money goes into patent hoarding and litigation, not R&D;.  Why don’t we ask McCain about that?

And we all know that this Blackberry moment will not get even 1% of the Gore internet claim, even though Gore was actually accurate in what he actually said, which is more than we can say here.

Too bad this wasn’t YouTubed.

I don’t know what’s happened to Holtz-Eakin.  Back when he was our manager for the Tap Into America tour, he knew all about Dobly sound.  Maybe he’s been swinging that cricket bat of his a bit too freely lately?

Well, I, for one, am deeply appreciative of the hard work John McCain’s Commerce Committee has put into making sure I can access The Google from anywhere on my portable telephone.

I can’t think of a politician in my lifetime who was treated more unfairly than Al Gore.

I have no doubt the media will understand perfectly what John McCain was trying to say, and won’t run around, hysterically screaming “LIAR!!! LIARRR!! OMGLOL LIAR!!!” like they did to Gore.

But Seeker, those patent-trolls were American, so that means McCain really did invent the Blackberry!

To be fair, Al Gore ran a pretty bad campaign. He should have sold himself as a third Clinton term, and he didn’t.

Well, there goes my mental picture of a shirtless, sunburned Al Gore, digging trenches and laying cable to build the Internet, replaced by John McCain in white lab coat and shoe covers wielding a soldering iron at his workbench, building a prototype Blackberry.

Ben D. sez:

To be fair, Al Gore ran a pretty bad campaign. He should have sold himself as a third Clinton term, and he didn’t.

Maybe, but to be more fair, it’s pretty fraggin hard to run the campaign you want to run when you’re constantly trying to explain that no, I didn’t say I invented teh Interwebz, and no, I didn’t say that I invented Love Canal, and yes, I’m sorry that I took a bad quote saying that Love Story was about the wife and me seriously, and all the other fake lies the press decided to run with in 2000.  The media deck was stacked so heavily against Gore that it’s really impossible to say whether or not he ran a decent campaign.

I will concede that, as Huey Freeman would put it, he went out like a punk, but that’s another argument.

</derail>

Ben, the Gore thing has been fairly well canvassed here.  Fact is, yes, Gore ran a shitty campaign.  (Amongst many, many, other things, he forgot the first rule of winning: before anything else, shoot Mark Penn.)  But he was also royally, royally screwed by the media in an unfair way to a way that had never been seen in the modern era.  Not only was the coverage unfair but the individual reporters responsible were arrogant and petulant and sulky and hostile to correcting any of it.

He spent 5+ years as a POW working on the prototype for that, you ungrateful bastiches.

Of course, he would have been better off if he had spent the time working on a metal suit with flight capability and repulsor rays.

The Plebe is right.  Innovation in telecommunications in the US has often come DESPITE the gov. and the large companies.  They wanted to keep their nice stable cash flow and they bought enough legislators to get it done until they could be in a position to strangle the next paradigm.

Mornings spent digging ditches and laying fiber optic cables, nights spent innovating the global communications field. Few know the sacrifices John McCain has made to make our phones great. Elect him Techno-Lord to repay him. He’s ten times the man Alexander Graham Bell was.

http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/

Somewhere in Tennessee, Al Gore is laughing with revenge.

Only if there were endless media stories harping on this. Which there won’t be, because IOKIYAR.

There should be, because the GOP is shouting like a pack of rabid dogs over the same effing drivel.

I still want a “Caribou Barbie” and “Snowmobile Ken” Doll set

John McCain invented the Blackberry . . . . but he can’t send an email . . . . syntax error! syntax error!  followed by: MSOD - (Microsoft Blue Screen of Death)

I really, really had thought that I was prepared for the most asinine, ridiculous, and reality-challenged statements . . . . but, no, I’m not. the capacity of the Republicans to deny and twist reality matches exactly . . . well, has anybody noticed that the Republican Party talks about McCain the way the Communist Party of North Korea talks about their Dear Leader?

Of course Blackberries wouldn’t work very well had Al Gore not invented the internet!

Not to mention that if Republicans got the same treatement as Democrats, Sarah Palin’s installing a tanning bed in the governor’s mansion would be the “windsurfing photo” of this campaign.

But Redshift, that doesn’ t matter because she was NEVER THERE!  It was just for the times they rented the place out as a conference center, for the benefit of the taxpayers, of course!

How long until someone points out that McCain voted against the 1996 telecommunications act that laid the groundwork for much of the current telecom infrastructure?

He spent 5+ years as a POW working on the prototype for that, you ungrateful bastiches.

Lazy. Tony Stark was only a POW for a month, and by the end of it he’d not only invented an impossible power source, but a fully-armed power armor to boot.

Psst.

Word on the street is that McCain used his position in the Senate Commerce Committee to facilitate an American company’s attempt to sue the Blackberry out of existence.

Pass it on.

America is truly not worthy of being lead by a man as intelligent, far-thinking, masterful, and creative as John Sidney McCain III.

No.  No, it is.

<blockquote>Given the level of McCain’s technical sophistication, I’m trying to figure out where the boiler and the steam engine are on my BlackBerry Curve.  I have to say, I don’t know how he did it, but I’m mighty impressed… </blcokquote>

You should have seen the prototype he made while he was a POW.  It was made of bamboo and coconut shells, held together with ear wax.

keshmeshi:
The sad thing is that many Americans would be just fine with McCain sticking it to some goddamned foreigners, even if they were in the right and Americans in the wrong. 

“Ha, ha, you did all the work and we get all the muh-neeeee!  Ha, ha, ha-ha-ha!  Loooooosers!”

my mental picture of a shirtless, sunburned Al Gore, digging trenches and laying cable to build the Internet

This would be *young* (like, mid-80s) Al Gore, right?

That would explain why the RIM network is so shitty and they never explain why it crashes.

That would explain why the RIM network is so shitty and they never explain why it crashes.

Indeed McCain _is_ the master of crashing.

Wait, wait: John McCain is too physcially POW-disabled to use a computer…buuuuut he invented the Blackberry? (Allegedly.) Or is that why he “invented” it? (Allegedly.) 
And does he actually know how to use one, or does he keep trying to use it to change the channel?