McCain Actually Blocked Creation of Blackberry

[Shiver]

From Politico via The Huffington Post...

/snippity/

One thing is certain: McCain’s tenure is not as simple to encapsulate as McCain’s economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, tried to make it seem last week, when he held up a BlackBerry and credited its invention to McCain’s work on the committee. In fact, McCain voted against key legislation that paved the device’s way.

“Being the chair of that committee is very, very important,” said former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt, who served for nine months with McCain at the helm of Commerce and now advises the Obama campaign. “And if it were true that John McCain had championed the opening up of new markets or technology, that would be a good thing. It just is not true.”

/snippity/

“Under John McCain’s guiding hand,” his website states, “Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology.”

But a former FCC senior staffer, who would talk candidly only if not quoted by name, called this a serious overstatement, noting that the nascent wireless spectrum was first made available in 1985, and that the FCC increased its size for “unlicensed national information infrastructure devices” in January 1997 — just as McCain was assuming the chairmanship.

/snip-snip/

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13822.html

*****

Admittedly, not the biggest lie or gaff, but I'm seriously starting to wonder is McNugget or his staff are even trying anymore...

[JTFrog]

1. "McCain Adviser: BlackBerry comment was 'ill-timed' joke"

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/21/mccain-adviser-blackberry-comment-was-ill-timed-joke/

From CNN's Peter Lanier

(CNN) — John McCain's economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin laughed off his now infamous BlackBerry comment on Sunday, and jokingly laid out his new campaign strategy.

"Many lessons here-number one, no sense of humor on the campaign trail. I swear off telling any jokes," Holtz-Eakin told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. He went on to add that he wouldn't talk about the history of technology anymore either. Holtz-Eakin came under fire earlier this week for implying that McCain invented the BlackBerry. When asked during a press briefing on Tuesday what McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Holtz-Eakin held up his Blackberry and said: "He did this".

"Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did," he went on to say.

While Holtz-Eakin reiterated his point that McCain was involved with telecommunications advancements, the adviser claimed that his comment was nothing more than a bad joke.

"It was not just badly told, it was ill-timed," he laughed. "But you know, these things happen."