Cavaliers didn’t appreciate LeBron’s words, actions during blowout – Washington Post
Globe and Mail |
Cavaliers didn't appreciate LeBron's words, actions during blowout
Washington Post AP CLEVELAND — Cavaliers guard Daniel Gibson says he didn't appreciate some of the things LeBron James had to say during his heated homecoming. Gibson, embarrassed and disappointed by the way he and his teammates played in Thursday … Cavs: In-Game Chatter With LeBron Anything but Friendly LeBron James Reminds Cavs What They Once Had Toughest hurdle still ahead for LeBron, fellow Miami stars |
Amazon: We Didn’t Pull Down WikiLeaks Because Of Government
Say it ain’t so, Joe. Amazon’s web hosting service on Thursday said they didn’t stop hosting WikiLeaks just because Sen. Joe Liberman (I-CT) asked them to.
The Lieberman camp said this week that Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks after inquires from the Connecticut Senator’s office. But Amazon said late Thursday that reports that government inquires caused the pulldown were “inaccurate.”
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them,” Amazon said.
WikiLeaks, said Amazon, had violated their terms of service which stated that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.”
“It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content,” Amazon said in a statement.
Human Rights First had written a letter to Amazon asking the company to “make clear the decision making process that led the dropping of Wikileaks from Amazon’s servers and to share with the public which parts of the United States government contacted Amazon with the request to halt service.”
Amazon’s full statement:
There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate.
There have also been reports that it was prompted by massive DDOS attacks. That too is inaccurate. There were indeed large-scale DDOS attacks, but they were successfully defended against.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.” It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy. Human rights organizations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments.
We’ve been running AWS for over four years and have hundreds of thousands of customers storing all kinds of data on AWS. Some of this data is controversial, and that’s perfectly fine. But, when companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere.
We look forward to continuing to serve our AWS customers and are excited about several new things we have coming your way in the next few months.
– Amazon Web Services
State finds Broward Judge-elect Gottlieb didn’t break election laws
Broward Commissioner Stacy Ritter wasn’t the only local who had to plead a case to the state elections commission recently. Judge-elect Ken Gottlieb, husband of school board member Jennifer Gottlieb, was also accused of breaking elections law.
Unlike Ritter, though, Gottlieb was cleared.
“It was frivolous,” Gottlieb said Thursday. He’ll be sworn in as the Group 20 Broward County court judge on Jan. 21.
He was accused of breaking the rules governing judicial races by letting voters know he was a Democrat. The accuser pointed to YouTube, MySpace and an old Gottlieb Senate campaign page, as well as a biography on Gottlieb’s law firm website, where hints or overt statements about his political party were printed.
The Florida Elections Commission staff recommended that probable cause be found that he violated the law. But the FEC itself didn’t agree; the charges were dismissed.
“I’ve never done anything wrong,” Gottlieb said Thursday, “and the Florida Elections Commision found none of it was true.”
More on the jump.
When Hitler didn’t meet Churchill
(Scott)
John noted the anniversary of the birth of Winston Churchill yesterday. Among the many qualities that made Churchill a man out of joint with his times was this one: He frequently wrote and spoke favorably of the Jews and in support of the creation of a Jewish homeland. In his book Eminent Churchillians, the prominent historian Andrew Roberts pauses in his chapter on Churchill’s politically incorrect statements on race to observe:
Not all Churchill’s racial characterizations were negative…He believed the Jews to be “the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” He felt an instinctive affinity for their genius as well as a historian’s respect for their trials, and he supported Jewish aspirations wherever they did not clash with those of the Empire. He may have inherited his philo-Semitism from his father, but he certainly gave it new lustre in his own life.
(Roberts’s quote derives from Churchill’s famous essay “Zionism versus Bolshevism.”)
One striking example of Churchill’s sympathy for the Jews derives from Churchill’s work on his great history of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, during Churchill’s “wilderness years.” In 1932 Churchill’s research on the Marlborough biography took him to the European battlefields on which his ancestor had staked his claim to greatness. Churchill continued to Munich and a possible meeting with Adolf Hitler. Martin Gilbert tells the story, but prefaces the story with this revelation:
Every biographer tries to find the key to his subject’s personality, and above all the flaws and weaknesses which are an indispensable part of any biographical presentation. I remember how pleased, actually thrilled, I was some twenty-five years ago, talking to one of those who had been close to Churchill in the Twenties, Thirties, Forties and Fifties. He said to me: “You have to understand, Gilbert, that Winston did have one serious fault.” As a biographer, my ears pricked up and my pen was poised to record and then to follow this up. This gentleman continued, “He was too fond of Jews.” Whether this was a serious fault for some of his contemporaries, for his biographer it was an extraordinary window into his life.
Then the story:
When in November 1932, shortly before Hitler came to power, and Churchill was in Munich doing some historical research about the First Duke of Marlborough, his ancestor, an intermediary tried to get him to meet Hitler, who was in Munich at the time and had high hopes of coming to power within months. Churchill agreed to meet Hitler, who was going to come to see him in his hotel in Munich, and said to the intermediary: “There are a few questions you might like to put to him, which can be the basis of our discussion when we meet.” Among them was the following question: “What is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?”
Gilbert adds:
This may seem a simple sentiment to us now, but how many people, distinguished people from Britain, the United States and other countries, who met or might have met Hitler, raised that question with him? So surprised, and possibly angered, was Hitler by this question that he declined to come to the hotel and see Churchill.
Gilbert retells this story in Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, which should be supplemented by Michael Makovsky’s Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft.
Geller didn’t call Gunzburger to congratulate her, either
Truth be told, former Broward Mayor Ken Keechl is not the only losing candidate who didn’t call his victor to offer congratulations.
Steve Geller is another to add to the list. Geller fought viciously with Sue Gunzburger for her District 6 seat on the Broward County Commission. She beat him in the August Democratic primary. (She went on to trounce Russell Setti in the general election and is now Broward “mayor.”)
While I wait for Keechl to call me back to talk about his reasoning, I did reach out to Geller, a former state senator, for his thoughts. Geller said “of course not” when I asked if he called Gunzburger after her win.
“What do you say when you call somebody to congratulate them?” he asked. “You’re not calling them to concede. You’re calling to congratulate them. I would prefer to think of this as when you have two boxers in the ring and they circle around and they have a tough fight and one of them wins and they both go over and say ‘Hey, good fight, good fight.’ On the other hand if one of them wins by, just an example, they pack into their boxing glove a set of brass knuckles or they win by punching you in the eye or kneeing you in the groin when the referee is not looking, you wouldn’t go over and congratulate them.”
Geller said Gunzburger called him a “sleazy lobbyist,” distorted his record and “she photoshopped my picture on a regular basis.”
Those were the equivalent of being kneed in the groin, he said.
No, the Pope didn’t condone condom usage
Wanting something to be true does not make it so.
American Thinker Blog
Outgoing Broward Mayor Keechl didn’t get traditional sack of gifts
Thanks to ethics reform, Broward’s departing mayor, Ken Keechl, did not get the traditional sack of gifts from the vice mayor, Sue Gunzburger.
This tradition cannot be underestimated in its importance, judging from the past. As you might recall from the 2008 “I didn’t get a plaque” incident, any omissions can be considered a blatant snub. In that case, then-incoming Mayor Stacy Ritter bought an interesting sack of gifts for outgoing Mayor Lois Wexler. But she did not buy her a plaque with a gavel on it.
Click on the jump to have your memory refreshed about what was in Ritter’s bag of gifts to Wexler, and to read our story about that perceived slight. Ritter received a crystal vase and a donation on her behalf to the charity Family Central, when Keechl took over as mayor.
But the tradition is gone, apparently. This year, Gunzburger said that because of the new ethics rules — which say commissioners can’t accept gifts in their official capacity that are worth more than $ 50 — she was only giving Keechl a plaque. The photo above shows her handing Keechl the plaque, and kissing him.
NYT’s Calmes Complains GOP Didn’t ‘Accommodate’ Obama by Passing Liberal Laws During ‘National Crisis’
New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes appeared on a panel discussion on “The Role of Minority Party in Congress” held at the Wilson International Center for Scholars on Monday, and outlined four liberal complaints against Republicans for not sufficiently accommodating Barack Obama early in his presidency (when they were distinctly the minority party and rather powerless) on his allegedly moderate measures like health reform and financial regulation.
Blaming Republicans for Obama’s woes ignores the fact that the Democrats had just won huge filibuster-proof majorities in 2008. The party controlled the Senate by a 60-40 margin and the House of Representatives by a health 257-178. And conservatives would argue that Obama’s claims of bipartisanship were severely overstated and amounted to trying to pick off individual Republicans to get on board with his sweeping liberal agenda on stimulus and health care “reform,” instead of reaching out to the Republican caucus as a whole with more moderate and modest proposals.
Talking on the panel Monday, aired by C-SPAN, about the need for political accommodation in Congress, Calmes took “the risk of sounding like I’m expressing an opinion" in her closing remarks, about an hour and ten minutes into the discussion:
NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias
Wolffe: Rahm didn’t push bipartisanship
Sargent highlights a passage in Richard Wolffe’s new book, that shows Rahm Emanuel arguing against a bipartisan route on health care:
Obama was prepared to sacrifice time and political capital to make his policy bipartisan and more ambitious; Emanuel believed Obama did not have that luxury. "Time is your commodity. That answers everything," Emanuel said. "But a lot of us thought we didn’t have the amount of time that was being dedicated. If you abandon the bipartisan talks you get blamed. He still wanted to try to achieve it that way. But that’s one of a series of things you can look back on and be a genius about.
As Sargent notes, this is contrary to the perception that it was Emanuel pushing the administration on compromise.
Rahm Didn’t Want Bipartisanship
Richard Wolffe is out with a new book, Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House, in which former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel says he departed from his boss on a key issue: to be bipartisan, or not to be? Greg Sargent with the details:
“Unlike his boss, Emanuel wasn’t interested in looking reasonable with Republicans; he wanted to look victorious. He didn’t care much for uniting red and blue America; he wanted blue America to beat its red rival.”
Said Emanuel: “My job as chief of staff is to give him 180-degree advice. He hired me, as he asked, to learn from the past, or to use my knowledge from my time in Congress and in the Clinton administration. Watching ’94, watching ’97 when we did kids’ health care, and then studying Medicare, what were the lessons? The lesson about time as a commodity is not mine, it’s Lyndon Johnson’s. You got X amount of time; you gotta use it.”
Sargent: “The decision to waste time chasing bipartisan support for health reform was clearly one of the mistakes that led to health care being such a big political liability for Dems. It extended the whole mess by months and months, which gave opponents more time to demagogue the bill and scare voters and helped turn the public against the process. Rahm seems to be suggesting here that he foresaw something like this happening, and argued against the futile quest for bipartisan support, which is certainly not the view of his legacy in the White House that has endured.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire
The account of the Coalition negotiations by David Laws tells us little we didn’t already know. It thus surely heralds his return to office.
What Pelosi Didn’t Say
First Read: “The most underreported part of Nancy Pelosi’s decision on Friday to run for minority leader: The fact that her announcement (both her Tweet and her full statement) NEVER once mentioned how she plans to lead the House Democrats back to the majority. It was about protecting what had been created (health care, and Wall Street reform), not about how Democrats regain power. We know that Pelosi racked up a considerable legislative record over the past two years, and we also know that she and her team were able to win control in ’06. But how does she fix her public image?”
Meanwhile, a New York Times editorial argues House Democrats need a new leader: “What they need is what Ms. Pelosi has been unable to provide: a clear
and convincing voice to help Americans understand that Democratic
policies are not bankrupting the country, advancing socialism or
destroying freedom.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire
Reid didn’t get 90% among Hispanics
I was one of several reporters to print — in error — a report that Sharron Angle got just 8 percent of the Hispanic votes.
The implication is that these numbers come from a "Latino Decisions" exit poll — an implication the authors of the poll are not in a hurry to dispel. Ben Smith at Politico, as just one example, was taken in: "Reid got an amazing 90 percent of the state’s 12 percent Hispanic voters, according to exit polls; Sharron Angle got just 8 percent."
Except that the Latino Decisions poll wasn’t an exit poll — rather, it was an "election eve" poll, conducted before Election Day, just like all the other polling that has been going on for months. The actual exit poll, over at CNN, shows Angle getting a normal Republican share of the Hispanic vote, 30 percent.
The 38-percentage-point Reid margin among Hispanics in the exit poll is still a symptom of a big Republican problem out West, but it’s not out of line with their problems in other races, and it’s actually better than John McCain did among Hispanics in Nevada in 2008.
UPDATE: Latino Decisions explains why they think they’re right.
What President Obama Didn’t Learn at Harvard
If President Obama had gone to Harvard Business School, instead of Harvard Law School, he might have learned this amazing lesson about American enterprise
American Thinker Blog
Attacking the Media Didn’t Work
Brad Phillips: “2010 was supposed to be the year that attacking the media — if not ignoring it altogether — was the winning media strategy. It didn’t turn out that way. Tuesday’s election results are a vindication for media strategists who have long argued that maintaining positive press relations is still the best path to electoral success.”
“That’s not to say that an anti-media campaign strategy can’t work. It can, and it did for a handful of candidates. But the high-wire tactic tends to be horribly overused, unnecessarily crippling otherwise viable candidates.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire
