Results tagged ‘ Capitalism ’
Curt Schilling: STILL a raging hypocrite.
Hi guys & gals. I sure hated Obama and his stimulus money until I found out I could get my hands on some!
Oh goodie. It’s great to see Curt Schilling is STILL the big mouth, double-standard applying, flip-flopping, flaming hypocrite I have always thought of him as.
From Phil Andrews @ BleacherReport.com comes this:
Thanks to a $75 million financing deal with the state of Rhode Island’s Economic Development Corporation, former Major League Pitcher Curt Schilling is now on the move.
You see, back in 2006, Schilling founded the entertainment and IP creation company “38 Studios.”
Its offices were once based in Maynard, Mass., but now 38 Studios is relocating to Providence, R.I. and doing so by taking advantage of that states Job Creation Guaranty Program, which targets companies based in knowledge and intellectual property sectors who wish to expand their business to the Ocean State.
38 Studios expects to develop a broad range of products, including on-line and console video games, toys, novels, comics, film, TV and other forms of digital media.
The move also coincides with the debut of the company’s first major action fantasy game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
Reckoning has a class system called destinies, which will allow the user the chance to play and evolve their character depending on what play style they like.
Schilling says that Reckoning is full of infinite possibilities, endless choice and distinctly fast and fluid combat which can be seen in game trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhoJ3NcoqO4&feature=pyv
Look, I am one hundred percent FOR programs like these. I love the idea of stimulus money being used to free up funds at ANY level for small businesses such as this.
You don’t give billions in tax breaks/subsidies to large corporations like Exxon and BP if you want to kick start an economy rapidly. You plant those dollars like seeds among tens of thousands of small businesses and even if a large portion don’t succeed in the long run you are much better off for it in the end.
But I can’t sit here and read this piece and just ignore how ardently anti-Obama this clown has been from day one.
I specifically remember a post of his from not even two weeks after Obama had been inaugurated where he wasn’t even willing to take a “wait & see” approach and just started jumping down the President’s throat on anything and everything, regurgitating the normal conservative talking points along the way.
Now maybe this is just the competitors fire that still burned in him at the time, after all he DID Schilling stump for – and contribute to – the failed presidential campaign of Republican John McCain.
But it went beyond that. He just couldn’t stand the idea that someone who didn’t believe what he believed was now President. He just couldn’t tolerate the idea that someone who doesn’t “look” like him was now the leader of the free world.
In a blog entry headlined Wasn’t The Rest of the World Supposed to Start Loving Us? the right-hander recycles a lengthy anti-Obama screed originally penned by paleoconservative British journalist Peter Hitchens:
The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilization… If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything…
I was in Washington DC the night of the election… As I walked… there had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.
They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war… The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.
Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, [the United States] was unique…
And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad…
Hey Curt? Remember THIS guy? Yeah, he wouldn’t have bailed that program you are using out.
Yes, how sad. How sad that someone so patently wrong has such a loyal fan base of readers. But that is all Hitchens, the UK’s version of Glenn Beck, seems to have.
Droves of followers who love his pessimistic drivel that is just laced with intolerance towards all things that can be classified as “not them”.
He has been described by the left-wing Guardian newspaper as: “The Mail on Sunday’s fulminator-in-chief” and his columns as “molten Old Testament fury shot through with visceral wit.”
Hitchens is uncompromising with his moral and political stance (which is incredibly ironic since he has flip-flopped back and forth as an atheist/christian, liberal/conservative his entire adult life), describing Britain as a land of “burglaries, muggings, swearing, pools of vomit, MRSA, rave parties and traveller encampments”; council estates as “surrounded by the tattooed, with their pit bulls and serial partners, crack dens, joy-riders, open-all-hours pubs,” and the police as “wooden, officious twerps in dayglo jackets” who have sided with the lawless and given up on crime.
Of single mothers, he wrote: “It cannot be long before Britain has its first 24-year-old granny. When you abolish husbands and fathers that is what you get. As the rules of civilised life are swept away and the only people interested in getting married are lesbian clergywomen, there will soon be thousands of them.”
Hitchens lays the blame squarely at the door of the liberal left-wing: “Like several governments before it, Labour has actively encouraged promiscuity by undermining marriage, promoting ‘alternative lifestyles’ and preaching immorality in schools – and, of course, by continuing to subsidise the results.”
He has also criticised immigration, which is “limitless” and “unmonitored”; Tony Blair’s New Labour – “a horrible rabble of fakes, wreckers and frauds” who are “dismantling Britain as a free country”; the Conservative Party – “the Useless party”; the EU – “horrible”, “a monster”, “anti-British”; and liberal left-wing intellectuals – “hell-bent on turning the UK into a meaningless, history-free and cultureless wilderness”.
And THIS is the guy that Schilling looks to for his political philosophy.
Getting back to the “mouth that roared”, er, Schilling I just smiled at the hypocrisy this assclown is once again showing.
Remember that plan he got his incentive money from Rhode Island to move his company to their state? The Job Creation Guaranty Program?
Well that program was only made viable AFTER getting a huge, heaping dose of, gasp, evil stimulus money!
Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Small Business Jobs Act, SBA was able to temporarily increase its guarantee on most 7(a) loans to as much as 90 percent. This increased guarantee contributed to a rebound of SBA’s lending, which had been hit hard as a result of the recession, and put billions of dollars in capital in the hands of tens of thousands of small businesses across the country.
In layman’s terms, the program was faltering, the big, bad, intrusive Federal government he so despises stepped in and guaranteed the SBA‘s loans up to a previously unheard of ninety percent and this resulted in billions of dollars being infused into small businesses across the nation.
Read up Curt. Read up.
Including Schilling’s.
So this guy who has railed against Obama, referred to him as a socialist, endorsed other conservatives who question the man’s patriotism and nationality, donated in an effort to defeat him and even hit the campaign trail against him has the audacity to happily soak up money that was only made possible by the now infamous “stimulus plan” for his own purposes.
Grade. A. F@#$in’. Hypocrite.
Again.
Cubs threw 1918 World Series?
If Chicago has been willing to believe that a cow caused the Great Chicago Fire, maybe it will buy this one: The White Sox got the idea to throw the 1919 World Series after the Cubs did the same thing one year earlier.
That’s the suggestion — more of a hint, really — from Eddie Cicotte, one of the infamous Black Sox banned from baseball after their tainted World Series against Cincinnati.
In a 1920 court deposition the Chicago History Museum recently put on its website, Cicotte said “the boys on the club” talked about how a Cub or a number of Cubs were offered $10,000 to throw the 1918 Series they lost 4-2 to the Boston Red Sox.
Cicotte is as vague as vague can be, failing to name any names or provide any details about how the players might have done it or even if he believes the Cubs threw the Series.
But if what he suggests is true it means that when it came to fixing ball games in the early 20th century, Chicago was nobody’s Second City.
“It is interesting to me as a Cubs fan and a historian of Chicago that both teams could be involved in back-to-back years,” said Peter Alter, an archivist at the museum who examined the document and other artifacts that the museum paid $100,000 for at auction.
If Cicotte’s deposition lacks specifics, it does offer a glimpse into the life of a player when their lives were a lot more like the working stiffs who rooted for them than the wealthy owners they played for.
Players commonly groused about being underpaid and there wasn’t anyone in the majors who didn’t hear rumors about fixes. It was impossible not to see the gamblers at the games, the lobbies of the hotels where they stayed or in the taverns where they drank.
And they talked about such rumors all the time, including, Cicotte said, on a long train ride from Chicago to the East Coast.
“The ball players were talking about somebody trying to fix the National League ball players or something like that,” Cicotte is quoted as saying in the deposition.
“Well anyway there was some talk about them offering $10,000 or something to throw the Cubs in the Boston Series,” he said. “Somebody made a crack about getting money, if we got into the Series, to throw the Series.”
Cicotte apparently likes the sound of $10,000 because that is what he said somebody left in his hotel room for his role in the fix of the 1919 Series. He died in 1969.
Whether any of this is true is unknown, but an author who wrote about the 1918 Series after examining the deposition and other material said not only was such a fix possible, it was understandable.
“They didn’t make much money,” said Sean Deveney, a reporter with The Sporting News whose book, “The Original Curse,” said a fix by the Cubs was likely. “They had the incentive to do something like that.”
Both the Cubs and the Red Sox were upset that the teams’ owners were not paying their fair share of the World Series receipts, Deveney said. Before one Series game in Boston, the two squads refused to come on the field until the owners paid them what they were promised.
“The owners said no,” Deveney said.
Deveney said the players quickly understood that they could not win a public relations battle by refusing to play a game during World War I, not in a ball park filled with soldiers. So they played.
So did the Cubs throw the Series? No great hitter suddenly forgot how to hit, and the Cubs pitchers were terrific, finishing the Series with an astonishing 1.04 ERA.
Still, “there were definitely some suspicious plays,” Deveney said, and most of them involved outfielder Max Flack.
In the fourth game, Flack was picked off not once, but twice. Flack turned a catchable fly ball in the sixth and final game into an error that allowed two runs to score in the Red Sox‘s 2-1 win.
And there was the time Babe Ruth came to the plate for the Red Sox — a pitcher at the time, but emerging as one of the game’s best hitters — and the Cubs’ pitcher, Lefty Tyler, saw that Flack was not playing deep enough in right field.
“He waved him back and Flack just stood there,” Deveney said. “Sure enough, Babe hit one over his head” for a triple that scored two runs.
Later in the game, Cubs pitcher Phil Douglas came in the game long enough to field a grounder and throw the ball over the first baseman’s head, allowing the decisive run to score in the Red Sox‘s 3-2 win.
A few years later, Douglas was banned from baseball for what the papers called “treachery” after proposing that another team in the pennant race pay him to leave the team and “go fishing.”
All six games in the 1918 Cubs-Red Sox Series were close — Boston never won a game by more than a run — and it would only take a dropped ball here or a badly thrown ball there to turn victory into defeat.
“It didn’t take much to throw a game,” Deveney said. “It really didn’t.”
If there is a record of a baseball official asking Cicotte a single question about the 1918 World Series, Deveney doesn’t know about it.
I guess that "curse" actually lasted more than 86 years huh?
“Baseball didn’t want to investigate,” he said. “They wanted to make it all about the Black Sox and say, ‘OK, gambling’s gone.”
And what if the Cubs — a team that hasn’t won a World Series in 103 years, blaming the curse of a goat and the glove of a fan named Steve Bartman along the way — had actually beaten Boston back in 1918?
“It would have bumped the curse up a decade,” joked Alter. “We could be looking at a century [without winning a World Series] seven years from now.”
I Hate To Burst Your Bubble, But…
Insult is no longer allowed to be added to injury. Greed needs a boundary. The dot.sports bubble is about to burst.
Billionaire NFL owners and millionaire players insult our common sense as they cut up a 10 billion dollar revenue pie paid for by foreclosed fans.
Squeezing literal blood from a stone, owners have extracted huge TV prepayments, sent layoff notices to staff and invented “personal seat licenses” (the infamous mortgage derivative of sports) this year.
Help me understand: I pay for my seats, I pay shipping and handling and parking and overpriced concessions and logo’d merchandise and, in addition, I have to buy the right to be reamed for a price *larger* than my actual tickets?
Why? To pad the vault before a pending lockout designed to prevent the players from cutting a bigger slice of the pie – despite overwhelming evidence of the premature deaths and shortened life expectancy of players.
Hello, injury… meet insult. Football may be the most obvious right now, but baseball and other pro sports share the vastly inflated economic disparity vs. the fans. Bread and circuses?
Not that the players are underpaid (well, the Pittsburgh Pirates, maybe) – rather, under taxed. Due to tax breaks for new construction, some players in new top condos in NY pay *one fifth* as much tax as a couple in Queens pays. Hello, insult?
We forget that players work half a year, not full-time. And many duck local taxes in the “home” towns of their ballparks through high-priced advisors.
And the owners are rigging the game. Consider this: DirectTV would have actually paid the owners *more* if there were a lockout than if games were played.
Apart from the TV deals and away gate ticket sales the league divides, owners collect from their stadium (gate) receipts for home games, naming rights, sponsorships, luxury suite revenue, concessions and local broadcast rights.
In addition, your own stadium brings in extra money for concerts, events, a pro shop, and $12 hot dogs. And the trend has clearly been for private stadium ownership.
When owners saw the market trend move from individual fans to corporate buyers a few years back, they raised prices, expanded luxury boxes, and brought in arugula (the aromatic salad green). Let companies treat clients and vendors from their subscription, right? And serve wine and brie, right? Never mind that the crowd sounds different and TV shots are filled with empty seats, right?
Wrong. As the economic bubble burst, companies can’t afford overpriced seats and those that still might are *embarassed* to be seen as spending frivolously. The warning signs are visible during many baseball telecasts. The dot.com bubble burst. Then the housing bubble. Then the mortgage derivative bubble. Then the Madoff bubble (can you say Wilpon?). Then the jobs bubble. Soon the public pension bubble. And state budgets. Is DoubleBubble next?
New Rule: Team owners want a hefty percent of everything? Ok, you guys get the pain too.
1) Since each concussion costs 2 years lifespan, here’s the fair way: Team owners must experience exactly the same concussion in their luxury boxes that any player sustains on the field. Use automated hydraulic helmets or retired players with ball-peen hammers to invoke the “neuron-for-a-neuron” clause of the new collective bargaining agreement. Have owners and players share the same health plan (like maybe senators and citizens should?).
2) Since PSL’s are basically a real estate transaction, shouldn’t owners pay a tax like we do? Like a developer selling condo units. Sales and capital gain per every PSL. 40,000 seats @$10k PSL per = $400 million revenue… what’s the fair local tax on that? 25% = $100 million.
In the last few years, most people have seen their pensions and long-term benefits disappear – most corporate workers large and small, as well as teachers, firemen, policemen in the public sector – the promises were unrealistic and impossible to sustain.
Players may be “entertainers” and push for whatever contracts the market will bear. But the money eventually comes from or is passed on to the public – a broke public, mind you – and a market that can’t bear it anymore.
At what point is economic disparity so extreme that stadiums are empty or, even better, they will look like the streets of Cairo?
Can you say Twitter?
