Results tagged ‘ Republican ’

Not Surprisingly, Curt Schilling’s Hypocrisy Knows No Ends

Curt Schilling: Raging Tea Party Hypocrite

“There can be no question our country is in the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes. I also think there can be no question that it falls on us, the individuals, to find a way out of our own personal crisis.” — Curt Schilling, February 2011

Uh-oh.

Turns out that 38 Studios is in real trouble. You remember 38 Studios, right?

If you don’t, a quick refresh:

Schilling started his own video-game company in 2006 (think World of Warcraft-type stuff), based it in Maynard. Four years later the state of Rhode Island offered 38 Studios a $75 million loan to move operations to that state, a move that wasn’t exactly met with jubilation in Rhode Island (the $75 million represented more than half of Rhode Island’s new job creation program).

And now it appears that 38 Studios is broke. Just three months after the company released its first game — called “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning” — 38 Studios missed its latest loan payment of $1.125 million to the state of Rhode Island on May 1. That means that 38 Studios (which basically means Schilling, who has absolutely been the only face and voice of the company since Day 1) has defaulted on its loan. And if 38 Studios were to fully default on the entire loan, guess who takes the hit? Yup, the citizens of Rhode Island — which will reportedly be a $112.6 million wallop. Big government at its worst.

This is where I get lost in the tall grass.

Curt Schilling, maybe you heard, is a Republican. He’s made that clear many times in many different forums. He’s campaigned for John McCain and Scott Brown and flirted — briefly, but some leg was shown — with the idea of running for Ted Kennedy’s vacated Senate seat. And Schilling isn’t a moderate Republican, this isn’t Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins. Nope, Schilling has made his beliefs very clear — he’s a Tea Party guy, wants the government out of our everyday lives, Tim Thomas with a spiltter.

And those are perfectly legitimate opinions. As a matter of fact, I’m with him on less government all the way. But here’s the difference: I haven’t spent the last five years on a very large platform railing against government bailouts and the evils of the sitting President and then happily accepted what is surely going to be a bailout from the state of Rhode Island for over 100 million bucks.

If this was, say, 2010, and the state of Rhode Island had royally screwed up (which they did, the fault starts there) and was forced to bail out a company for $112 million there’s a pretty good chance you would have a spirited post on 38 pitches about it.

Curt Schilling could once throw a baseball very fast and very well. I believe he is a no-question first ballot Hall of Famer. Maybe there are three better postseason pitchers in the history of the sport but there aren’t five. And that means some people will listen when he talks politics, I suppose. And I don’t doubt his passion about 38 Studios. He’s devoted years of his life to the company.

But I’ve never cared what an athlete or actor or musician thought about anything outside their given profession. Others disagree and care a great deal. And it was because this was Curt Schilling — the bloody sock, the two World Series, all of it — that the folks making the decisions in Rhode Island decided to piss away $75 million dollars. Very expensive jock-sniffing and another shining example of why people should always view government with extreme suspicion.

I wrote a couple of months ago that Curt Schilling should keep his mouth shut when it came to his early criticism of Bobby Valentine. Turns out all you need to do to shut Schilling up is have his company fail spectacularly and at the cost of the citizens of Rhode Island. Where is Schilling? He was on WEEI about 30 days running during the Valentine bashing, but I haven’t heard from him on 38 Studios. Where’s that personal accountability he advocates so strongly?

And that’s the dirty little secret when it comes to Schilling — he’s got plenty of bluster but there’s always more than a whiff of hypocrisy. The two topics he’s been loudest about? Steroids and politics. He was all over the problems of steroids in baseball early on, but contradicted his previous stance while testifying in front of Congress in 2005, saying he believed there was very little steroid use in baseball. Since then, he has flip-flopped again, going back to his pre-Congress take on the issue.

That’s why he has zero credibility when it comes to the steroid issue. I hear him talk about it now and all I can think of is how he choked when put on the biggest stage (ironic, given his superb October numbers). And now he can’t talk about how much small government means to him — his actions have spoken a lot louder than any words ever could.

Just ask the taxpayers of Rhode Island. Think Schilling will be campaigning for Mitt Romney in the Ocean State this fall?

Source: Kirk Minihane @ WEEI.com

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   

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.

Rudy Giuliani…your modern day Mass-kisser!

alg_rev-al-rudy3.jpg He had to have known Yankee fans would react like this.  He had to have.

He is, after all, the man who has spent the better half of the last 6 months trying to convince Americans that only he knew that something like 9/11 was bound to happen.

He is literally running on a platform where he is attempting to paint himself (contrary to what his own 9/11 commission testimony tends to indicate) as some sort of modern day prophet.

And he didn’t see THIS one coming?

A day after former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani said he plans to root for the Boston Red Sox in the World Series, two of the city’s tabloid’s offered their response.

“TRAITOR!” decried the Daily News.  “C’mon Rudy, How Could You Root For the Red Sox in Series?”

“REDCOAT”  screamed the New York Post.   ”Yank Fan Rudy Pulls for Bosox”

Perhaps it won’t matter. After all, it’s not like he’s rooting AGAINST my beloved Yankees, who once again failed to make it to the series. But the baseball faux pas is a jab in the eye to all those die-hard Yankee fans who have always thought they had Rudy in their corner.   After all, this is the man who has been accused of having spent more time at Yankee Stadium than at Ground Zero in this post-9/11 world.

Do a quick google search (image tab mind you) under “Giuliani” and see how many hits it comes back with.  You will be amazed at how many of them involve the man either wearing some sort of Yankee attire or sitting at Yankee stadium.  Of course that will be after you get over the shock of how many different examples of Rudy Giuliani in drag are in the mix.

Hizzoner has always been such a fan. He even got into a bit of hot water earlier this year over questions about the four World Series rings that he owns — just like the players and coaches — courtesy of the franchise in response to his lifelong devotion to the ballclub.  Giuliani’s sudden change of heart about the nation’s pasttime has opened him up to charges of flip flopping and pandering.

Could it be that he is supporting the Red Sox because the team is so popular in neighboring New Hampshire, where, by the way, the nation’s first primary will be held sometime in January (or maybe even December)?

If you listen to the man that wants your vote the answer is “No”.

“I’m an American League fan, and I go with the American League team – maybe with exception of the Mets,” he said. “Maybe that would be the one time I wouldn’t, because I’m loyal to New York.”

But that answer may not satisfy everyone.

Kevin Madden, the spokesman for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney despite being a long-time Yankee fan, offered this observation in his morning email to reporters Wednesday:

“For me,” Madden said, “baseball season ends when the Yankees play their last game. I don’t even root for the AL in the All-Star game!”

Giuliani’s willingness to root for the Sox appears to be a recent phenomenon.

In June, he was asked the following by a political columnist for the Providence Journal-Bulletin:

“If the devil said you can be president if you become a Sox fan, would you do it?,” asked M. Charles Bakst.

The answer was typical Giuliani, which means, blunt.

“I’m a Yankee fan. My father made me a Yankee fan probably before I was born. I always believe it’s a sign of my being straight with people, about not wanting to fool them, that I was one of the first mayors to be willing to say I was a Yankee fan. Most mayors pretended they rooted for both sides. I have great respect for Mets fans, Red Sox fans. I have great respect for people who really are fans of the team they say they are fans of. But probably that’s a deal I could not make.”

Rudy Giuliani has made more than a few errors in his political career. This is, after all, the man who dumped his second wife on television.

But his latest questionable decision hits Americans where it really, really hurts: their sporting allegiances.

This week, he attempted to explain why he’ll be rooting for the Boston team in the impending World Series finals.   But his spin-job seems to be falling on deaf ears in New England.

The Boston Globe points out:

Recent history shows Massachusetts voters would sooner adopt Manhattan clam chowder as the state’s official food than vote Republican in 2008.

Ben Affleck, a rabid Red Sox fan, is a man that has made a career out of making bad decisions (J Lo or Gigli ring a bell?). His reaction to Rudy’s sudden change of allegiance went something like “If I was a politician I’d sooner admit to Satan worship than claim to be rooting for the Yankees”.

And that sentiment is pretty much par for the course when taken in the context of this rivalry.  This is the Sox and the Yankees!  Not Ohio State vs. Michigan.  Not Duke vs. North Carolina.  Not any one of many other epic sports rivalries.  This is the standard against which all other such sports conflicts are measured.

It’s bad enough that we live in the Sportscenter/Performance Enhancing Drug era, but now we have to have these two-bit politicians sullying our sports landscape?

We live in an era where too many athletes favor style over substance while looking for a spot in a highlight reel, even if it costs their team a win.  Our most sacred of baseball records are being assaulted by pharmaceutic-ally enhanced phenoms on a daily basis.  Olympic heroes are being revealed to be nothing more than frauds.  And now this.

“…there is no joy in Gotham—mighty Rudy has copped out.”

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