Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Obama interview on Fox

By Libby



The transcript is up. I managed to catch about a half an hour of the show myself. My first reaction is -- Meh. If you wanted fireworks, there weren't any. Not unexpectedly, he played it to the center and for all practical purposes disowned progressives. That doesn't make me happy, but I've never thought of him as advancing a progressive agenda, so I'm not disappointed either. IMO, he's still holding hewing a little more left than Hillary and that's the best we can hope for from either candidate.



As far as his delivery, he was pretty good, no major flubs, but he's not projecting the level of confidence I'd like to see. He immediately walked back from the single time I heard him say, "when I'm president." But I can see his dilemma. As a black man, if he projects too much confidence, it will be spun as arrogance and he risks stirring up the latent fear of angry black men that hides deep in the psyche of white America, whether we want to admit it or not. On the other hand, if he's too mild, he risks looking weak. He's walking a tightrope in this race and while he didn't dazzle with any impressive tricks, he didn't fall off either.



What effect this will have on his numbers remains to be seen. I'm anticipating it won't impact them much either way.



Posted by at
Labels: , ,

2 comments:

  1. littlehornApril 27, 2008 at 7:31 AM

    All you say is very true and deep. Good work.
    I'm intrigued when people say he doesn't go far enough to the left. After all, there were other candidates who were further to the left before, yet they gave up. That's too bad.

    ReplyDelete
  2. LibbyApril 27, 2008 at 10:16 AM

    Thanks for the encouragement littlehorn. I think people sometimes forget, myself included, that progressives are still not a big enough block to force an agenda.
    It reminds sometimes of living in lovely downtown Noho. That is the HQ of progressives and when you're surrounded by those who agree with you, it's easy to forget how small a town it is. I think Leftopia gets a little myopic that way too. Our strength is growing but not enough to really intimidate them yet. I think we need another cycle of electing downticket progressives before the entrenched Villagers start to really take us seriously.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)