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.


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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The slow-mo scandal that everyone forgot

By Libby



The wheel of Justice does indeed grind slowly. Jack Abramoff has long dropped out of the media narrative but the indictments related to that scandal continue to trickle in.

Prosecutors filed court papers Monday against Robert E. Coughlin II, the former deputy chief of staff of the department's criminal division, signaling that Coughlin has agreed to plead guilty.



In the court papers, Coughlin is accused of accepting gifts from an unnamed lobbyist between March 2001 and October 2003 while providing assistance to the lobbyist's firm and negotiating prospective employment with the firm. [...]



A spokeswoman with the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore, which made the allegations, wouldn't comment. Coughlin is at least the second Justice Department official to come under scrutiny in the wide-ranging Abramoff probe, which has implicated at least five congressmen, a deputy Cabinet secretary, a White House aide and eight others.

Those include Sue Ellen Wooldridge, former lead Justice prosecutor who resigned last year and Rep. John Doolittle, R-Roseville, who announced his retirement, both of whom are yet to be indicted. It will be decades before we discover the full extent of the criminality of the Bush administration and none of the perps are likely to receive the punishment they deserve. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans languish in jails for smoking a plant.



Hard to understand why we call it a system of justice.



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2 comments:

  1. JDApril 23, 2008 at 11:50 AM

    Libby, they really do not like you over at the AmericanWarmonger, er, I mean AmericanPower blog.
    Peace...

    ReplyDelete
  2. LibbyApril 24, 2008 at 1:02 AM

    LOL JD. The donald has been stalking me since the day he stumbled onto my personal blog some many months ago. He seems to hold personally responsible for the downfall of western civilization.
    I don't read him myself. I won't engage with someone who routinely showed in my comments and calls me babycakes. He's just a troll with his own blog.

    ReplyDelete

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