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, May 14, 2008

Pennylsvania political rumblings

By Fester:



In the past few days, I've been listening to a couple of interesting grape vines which may have been aided by a bottle of excellent Merlot and the grapes are talking about outside group mobilization and targeting efforts by non-coordinating with campaign actors.  And it is sounding very interesting.



One liberal leaning group is looking to expand the probable Democratic voter pool by approximately 7% to 8% between May 1 and the general election.  This is on top of the current expansion of approximately the same size that the Obama and Clinton campaigns drove in during the primary campaign.  The plan is to flush the cities and find every last eligible but not registered potential voter. 



Another group is looking to add another 3% to the Dem voter pool by targeting younger and single women.  They are also primarily looking to flush the urban areas. 



Both groups, and several others are hurting for political talent.  Right now they are being staffed up by survivors of the Edwards campaign and independent non-coordinated groups' institutional organizing capacity.  Dislodging either Clinton or Obama staffers or volunteer supporters from locally developed networks has been tough at this time as there is a good deal of buy-in and faith that both campaigns will need their respective talents come July.  I think that the talent drought will not have significant impact if it is resolved in the next month or so.  After that, we could see SW Pa 2008 look like SW PA for Kerry --- a disorganized fiasco when the national campaign parachuted in without a clue. 



The other worry that I have is that I have not heard too much about expanding outreach and mobilization efforts outside of the Democratic base areas.  I think the external groups can increase the Dem voter pool by roughly 10% to 12% and the total voter pool by 6% to 7% but under what I am hearing, the voter pools will not significantly increase coattails. 





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