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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Saturday, June 14, 2008

One vote away from constitutional chaos

By Libby



A great post by JB at Balkinization on the failure of movement conservatism's constitutional revolution. He lays out the legal angles of their plan beautifully.

Following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush and his supporters proposed a significant chance in constitutional norms, centered around increased presidential power to fight the war on terror. This vision included (1) a doctrine of preemptive war, (2) new surveillance techniques, including domestic surveillance, (3) a new system of preventive detention, including detention of american citizens without access to courts, (4) the creation of legal black holes like Guantanamo Bay and CIA black sites, (5) use of torture and torture-lite to obtain information, (6) enhanced secrecy and classification policies, and (7) a version of unitary executive theory that claimed that Congress could not constitutionally limit the President when he claimed to act under his powers as Commander-in-Chief. The last idea was also articulated in (8) the expansion of the use of constitutional signing statements, in which the President would state that he would disregard certain features of laws passed by Congress without telling the public any details about the scope or extent of his non-enforcement.

I never understood why more people weren't horrified enough to complain about that last one. It strikes at the heart of the whole system of checks and balances. And I agree that it's going to be a helluva mess to clean up.



Read JB's whole post to see how close we came to seeing it succeed. It still could. We're one SCOTUS vote away from destroying centuries' worth of precedents and progress. At the end of the day, nothing matters more to me than making sure it's not McCain who gets to pick the next justices. It would be a constitutional disaster.



Update: Thanks to Geoff for the link to another must read post on the subject by Scott Horton. The importance of preventing another round of GOP appointed justices really can't be over-emphasized.



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  1. geoffJune 15, 2008 at 7:22 AM

    Libby Scott Horton over at Harpers also has a good note up on the recent SCOTUS ruling. I like his characterisation of the turn "off and on" constitution which has been the brain child of the current administration. He also lays out the likely next shoe to drop scenario which he says an inside Bush source says they have been planning.
    http://harpers.org/archive/2008/06/hbc-90003070

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