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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Friday, June 26, 2009

Supremes skeptical of the state

By Fester:


If you told me that there would be two Supreme Court cases released this week that pitted an expanded trust of government officials' say so against marginalized individuals, I would bet that both cases would be for expanded governmental authority and reduced rights and autonomy for marginalized classes of individuals. 


I am glad that I am wrong.  The Supremes in the Redding case (the 13 year old strip searched at school for suspected possesion of NSAIDs) and Menendez-Diaz case ruled for the marginalized individual against the power and authority of the state and its agents to act without check.  The Menendez-Diaz ruling requires crime lab analysts to actually defend their findings at a trial if the defense wants to question them.  The assumption is that scientific evidence is not perfect, which is a reasonably description asRadley Balko has shown numerous times in just the field of bite mark analysis. 


I'm surprised, but glad that there is a coalition on the courts who have some question of the decision to place the benefit of the doubt on marginal cases towards the player with far more power, the government, instead of on the party with minimal power.  If there is a good case with solid evidence, these decisions will not impact the course of justice.  However these decisions will provide a higher probability of justice being served when the case is weak. 



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