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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Monday, July 27, 2009

The Republican's Frankenstein

Commentary By Ron Beasley


What happens when you build a base around the idea that ignorance is a virtue? (See Sarah Palin)



The reason Republicans in DC are running from some guy on the street asking them whether or not Obama is an American citizen is because they have spent the last thirty years cultivating a base of insane crazy people, and while they may escape a reporter from FDL, they can�t escape the base.


~John Cole


The Poitico headline says it all.


GOP headache: The birther issue



When lawmakers return home for recess in August, they can expect to hear tough questions from constituents on the economy, health care and government spending.


But Republicans are preparing for something else: the birthers.


As GOP Rep. Mike Castle learned the hard way back home in Delaware this month, there�s no easy way to deal with the small but vocal crowd of right-wing activists who refuse to believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States.


But it just gets worse.


Birther leader: GOP is with me



Orly Taitz, the California attorney-dentist leading the charge of the so-called birthers movement, is boasting on her blog that she�s made some high-profile �friends� on Facebook: Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor and GOP Reps. Mary Bono Mack and Cynthia Lummis.


But there is more:  Orly Taitz is going to appear on the Colbert Report.



The wave of publicity for the Birther movement hasn't yet crested, with the dentist who's the movement's leading legal light, Orly Taitz, saying she's taping the Colbert Report tomorrow, and popping up elsewhere in the mainstream media.


If the perception is that the Republican Party is largely made up of lunatics even if people get unhappy with Obama and the Democrats how likely is it they will vote for the Republicans instead.  As Fester said below - make the congressional lawmakers pay.


Update:


Hardball today:



Great line from Fineman. 


"When the river gets low the bottom is exposed.  The Republican river is low and we are seeing the rocks on the bottom." 

Translation: most of the sane people have left the Republican party.

 

Update II:

 



The House resolution to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hawaiian statehood -- which included language recognizing the state as President Obama's birthplace, in a none-too-subtle jab at the Birthers -- passed this evening by a 378-0 vote.


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