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.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday, August 31, 2009

Carwash for Surgery

By Dave Anderson:


Yep, best healthcare in the world, where you get treatment if you get shot even without insurance, but at the cost of destroying your fiscal future...


From earlier this month, at WPXI:



A car wash became a support system on Sunday for one of the victims of the LA Fitness shooting spree.


Heather Sherba, 22, showed up on crutches for a car wash held to help her pay her mounting medical bills..\l .


Organizers hoped to raise $500....


This is the healthcare system of Senator Coburn --- if you are too poor to afford health insurance, hold a bake sale, wash some cars, or count on charity.  Do all of this, and individuals will still realize that the couple hundred bucks raised is not even a drop in the bucket for a random and moderate health-care incident. Are there no workhouses or at leastCensus Bureau reclassifications available?


Zuska looks at the implication of charity care and the continual American fascination on the dichtomomy of the deserving versus the undeserving poor:




Here's my guess: you throw ten bucks in the can at the young shooting victim's car wash, and you feel virtuous; you feel you have helped someone who "deserves" your help. You are participating in the mythology of "we all take care of ourselves and we don't depend on gov'mint handouts". But, you pay taxes to insure that everyone has access to adequate health insurance coverage, and the rightwing nutjobs convince you that you are a dupe who has been made to fund the lazy, brown- and black-skinned no-good-niks who are destroying America as you know it, and who will thank you for your efforts by raping your daughters and looting your homes if given half a chance.



If an individual has a good story, or at least good connections to spread a good story, they deserve care without bankruptcy, everyone else is SOL. That is not what I want in my country.



2 comments:

  1. ... But, you pay taxes to insure that everyone has access to adequate health insurance coverage, and the rightwing nutjobs convince you that you are a dupe who has been made to fund the lazy, brown- and black-skinned no-good-niks who are destroying America as you know it, and who will thank you for your efforts by raping your daughters and looting your homes if given half a chance.
    It isn't just the "rightwing nutjobs." That's an embedded fixture in the murkin social ontology.
    The "deserving" poor are the white people "displaced" by Affirmative Action.
    The "undeserving" poor are the 'lazy, shiftless, baby-spitting, fornicating drug-abusing' "others." That they are non-white is no 'mistake.'

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good grief, Cordesman is the nu-Kagan-Kristol, all rolled into one.
    He also ought to read Rubin's story on Karzai (Karzai in His Labyrinth). Karzai's "government" is anything but centralized. He runs it, in part, like an elder of tribes. It ain't working, each ministry runs itself for itself. Karzai has had to demand tax revenues from the Interior Ministry, which was hording the take. Corrupt, obviously. Centralized? Only in name.

    ReplyDelete