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, September 9, 2009

An honest man is above his might

By Steve Hynd


 Reacting to style over substance is still just style over substance. So...what Meteor Blades said:



why get hot and bothered by the jackassery of a single Congressman from the Party of No? I think it has to do with the truckloads of lies and despicable slurs dropped on Obama in the past few months, many of them overtly racist. Our fury at Rep. Addison "Joe" Wilson's blurted "You lie!" is not just a response to him, but to the never-ending feces-throwing by the GOP and a right-wing media engaged in a full-court smear fest of our first African American President.


...let's not let this screamer steal the headlines for the next few days. Because that was not what Wednesday night was about; it's not what all the wrangling has been about for the past several months. As President Obama pointed out, doing something about our broken health care system is not an issue that just appeared on the scene. Efforts have been made for decades. But because of past obstructionism, uncounted numbers of American have died, gone bankrupt, lived misery-filled lives, all because they were denied medical treatment based solely on their inability to pay for it.


We shouldn't allow one of the latest cohort of obstructionists to divert us from the task at hand.


Indeed. Don't tell me about "respect for the office". A funny-shaped room never ever made a crook or a cad into an honorable man. Ask Nixon or Bush II. And I firmly believe that in the U.S., as perhaps nowhere else, titles should not be the measure of the man.


You see yonder fellow called 'a lord,'
Who struts, and stares, and all that?
Though hundreds worship at his word,
He is but a dolt for all that.
For all that, and all that,
His ribboned, star, and all that,
The man of independent mind,
He looks and laughs at all that.

A prince can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and all that!
But an honest man is above his might -
Good faith, he must not fault that
For all that, and all that,
Their dignities, and all that,
The pith of sense and pride of worth
Are higher rank than all that.


The story should be the substance and the emotional appeal of Obama's speech, not what some small-minded moran blurted out.



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