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.


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

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Anti-douchebaggery incentives

By Dave Anderson:


Good behavior should be rewarded, bad behavior should be made expensive and unpleasant.  This is basic operant conditioning.  This is basic political incentives, and it is almost a tautology of economics --- you get what you pay for --- but it is an incentive structure that is not always present in American politics, so we get lots of bad behavior as that is where the incentives lie. 


Being dumb and saying dumb things is something that the American political system should have strong electoral incentives against.  We saw that in 2008 with massive Democratic fundraising against Michelle Bachman in MN-6, and Repubilcan fundraising against John Murtha in PA-12.  Neither effort was successful in beating incumbents, but each effort significantly increased the cost (both monetarily and hassle wise) for incumbents who previously were seen as highly probable to win re-election without too much effort.


It looks like Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) is seeing this same anti-douchebaggery incentive applied to him, as his opponent now is better funded as of this afternoon than he was at any point in the 2008 cycle.  Daily Kos has the numbers:



Overall, Rob Miller is close to hitting  $400,000....Note, Miller raised $340K from individual donations ALL of 2008. He's beaten that in 18 hours. And going into the last reporting period, Wilson had $180,000 cash on hand. Those two words -- which have now cost Wilson nearly $200,000 each -- have utterly shifted the ground in this district.


Money is not everything in an election; otherwise we would have seen Rudi Guiliani or Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, and we would never have seen Rep. Carol Porter-Shea (D-NH), but it sure does help.  Wilson has seen his 2010 race going from strongly favoring him to being a probable fiscal slug-fest where he'll need to kiss babies and asses for the next 58 weeks to win re-election instead of just cruising to re-election. 


 



Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)