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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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Pissing on your activists...

By Dave Anderson:


Sean Kelly at the Agonist has the short summation of the vast majority of liberal activists' discontent:



Ian has the bill of indictment. Sad to say he's right about every single one of them. When I came home this summer and kept saying, "nothing has changed," all my friends said, "just wait."


Screw that; I don't vote Democratic to wait. I voted Democratic to see change.


Time to deliver, past time to deliver instead of jerking off Max Baucus to produce a piss-poor health plan that still will not achieve the magical bi-partisan unity pony because everyone who can read incentives knew that there is virtually nothing that will get Senate Republicans to vote to slash their own throats.  Sure, student loan reform is a nice little technocratic win that helps advance the narrative that government can and will accomplish good thing at very competetive prices compared to the private market, BUT that gets buried under an escalation without a measurable set of metrics in Afghanistan and pushing a healthcare reform bill that has a strong chance of only being about the bill and not about either healthcare or reform. 



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1 comment:

  1. whut changeSeptember 17, 2009 at 12:11 PM

    http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/09/17/volcker-renews-call-for-limits-on-systemically-important-banks/
    There is a larger story to be done about how Obama did a bit of a bait-and-switch, hiring progressives to run his campaign and jettisoning them once he got into office. I hear about this phenomenon from different corners of the policymaking universe, from health care to defense and intelligence spending. But my sense is that the switch was most violent in the realm of economic policy, which means stuff like this bears particular attention. Will Obama act on Volcker�s recommendations? We should probably wait and see, but I�m not holding my breath.

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