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, October 19, 2009

Unpresident Karzai

By Steve Hynd


1.3 million Afghan ballots have been tossed as obviously fraudulent by the UN's watchdog, reducing Karzai's share of the vote to only 48.3 percent. His main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, actually increased his own share thereby, to 31.5 %.


Now, everyone is waiting to see whether Karzai's tame Afghan Independent Election Commission will accept the EEC'[s findings, whether Karzai will accept a run-off if they do, and whether his opposition will accept any of those decisions. "Afghan and international powerbrokers are reportedly filing in and out of the presidential palace, either trying to encourage Karzai to accept the decision or to make a power-sharing deal," according to J. Alexander Thier of the USIP. 


Strangely, Karzai is keeping on acting as if he's President of Afghanistan despite the fact that constitutionally he isn't. The Western allies have their own obvious reasons for letting him do so.


So far, there have been nothing but peaceful protests from either side. Let's hope that doesn't change. But John Kerry was correct that it makes no sense to escalate U.S. troop numbers until such time as we discover whether there's going to be yet another insurgency in Afghanistan, and the White House was right to follow his lead on that.



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