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, November 18, 2009

Tom Watson -- <i>Empowering Sarah</i>

By John Ballard



This is too long to tweet and too short to blog, but too good to miss.
Tom Watson riffs on the Palin phenomenon.
Journalistic poetry.





...Newsweek went with the full Joan on its cover this week, fronting essays by Evan Thomas and Christopher Hitchens, pieces that are also accompanied by a photo of a Palin doll dressed in full schoolgirl-slut porn costume. That picture alone - never mind the Runner's World cover shot Newsweek chose from among the thousands of stock Palin photos available - gives lie to editor Jon Meacham's disingenuous note: "We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."

?000?

To say that Palin is a lightning rod is to say the Empire State Building is a walk-up; her strange white heat wattage could power some of the more under-populated red states. It's turned writers like Andrew Sullivan into cackling Cody Jarretts, howling frenetic ghouls doing the full self-destructive Cagney at the top of the massive gas storage tank that comprises the political blogosphere.

"Made it, Ma! Top of the world! I'm the world's authority on Sarah Palin's uterus!" That's essentially the single-Tweet version of Sullivan's entire blog of late, as he picks up his detailed Baedeker of the Alaskan's reproductive history to coincide with the heavy breathing in political circles around Palin's get-even-with-McCain memoir, Going Rogue.

The attention meter is stuck on eleven and honest to God, it's like dropping a live toaster into Godzilla's bathwater....



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