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, January 27, 2010

Populism - Class Warfare, Part II

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Below I discussed how the citizens of Oregon had done the unthinkable and voted to increase taxes.  Our great researcher Kat found this from Atlantic business reporter Derek Thompson:

The second observation is that I think this vote has nothing to do with
Left or Right. It has to do with money and anger. With double-digit
unemployment, eight-digit Wall Street bonuses and thirteen-digit
federal deficits, Americans are feeling inundated with a lot of numbers
that tell a simple story: America's workers have no money, America's
coffers have no money, but America's rich people have a lot of money.
Neither liberals nor conservatives have a monopoly on populism, and it
seems to me that Obama needs to show America tonight that he feels the
anger. If we're lucky, we might even see it. It's not entirely clear to
me how the White House loses by taking on the banks more aggressively
in the next few months to build back political mojo. Separate from
whether or not it is good financial policy, a plan that says "I'm
taxing the banks who created this mess and I'm funneling that money
into jobs programs to help average Americans pay their mortgage" is
pretty safe politics.

I think he gets it right but from what I have seen so far I have very little hope that this is the lesson Obama will take from this.



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