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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Sunday, May 9, 2010

Censorship of the Smothers Brothers

by John Ballard



This afternoon a local PBS station rebroadcast the 2002 documentary Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, allowing me to escape today's frustrations and revisit others from my youth. It was a shot in the arm which I needed. It's easy to forget how helpless one feels when confronted by entrenched evil that seems impossible to overcome. We need to be encouraged not to give up.



Here is a recently uploaded which seems to be a collection of snips from the documentary.






My current frustrations derive from today's soundbite mentality which fosters wholesale ignorance. The tossing of Utah's Senator Bennett by the Tea Party insurgency is the latest evidence of misdirected populist frustration reflecting a breathtaking level of stupidity.



The rage is valid but the target is not.



The problem is not the size of government but the fact that it has become nothing more than the political dimension of large national and trans-national corporations. And they are not all in the banking and finance sector although that is the breeding ground in which they all flourish.



When corporations acquired the rights of individuals (and de facto immunity from criminal penalties), government stopped representing individuals and became just another resource in the corporate toolbox.  When the Secretary of Defense says Congress is pissing away too much money on defense spending it is about corporations and the lock they have on elected representatives, and yes -- the voters as well, in places where they have roots. 

We have met the enemy and he is us.





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