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, May 10, 2010

Go Big and Get Off

By BJ Bjornson


Last week or so came news of a massive mortgage fraud ring operating in Alberta, mainly focused on Calgary. I�ve been following the story on and off, but outside of the sheer scope and number of people involved, including a sitting Conservative MP, nothing about the case really jumped out at me until today, when the RCMP and Calgary police said they really weren�t interested in pursuing the case.


RCMP and the Calgary police have told the Bank of Montreal they won't investigate what could be the biggest mortgage fraud in Canadian history, CBC News has learned.


Both police forces stated last week they were reviewing the voluminous case � more than 35,000 documents � assembled by the bank's investigators to see if a criminal investigation was warranted.


But sources have told the CBC that top investigators from both forces recently met with the bank and told it they were not interested in pursuing a criminal investigation.




There are a couple of reasons given for the lack of interest in the article, with the main ones being that such investigations are a lot of work and that the police just don�t have enough investigators to deal with all of the fraud cases they get. Neither point really surprises me.


In any case, let that be a lesson to all of you potential thieves out there. Make sure your schemes are big and complicated, and the too few talented investigators our government has on the payroll to look into such matters will take one look at the massive amount of work required to hold you accountable and just throw up their hands and walk away. And yet somehow I doubt we�ll hear much about how �soft on (white-collar) crime� the government is over this.



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