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.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Gulf Disaster is NOT Unprecedented

By John Ballard



This video from the Wonk Room speaks for itself.
They also have a brief commentary and over three hundred comments in the comments thread.





Miller's remarks in the above clip end at 57 minutes into the hearing.
It was followed by a three-minute litany of BP safety failures and poor
safety record. The following two minute summary by Rep. George Miller underscores a toxic mixture far worse than anything occurring in the aftermath of the Underwater Horizon failure, that being the incestuous manner in which a poisonous corporate culture at BP mixed with a similarly poisonous bureaucratic culture at Minerals Management Services, their presumed regulatory authority.






It is now clear that this tragedy was a preventable occurrence.



It's too late for the media to change the language but every time I see words like leak and spill I want to scream at the TV or radio.
This is not a "spill".
This is not a "leak".
What we are witnessing is a hemorrhage of crude oil from the earth which is the ecological equivalent of a volcanic eruption, a tsunami, a category 4 or 5 hurricane or a 100-year flood.
It may have been Candy Crowley, but this morning I heard someone on CNN ask "Don't we have a word beyond catastrophe"?

1 comment: