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

Who Cares?

Commentary By Ron Beasley



I was listening to Thom Hartmann this morning and a lesbian called in insisting that Elena Kagan come out of the closet.  Andrew Sullivan is on the same trip:

It is no more of an empirical question than whether she is Jewish. We
know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the
public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly
odd, bizarre, anachronistic, even arguably self-critical or
self-loathing. And yet we have been told by many that she is gay ... and
no one will ask directly if this is true and no one in the
administration will tell us definitively.





Of course there is no evidence she is in the closet:

I don't know if Elena Kagan sleeps with women or men. I don't know if
she sleeps with anyone at all. I don't care. What I do know is that she
has never claimed to be a lesbian, that she's never spoken out in the
first-person as an advocate of gay rights and that she has never
publicly discussed a romantic relationship with a woman. Gay isn't some
genetic or soulful essence; it's a name you call yourself--and Kagan
has not done that. So in my book, case closed. Elena Kagan is not gay.
Is she straight? I don't know, and again, I don't care. Why does she
have to have a sexuality at all?





Did anyone ask Roberts or Alito about their sex lives?  Did anyone think it made any difference?  It's irrelevant, just as the fact she is Jewish is irrelevant.  This is the way the Gay and Lesbian community can reverse the gains they are making.



2 comments:

  1. Please. Never link back to Sullivan. He's simply a provocateur with no real convictions of his own beyond issues in his immediate three-monkey sphere.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yesterday's best tweet:
    CharlesMBlow Re Kagan's sexuality: the answer to the question is irrelevant; the asking of it is telling.
    This is a non-issue best addressed by and for those with tiny intellects in Tweetopia. Also listed among Tom Goldstein's assessments. ...the Administration�s response was decisive and fully informed, so it will not emerge as a genuine question.

    ReplyDelete