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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Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Rod Blagojevich: The Sarah Palin of the Democratic Party

By John Ballard



From the Esquire political blog. The headline was so good I had to steal it.



Imagine a governor, whim-prone and manic, stymied at every turn by state ethics laws and legislative rivals. Depressed by the tedium and nuisance of governing, this governor ultimately becomes less interested in making laws and more interested in making bank. The same obsessive behavior once used to attain political capital is then turned to amassing personal fortune, but the illusion (delusion?) of someday running for and winning the presidency is never dropped.

�


McCain staffers once speculated that Palin was depressed; Blagojevich admitted as much to an aide. "I was depressed on my election night, OK," he is heard saying on an FBI recording played last week. Knowing that he was marooned in Illinois with little pocket money and no shot at the White House until 2016, Blagojevich's future tormented him. He needed "a better gig," as he said on another tape.


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