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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Elena Kagan, the nominee to the Supreme Court, was dean of Harvard Law School in 2006 when she introduced Aharon Barak, chief judge of Israel's High Court of Justice, during an award ceremony as �my judicial hero.� She explained (per the New York Times):
ReplyDeleteHe is the judge or justice in my lifetime whom, I think, best represents and has best advanced the values of democracy and human rights, of the rule of law and of justice.
Turns out that Kagan (who testified today that "Israel means a lot to me") is not alone. In The Case for Israel (2003), Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz writes:
This book is respectfully dedicated to my dear friend of nearly forty years, Professor Aharon Barak, the president of Israel�s Supreme Court, whose judicial decisions make a better case for Israel and for the rule of law than any book could possibly do.
Who is Barak? In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein says that Aharon Barak was "a leading proponent" of guidelines allowing torture-- making Israel the "only country in the world where torture was legally sanctioned," according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. He also gave a green light to administrative detentions, even as the judge conceded, �there is probably no State in the Western world that permits an administrative detention of someone who does not himself pose any danger to State security.�
Well, he has fit right into the Senate, where "hearings" are not places to ask questions of anyone, but rather are places to make speeches. He certainly learned a lot about Kagan, learned a lot on which to base his vote regarding her confirmation, by making that speech, didn't he?
ReplyDeleteSenate hearings are rather like blog posts. Often little connection between subject content and the comments thread.
ReplyDeleteNice dig, John.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
ReplyDeleteI sometimes wonder if anybody reads this stuff. It makes me feel better when someone pays attention.