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, July 27, 2010

Two Commentaries Under the Radar

By John Ballard



I'm a bottom-feeder. I admit it.
The stuff I read is not apt to be found in popular magazines or the evening news. But like a beachcomber I find a piece of driftwood or some detritus worth keeping almost every day by combing the Intertubes.

���



?This is how Evert Cilliers ends his latest screed.



The lower-earning 80% of Americans have to share 15% of the shrinking American pie, yet the latest incarnation of populist Americans, the Tea Party folks, who are older, wealthier Republicans, are saying that spending is out of control (on Social Security, NOT on subsidies for big business or on wars; by them, it's OK if we blow trillions on whacking Arabs who had nothing to do with 9/11, but hell, we've got to cut Social Security, it's the �responsible� thing to do). These Tea Party deaf-dumb-and-blind humans say the government is �taking over� our lives with �social engineering� and that Obama is a �socialist.� They represent a typical section of the petit bourgeoisie, who have traditionally been more scared of the classes below them than of the upper classes who are shafting them along with everyone else.


The whole charade is more absurd than Eugene Ionesco's play �Rhinoceros.� While we're burning and our elite is fiddling, what are the Tea Party people doing? They're complaining about the quality of the firewood.


America has lost its mind and keeps losing its mind. In Europe they're coming down hard on the banks and on the outsize bonuses that inspired the reckless behavior that led to meltdown.


In America, we're still right behind the Wall Street mantra of IBGYBG: �I'll be gone and you'll be gone, so let's make the deal and let the suckers pay in the end.�


And some known masters of supreme assholicity, like Andrew Breitbart, Faux News and Glenn Beck, have the White House so poop-scared they're prepared to throw a good woman under the bus. At this point their bus has to be bigger than Sarah Palin's mouth to contain all the good people they've thrown under it.


No amount of apologizing can excuse their first reaction of utter cowardice in the face of a known liar's fake threat.


Gadzooks and forsooth, folks. The sane mind boggles. But, but and but again: there's more to this than just another political flap.


Obama the coward reflects the prevailing ethos driving all of us: we are a nation of cowards. Until we show some spine, we shouldn't expect to see any from Obama.



���



?And this is what SPLC uncovered about another piece of shit from the right-wing noise machine. Fortunately, most people didn't hear about this, although Memeorandum headlined it a couple of times briefly.

(And yes, I don't care what anyone says. As long as the machine keeps making the noise it gets credit for the spinoff, even without a direct link. In the same way that patience, good character and tolerance flourish in the right atmosphere, so too do intolerance, hatred and willful ignorance.)


The tale, reported by Dan Amato, a Pennsylvania anti-immigration blogger, gained traction throughout the blogosphere. Amato, who blogs under the name of Digger, claimed that members of Los Zetas � dangerous Mexican gunmen heavily involved in the international drug trade and other criminal activities � had crossed from Mexico into Texas and taken over the two ranches in the border city of Laredo. �The source is law enforcement in the area,� Amato wrote from his perch some 1,800 miles away.




In truth, Amato�s source was Jeff Schwilk, the bellicose leader of the virulent San Diego Minutemen anti-immigration group, as Amato subsequently revealed. Schwilk�s home base is about 1,300 miles from Laredo. And Schwilk�s source? Another San Diego anti-immigration diehard, Kimberly Dvorak. She wrote on Saturday at Examiner.com that the so-called ranches takeover �could be deemed an act of war against the sovereign borders of the United States.�

[Further details at the link]





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