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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Thursday, October 7, 2010

Ritual humiliation instead of jobs

By Dave Anderson

The probable next governor of South Carolina is into inflicting ritual humiliation on others.  Hey, who cares if that is what is what works for her, but please only play that way with other consenting adults.  Nikki Haley wants the unemployed to engage in ritual humiliation instead of actual economic policy:

South Carolina's more than 236,000 unemployed workers
could have to take a drug test in order to receive jobless benefits,
according to a proposal by Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki
Haley on Tuesday. [...]

Though employees fired for using drugs, alcohol or missing work
can be disqualified from jobless benefits, Haley said testing the
unemployed was one of several steps in ensuring the newly restructured
Department of Employment and Workforce -- now a cabinet agency -- only
pays benefits to those who have earned them.



"We will make sure, above all, that there will be no ... benefits if
they do not pass a drug test," Haley said. [h/t Steve Benen]

People who are unemployed through no fault of their own and who had accumulated enough weekly work credits have earned their benefits.  FULL STOP!

Everything else is an attempt to create a false distinction of the deserving versus the undeserving poor who can then be looked down upon as immoral inferiors.  It is an attempt to create a distraction from having an economic philosophy and policy portfolio that would make a shitty labor market even worse.  It is a diversion from reality. 



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1 comment:

  1. malcontentOctober 7, 2010 at 6:52 AM

    How much is this going to cost the taxpayers of South Carolina? How much do the proponents of this program estimate it will save the taxpayers of South Carolina? Which companies are lined up to take this government largesse?
    While I know that this notion comes from social conservatives, it is so liberal, in the classic sense, that these conservatives ought to be ashamed.

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