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, November 2, 2010

Midterm Election Quote Of The Day

By Steve Hynd.


Take a bow, John Aravosis, for distilling sense from all the crap being talked:



if so many Democrats are disaffected that their lack of support is harming someone's chances at re-election, the person to blame isn't the voters, it's the politicians who let them down.  You earn my vote, you don't own it.



Spot on, despite the fearmongering attempts every two years to call each election the "most important election EVAH!"


Tomorrow the post-mortems begin. As ever, there will be three camps. One will say the left must support Dems come what may because "it will always be worse with Republicans in power". Call that the "he loves me, really" voice. One will say that the left must force the Democratic Party to listen to its agenda, even though all the evidence says that the Dems will never seriously do so. Call that the "he'd really love me if I just said things right" voice. The third camp, of which I am a member for reasons I've written about often enough over the years, says the left must take a deep breath, ditch the abusive relationship with the Dems and strike out on its own, despite the many obvious hardships of doing so. Unfortunately, the third voice is the smallest - it always is with abused spouses.



2 comments:

  1. Somehow the professional political class seem mostly to forget those highlighted 8 words especially as they might be wrenched from the trough and have to endure a nanosecond before joining a lobbyist crew and start to openly bribe former pals, enemies & colleagues.

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  2. Aravosis' remark applies to Democrats. Republicans tend to be team players by nature. They would sacrifice their firstborn before crossing party lines. When they get independent, they become tea partiers. Which may mess with party plans sometimes, and sometimes not. But it still gets the vote out.

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