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, January 11, 2011

The Many Shades of Crazy

Commentary By Ron Beasley


My partner Steve says Crazy Is As Crazy Does. He's right of course, everything points to Jared Loungher being a paranoid schizophrenic.  That doesn't mean that others don't have blood on their hands.



  • The NRA and the politicians who are too cowardly to stand up to them.  Fact - if the Brady Law was still in place  Mr Lounger would not have been able to purchase a 30 round magazine.  Twenty of those shots that killed and injured people belong to the NRA.  I own guns and have no objections to others owning guns but the sole purpose of automatic weapons is to kill a lot of people really fast.

  • The modern snake oil salesman like Limbaugh, Palin and Beck who don't say but imply that gun violence is a legitimate political tool.  This relationship is impossible to prove but they have created an atmosphere of hate combined with references to guns.  The most damming thing is they have done it for fame and fortune not ideology. There are elected officials like Michele Bachman who also fit the dangerous snake oil salesman profile.

  • The politicians who are afraid to stand up to the snake oil salesman.

  • A society that makes it difficult if not impossible for troubled people to receive the help they need - the US health care system.


Yes, Jared Loungher was a mad man - not left or right, liberal or conservative.  But he had accomplices. 


I suspect this is a symptom of a dieing empire, a collapsing society.  This was not the first and it will not be the last such incident.  The real irony here is that it was Arizona hero Wyatt Earp that instituted gun control to eliminate mayhem:



�In the 10 months before Earp became town marshal for Dodge City, 25 people had been shot and killed in the town and twice as many wounded in saloon brawls and street battles. In the eight months following the establishment of no guns north of the railroad tracks for Dodge City, only two men had been shot and killed in brawls and no one killed by a police officer.� And this was during the time the cattle drives and celebrating cowboys arrived.



 



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