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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Saturday, January 15, 2011

Tunisia Morning Snapshot

By John Ballard


I'm learning how to follow breaking news via twitter since the media seems to have more commercial messages than content. Hashtag #tunisia opens with "top tweets," a constantly changing set, driven I presume by re-tweets.
Here are the links...
http://www.counterpunch.org/ridley01142011.html
http://bit.ly/ifb2na


Tweet

That first link says this, in part... 


None of the politicians, secret police or other odious government forces will emerge from this period with any honor and quite a few are already cowering in the shadows.

But perhaps the biggest show of cowardice in this whole sorry episode has come from The White House.


Not one word of condemnation, not one word of criticism, not one word urging restraint came from Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton as live ammunition was fired into crowds of unarmed men, women and children in recent weeks.


And news of the corrupt, mafia-like regime would not have come as a surprise to either of them. We know this thanks to the Wikileaks cables written by US Ambassador Robert Godec who revealed in one memo: �Corruption in the inner circle is growing.�


But, as the injustices and atrocities continued there was not one squeak from the most powerful nation on earth � until America�s dear friend, Ben Ali had scuttled from the country.


The reality is the US Administration likes dealing with tyrants and even encourages despotic behavior. Egypt is one of the biggest testaments to this with its prisons full of political opposition leaders. Hosni Mubarak is Uncle Sam's enforcer and biggest recipient of aid next to the Zionist State.


Pakistan's treatment of its own people is little better. Remember when US Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad wrote in one Wikileak cable about the human rights abuses carried out by the Pakistan military? Patterson then went on to advise Washington to avoid comment on these incidents.


But now the US has made a comment on the situation in Tunisia ... but only when Ben Ali was 30,000 feet in the air did White House spokesman Mike Hammer issue a statement which read: �We condemn the ongoing violence against civilians in Tunisia, and call on the Tunisian authorities to fulfill the important commitments � including respect for basic human rights and a process of much-needed political reform.�


Unbelievable. Too little, too late, Mr President. Actually that statement could have been uttered any time during the last US presidencies since Ronald Reagan.



The other link is to a You Tube video of Kadaffi in Arabic but comments such as this say more than he.


Gaddafi should have hired a mouthpiece a bit less stupid than himself. Remember the proverb in Arabic saying " As you are you are, you will be ruled", so no surprise there at all, but I am sure most? - if not all Lybians are not as ignorant as you? are


Twitter update found a few minutes later: "Well it seems Libya already blocked Youtube .. wonder why!"


And the third tweet speaks for itself.
This is an event very much in the early stages.
I wonder if the silence and vapid statements of Washington are because Wikileaks has scared everyone from saying or writing anything.



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1 comment:

  1. geoffJanuary 16, 2011 at 4:48 AM

    Not sure what can be expected from the WH or State. It seems, as per usual, cluelessness. But that maybe being too charitable to them. Some media type should ask Obama to point out the country on a world map.

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