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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Monday, March 7, 2011

Intimidation and the extent of the state

By Dave Anderson:


Via NPR:



After she stepped forward last year to take a job no one else wanted because of the drug-related violence � police chief in the Mexican border town of Praxedis G. Guerrero � Marisol Valles was called the "bravest woman in Mexico."


Now, she's the ex-police chief. Valles, 21, was "fired Monday for apparently abandoning her post after receiving death threats,"



The threat of violence has basically denuded a border town of any semblence of public good receipt from the central Mexican government.  Even before this resignation, the writ of the state was very weak as the police force was too scared to actually aggressively patrol or to do its job. 


Intimidation works for the cartels as there is now another argument that the Mexican state can not protect itself, its representatives, or the civilians on the border zone. 



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2 comments:

  1. LexMarch 7, 2011 at 11:54 PM

    And it works because the cartels have money by the bagful and guns. The former is made trafficking drugs into the US and the latter are purchased (mostly) in the US with drug money.
    Remember the old commercial with the egg and the frying pan..."This is your brain on drugs." Well, this is your neighbor trapped in a war on drugs.

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  2. Ron BeasleyMarch 8, 2011 at 6:10 AM

    It it's only going to get much worse. Sometime this year or early next year Mexico will no longer be an oil exporting nation and the revenue to pay for the already inadequate police and military will evaporate.

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