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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Sunday, May 1, 2011

White House Correspondents Dinner and Roast

By John Ballard


CSPAN video Last night's White House Correspondents Dinner was a wonderful romp that left no one in politics untouched. Here is a link to the C-SPAN video for those who missed it. I expect when it goes into the video archive short clips will be embeddable, but until then this is available.


It opens with the president himself driving the last nails into the birther coffin.


Seth Meyers has the last half, starting at about 20 minutes. If he missed any targets I don't know what or who they were.


23:13  For those of you who don't know, the White House Correspondence' Association is an organization of journalists who cover both the White House and the President, though earlier Senator John Kyl told me that ninety percent of what they do is abortions.


Mag-24Obama-1-articleInline[1] It's fair to say that the 2012 campaign is now underway and this event, together with last week's publication of Janny Scott's  A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama�s Mother is as well-orchestrated an opening as his first presidential campaign.  Last week's NY Times review, replete with photos, is a taste. Look closely and find photos which credit "The Obama Presidential Campaign/AP."


The caption reads "PACIFIC RIM Barack Obama and his grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham in Hawaii."
And yes, there is a little icon of a magnifying glass if you want to make the photo bigger.



Ann Dunham, who jettisoned the name Stanley upon emerging from childhood, was just 17 years old in the fall of 1960 when she became pregnant with the child of a charismatic Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama, a fellow student at the University of Hawaii who was more than six years her senior. She dropped out of school, married him and gave birth shortly before their union ended. In the aftermath, she met Lolo Soetoro, an amiable, easygoing, tennis-playing graduate student from the Indonesian island of Java. They married in 1964, after Ann�s divorce came through, but their early life together was upended by forces beyond their control. On Sept. 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta, in what the army characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Students studying abroad, including Lolo, whose studies were sponsored by the government, were soon summoned home. A year later, in 1967, Ann graduated with a degree in anthropology, gathered up her 6-year-old child and moved to Indonesia to join her husband.




1 comment:

  1. I note as you enter your seemingly endless election season that this time around the world and particularly you will have the pleasure of knowing more of BOs personal life & especially his mom's part in it. We all got dad's part last time around, eh. Note any brand BS? Of course not, moms are always righteous and best dead particularly if they were a bit over weight. Schmucks are schmucks ever if their moms worked hard and had good intention for the little shits, now schmucks, they bore. I often wonder now which way Ann maybe spinning in her grave given the son she bore and his dismal impact on the world & you as the first black POTUS.

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