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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Friday, February 24, 2012

Lawsuit claims Obama can�t be president because he�s �mulatto�

By BJ Bjornson

It�s rare these days to find this much ignorance and bigotry all wrapped up together in one little package, well, broadcast publiclhy at least.


If we thought President Obama silenced all the birthers by releasing his long form birth certificate last year, think again. Apparently, some folks still have doubts and are taking it one step further: to court.

Tuesday, Gordon Warren Epperly filed a lawsuit in Alaska challenging President Obama's inclusion on the 2012 presidential ballot. What's Epperly's beef? Apparently, he feels Negroes and mulattoes can't be president because they aren't really citizens.


While this lawsuit, like all of the birther nonsense that has preceded it, will hopefully get laughed out of the court system, it is merely the most recent fringe example of what the �reasonable� opposition to Obama has been saying since he first came to power, Obama isn�t a �real� American.


They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn�t, he�s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he�s a Nazi, but on most others he�s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a �Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,� while the less adventurous say that he�s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.

Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.


Granted, some of these attacks would be leveled at any Democratic President (and, if the recent GOP campaign is any example, anyone with a more progressive worldview than Attila the Hun), but the virulence of the attacks on Obama speaks to something deeper than mere ideological differences, something the outright racism of Epperly�s lawsuit simply makes explicit.



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2 comments:

  1. John BallardFebruary 24, 2012 at 11:24 AM

    Here's another pertinent link. Molly Ivins must be smiling down on Charles Pierce.
    ...Old childhood plagues are making a comeback. It's also not promising, as the WaPo report points out, that pediatricians have started telling their anti-vaccination patients to go climb a tree.
    This is a real-world consequence of our tendency to enable nonsense to the point that it actually has an effect on public policy. This is a real-world consequence of our current taste for non-science, or anti-science, to borrow a useful term from the history of Mother Church. This is the public-health face of climate-change denial, to name only the most obvious parallel. Create your own "science," sell it enthusiastically, get enough people to believe it so that the teenage bookers at cable news notice the dust you've kicked up, and you've got yourself a movement, regardless of what the people who actually know what they're talking about think.
    http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/indiana-measles-outbreak-6863798

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  2. labman57February 25, 2012 at 9:24 AM

    So first conservatives insisted that Americans must pass an ideological purity test in order to be card-carrying members of the Republican Party.
    Then Franklin Graham declared that people must pass a religious conviction purity test to be accepted as a true Christians.
    And now this clown -- apparently enamored with pre-WWII Germany's Aryan race philosophy -- is claiming that Americans must pass an ethnic purity test in order to be regarded as naturally born citizens.
    Welcome to your new, improved Republican Party.

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