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, September 21, 2009

More troops, less support

By Dave Anderson:


With the planned leak of the request by Gen. McChystal for seveal more combat brigades to socially re-engineer several hundred years of Afghan political arrangments in one or at the most two deployment cycles, there is  massive problem with this strategy, if it can be called that.  COIN is an operational doctrine, and it does not examine the political goals that are being sought, nor the political constraints.  One of those political constraints is that the American public is indierennt at best towards supporting the current level of activites in Afghanistan, much less escalating thos activites. 


From CNN:



But support for the Afghan war hit an all-time low in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released last week. That survey found 39 percent still favor the war, compared with 58 percent who oppose it -- making it almost as unpopular as the Iraq war has become in recent years. And calls for more troops could be a tough sell in Congress.


Expanded and expensive committments for an already unpopular war in a shitty economy with no hope for employment or wage increases for a while where the only supporters for the increase are political adversaries of the President and the majority is not a formula for success or sustainability. 



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