Now Hear This: Commence Operation Schadenfreude!

A federal jury Thursday found former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, guilty of public corruption — sending a message that they believed the couple sold the office once occupied by Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson to a free spending Richmond businessman for golf outings, lavish vacations and $120,000 in sweetheart loans.

He was convicted on 11 counts, his wife on nine. He was found not guilty on two, his wife on four according to CNN. It would seem that there was a deadlock for each of them on one of the counts. Or CNN can't count.

When Seconds Count, the Po-Po Are Minutes Away

A terrified Arizona widow, armed with a revolver, hid in her bathroom then shot and subdued a robber who broke into her home.

Audio and transcript here.

"A lot of officers are responding"-- none of them got there in time. The perp broke into the house, found her and started beating on her before she managed to shoot him. Four minutes after she shot the perp, the cops came into her home.

No doubt that if she had killed him, one of Hizzoner da Mare Bloomberg's astroturf gun-grabber groups would have listed him as a "victim of gun violence".

Self-defense is a human right.

VFTP, Update the Second

It's back, after a request that the blog be made accessible for the purpose of perusing the archives.

Tam does not intend to continue blogging and comments have been disabled.

"And That's When the Fight Started."

Which is the last line to all of these jokes:

A woman went with her husband to his high school reunion. Two tables over, a woman was sitting alone and pounding down drinks.
"Honey, do you know that woman," the wife asked.
"Yes," he sighed. "We dated and broke up after graduation. I heard she took up drinking and never stopped."
"Ohmigawd, that's an awfully long time for a celebration," the wife said.

A man was hinting to his wife what he wants for a 50th birthday present.
"I want something that has chrome and will go from 0 to 200 in a few seconds," he announced.
She bought him a bathroom scale.

A man was walking down the street in the city and turns the corner by a building. He bumped into some guy who was carrying a cardboard tray with four coffees in it. The coffees dumped all over the other guy, who starts cussing a blue streak. The guy who turned the corner did a double-take, as he realized that he just almost trampled a dwarf.
The guy with the coffees ended his tirade by screaming: "I am not happy!"
The first guy asked: "OK, so which one are you?"

A man was standing in the bedroom, looking in a mirror and frowning.
His wife walked in and asked what was wrong.
He said: "I've got a pot belly, I'm going bald, what hair I have left is turning gray and I'm not the stud that I once was."
"Is there anything that I can do to cheer you up," she asked.
"I need you to pay me a compliment."
She thought for a second and then said: "Your eyesight's excellent."

A woman walked into her husband's man-cave and asked: "What's on TV?"
"Dust."

A man is reading the paper when his wife walked into the room.
"Dear, I just got off the phone with my mother. She said you didn't buy her a gift for her birthday."
"Hell, she didn't use the gift I bought her last year."
"What did you give her?"
"A cemetery plot."

So the guy in the last joke took his mother-in-law out to a restaurant to try and make amends. For some reason, the waitress first asked him for his order.
"I'll have the prime rib, and I want it rare."
The waitress paused with her order pad: "Aren't you worried about mad cow?"
"Nah, she can order for herself."

A few days later, that guy was was reading a story in the paper about the fight to put the Ten Commandments in the courthouse. He said: "They have a commandment about how we're supposed to treat our parents, but not one about how wives are supposed to treat their husbands."
"Oh, but they do, dear."
"They do," he asked. "Which one is that?"
"Thou Shall Not Kill."

VFTP, Update

If you want to get a very, very tiny taste of the crap that led to Tam zorching her blog, then go to this post on Roberta's blog and read through the comments. The troll that infected Tam's life is there. He's easy-peasy to pick out.

Cram People in Like Rats and People Will Fight Like Rats

For the third time in nine days, a fight over reclining seats caused a commercial airline flight to be diverted.

This time, a Delta Air Lines flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to West Palm Beach, Fla., made an unexpected stop in Jacksonville on Monday night after a passenger became irate when the woman seated in front of her reclined.

The "pitch", the distance between the seat rows, has steadily declined over the years. There was a time, Gentle Reader, when you could actually stretch out your legs in a coach class seat and barely touch the seat in front of you. If you had the window seat, you could get up and go to the can without making the passenger next to you move from his/her seat.

But the fucking airlines moved the rows closer and closer and the future isn't looking so good.

If you jam critters too close together, bad shit happens. There's gotta be enough research to support that. Which is probably why the airlines have stopped squawking about the TSA, they need the TSA to ensure the passengers are fully disarmed before cramming 60 of them into the flying version of a "40 or 8".

The Kristol Doctrine: "Bomb Everywhere"

I have been observing, with some bemusement, the knots that the neo-cons have been tying themselves into over Ukraine and ISIS. Their consistent prescription for everything, except maybe Ebola, is the same: Bomb it.

See, if any pissant with a video camera and access to the Internet picks up an AK-47 and starts ranting, the neo-cons want to bomb the shit out of them.

How much more of this shit can we take? How many continuing wars do they want us to get into? You might recall that as the Second Persian Gulf War wore on, the Army kept lowering their recruiting standards to "dim-bulb IQ, not too many facial tattoos, no major felonies, and not old enough for Social Security". The Army was so short of people that tens of thousands of airmen and sailors were effectively drafted into the Army.

As for ISIS, the Saudis have a nice, pretty army and air force. The Almighty knows that they've spend billions and billions of petrodollars buying shiny bangity things for their military. Why don't they try using them?

Well, the Saudis won't. First off, the officer ranks of their military are used, in part, to provide jobs for Saudi princes who are way down the line of succession to the Saudi throne. And second, ISIS became powerful because the Saudis financed them.

That's what the Saudis do. They finance a terror group and then, when their pet monster breaks its chains, we get to go play Whack-a-Terrorist.

Really fixing the shit there is going to require Iran and the United States to get over their respective butthurts and work together. That would piss off the Saudis no end, another reason to do it.

As for Ukraine, when someone points out our hard national interest (other than "zOMG, aggression"), I'm listening. The Euros are freaking out because they opted to suck at the teat of Gazprom, despite all of the people who said: "I wouldn't do that shit if I were you." The same people who are freaking out over the Russians playing with their guns in the "near abroad" nations on their border were cheerleading when Reagan invaded Grenada, Bush I invaded Panama, and Bush II invaded Iraq.

Because "cheerleading" is all they do. Not that any of their kin are going to be shot at. None of Mittster's kids put on a uniform. The only member of the Bush family to serve recently was a USNR intelligence officer, which is a job that can be done adequately whilst wearing a cocktail dress and heels.*

These wars all seem to come down to the gas and oil companies making money, don't they? No doubt, our own energy companies are slavering at the idea of selling LNG to the Europeans. Which means that once again, we'll strip our own domestic energy supplies for the sake of the Europeans.
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* I've used that line before. So sue me.

"Permission Denied"

If you have tried to read View From the Porch in the last several hours, you would have gotten a "permission denied" message.

That is not a bug in Blogger. Tam has shut down her blog. Her reasons are sort of private so forgive me, Gentle Reader, if I refrain from commenting on them. Other than to say that they are valid.

I will miss her writings.

Short Barreled Rifles, a Followup...

....to my recent post on them.

The September issue of American Rifleman has the Mossberg MVP as its cover story. This paragraph was in the article:

And the Mossberg MVP series continues to grow. Mossberg has announced that it will soon offer rifles designed in cooperation with Red Jacket Firearms. These are the folks on the “Sons of Guns” show on the Discovery Channel. And you can bet that one of the Mossberg/Red Jacket guns will be an MVP.

I'm kinda guessing that Mossberg is going to put some considerable distance between them and Red Jacket, given the recent arrest of its owner on child molestation charges.

Even the Rich are Feeling Pessimistic

A mother in a very well-off family explains why even they have pulled greatly back on spending.

For some reason, people say they feel confident. But consumer spending is between flat and down. Which would seem that the old line of "money talks, bullshit walks" is still in force.

Workers in general have not recovered from the Great Recession. For the last 35 to 40 years, the economy has been engaged in a massive redistribution of wealth from those in the bottom 80% to those at the top.

Part of this is due to the treason of the capitalists, who have put their own pocketbooks ahead of the good of the country. The "creative destruction", so loved by financial pirates like ol' Roof Rack and Carl Icahn, threw millions of people out of good-paying jobs and gutted financially profitable companies, all so those greedy bastards could get even more riches. The treason was in two parts: Destroying the economic viability of the workers and middle classes and selling our industrial base to the Chinese.

And yes, I believe that's been the long-range plan of the Chinese government for the last 30-35 years: To strip the industrial bases of the West (not just us) and to transfer huge amounts of wealth to China. Here's a stat for you: In 1975, American steel mills produced 150 million tons of steel. In 2013, the U.S. produced was 87 million tons of steel. China produced 779 million tons in 2013, 494.9 million tons in 2007 and 20.5 million tons in 1976. Right now, China produces just a skosh under half of the steel made in the world.

Without doing a jot of research, I'll bet that if you looked at the list of Fortune 500 companies from the Bicentennial and compared it to the current list, you'll find not a few companies which were looted by the vulture capitalists.

As an aside, calling Romney and his ilk "vulture capitalists" is an insult to vultures. Vultures generally wait for their food to die. No, they're more like "hyena capitalists".

So here we are on Labor Day in the middle of the second decade of the 21st Century. Our largest employer is a company whose business model is based on exploitation of its workers and those in its suppliers. (They're joined in that by #2 and #3.) Labor force participation rates began falling as the Great Recession took hold and have continued to fall.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the unemployment rate has fallen:

But if you can't find a job and have been out so long that you have no hope of ever finding one, they don't count you.

If you count those who have been out a long time and those who have part-time jobs, but want to work full-time, then the marginal/unemployment rate is still 50% higher than it was before the start of the recession:

And nearly three million more people are collecting disability from Social Security since the recession began. The number of veterans claiming VA pensions has gone up 50%. Not all are mooching. Many find themselves with no prospect of employment anytime soon, so they grab for what they can. People who have houses are far less mobile than those who rent their dwellings, for the banks, despite their public protestations, make it almost impossible to do a "short sale". And a few states have figured out that the key to lowering the Medicare rolls is to hire the figurative descendents of Franz Kafka to run their programs.

So, Gentle Reader, please enjoy your burgers and brats on this Labor Day. When you look to the future, you may want to wear a welder's helmet.

Because you probably won't like what you'd otherwise see.

(H/T)