No Runny Eggs

Nick (The World According to Nick host/creator of the Carnival of the Badger) brings the not-so-good news that anonymous annoying Web messages are now punishable by 2 years in Club Fed. Stupid, stupid, stupid, even though I haven’t had to break out the boomstick on any trolls.

That reminds me; how in the heck did I forget to put Nick on the blogroll? I can’t even claim RSS reader failure. Sorry about that, Nick.

Revisions/extensions – Nick points us back to the Volokh Conspiracy and Football Fans for Truth, which make a rather convincing case, pending legal challenges, that this rewrite of existing telephone anti-harrassment law was targeting only VOIP. Of course, I seem to recall a greasy assurance that the McShame-Slimeroad Lieberal Protection Act would be found un-Constitutional by the courts, only to find out that a majority on SCOTUS saw a previously-undiscovered exemption to the First Amendment for mentioning office-holders’ and -seekers’ names around election time without being a member of the LeftStream Media.

Or at least semi-active. I don’t know how much I’ll use this, but I decided to “test-drive” Pollhost.com‘s free poll hosting to see if Jessica could/should use that as a replacement for the ad-plagued Bravenet she had been using. It seems to be working, the ads are limited to the results page, and I even don’t accept cookies from the site.

Now that I’m dried off from testing out the Sykes Cement Shoes (yes, they do sink a blogger), it’s back to business. Channel 12 gives us a story on a state warning about tax refund anticipation loans. I do agree with the state that these are very bad ideas, and for the reason why they state – it’s borrowing your own money at an exhorbitant interest rate. However, there’s a point they don’t bring up. In order to get that massive “refund”, you were borrowing your own money to the state and the feds at no interest rate. What are you doing giving the state so much tax money through the course of the year that you have a massive “refund” coming? That’s money that you could have invested over the course of the year, and instead of having less purchasing power from it by taking it as a late lump sum, you could have either spent it as it came in and had more stuff for your money, or done the really-smart thing, invested it and actually made some money.

Do note that I’m not saying take withholding down to zero (though I would prefer that, with everybody writing a quarterly check like those that earn most of their income from sources where withholding doesn’t happen, just to see how much money is going out the door to government – it’s FAR more than the property taxes, almost 47.5 times more as of 2004, and that’s just the state income tax), because that would, without the estimated quarterly tax payments, get you in a heap of trouble. I do recommend asking your tax advisor a different question than the usual maximize-refund one; “How do I maximize my take-home pay without getting whacked with penalities?”

The dearly-departed “Revisiting history – Part 3” got me in serious trouble with the Blogfather. It seems that because I post-dated it to the end of this month, Charlie’s feed reader got all discombobulated and that resulted in a short trip off the Bender Park boat launch.

Things got worse when I first rubbed it back out; it didn’t want to die. Sure, Blogger said it wasn’t there, but the home page disagreed. I finally re-created a current-dated version and sent it to Jones Island.

Never fear; the gist of it lives on, and it has a more-permanent home, at least until we defeat AB15, the bad-gas bill. Speaking of which, I have yet to hear back from Plale. Looks like I’ll be busy tomorrow (I might even do a road trip for some citizen lobbying if he continues to ignore me, but I won’t take the Voces de la Frontera route and trek into South Milwaukee).

I guess I can’t complain too much about getting whacked off the Blogfather’s blogroll. At least Aaron won’t be borrowing Tony Montana’s little friend.

Revisions/extensions; I’m drying off from the late Polar Bear dunk. No harm, no foul.

If I really cared about what Eugene Kane says, I would have done what Fred did and done a ReWriteâ„¢ of Kane’s bit in the Jountinel’s full frontal assault on this end of the Cheddarsphere.