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Just an FYI that I won’t be doing any lame April Fools jokes. Most are really groan inducing and not at all believable.

The best one ever (at least for font geeks like me) was San Serriffe, the fictional island that the BBC created in 1977. The island was littered with puns on font types and was shaped like a semi-colon. Spirit, the Southwest Airlines magazine, has an excellent feature article this month about the hoax and others. Go read about that rather than the random and lame April Fool’s jokes that are percolating the web today.

I was about to give the Clinton campaign credit for not piling on in the whole “Should Obama dump his pastor” kerfuffle. Then Hillary’s team lets her put an easily fact-checked lie into her stump speech and she then decides it’s time to wade in because she was “just responding to a question”.

Uh huh. Because pols never, ever avoid a question they don’t want to answer. I’m sure it has nothing to do with a deflection strategy on the whole Bosnia issue. I want to give her the benefit of the doubt and say she misremembered the first time, that happens. But then her team let it into a stump speech and didn’t bother to factcheck the story. That’s the real problem here. Why would they put that into the stump speech without knowing whether it was true? You would think that the Clinton campaign people would have this whole running for President thing down but they prove time and time again that they simply have no clue.

As far as the whole pastor thing, I don’t much care. I disagree with a lot of what my minister says as well. I wouldn’t want you to hold me to his politics anymore than I would hold you to yours. It’s not as silly as the whole Geraldine Ferraro incident (who should know about being used to make a point) but anything passes as news in this 24 hours a day news cycle where gotcha politics rules.

Oh well, only seven more months until the 2012 election cycle starts…

One of the wonderful things about dealing with state laws is finding the old laws still on the books that really no longer serve any purpose. For instance, Vermont has a tax clean-up bill (HB 888) that would repeal the property tax exemption for veterans of the Civil and Spanish-American wars. Nevermind that a Civil War veteran would have to be 165 years old to still be alive today (assuming that they entered the service at 18 in 1861) and Spanish-American War veterans would be 140 years old.

There are tons of little laws on the books that simply need to be cleaned up. Sometimes we’ll get those forwards (of dubious origin) that list the quirky laws that states still have, but it amazes me the the stuff that is still on the statute books.

Why? Because Cubs fans hopes for Kerry Wood are getting dashed again. Like Charlie Brown and that damned football, Cubs fans hoped this year would be different. This would be the year that Kerry Wood took his place among the immortal starting pitchers closers in baseball history. His fastball hit 98 in spring training. He was ready to pitch back-to-back days. He was ready to go.

Until he actually went to pitch back-to-back days and had back spasms. Now, he can’t pitch for a week because they don’t want him to ride the bus to an away game. It looks like the all time leader in simulated innings will continue to add to his record.

Ah, Cubs fans. You crack me up. I know, I know this was going to be the year. It was the hundredth year without a championship and the embarrassing streak would gloriously come to an end as Kerry Wood held the World Series trophy high on the mound of Wrigley Field. All the old players would be there and it would be like Field of Dreams. No black cats or billy goats or idiot fans would ruin the fun this year. No, siree. This was it.

Or maybe not. I can hear them from here “it’s just back spasms”. Uh huh. Here’s to 101.

Kevin,

I’ll put it in terms you’ll definitely understand. The Protestants have a bit of marketing problem. The Catholics offer copious amounts of booze and a good time. Protestants offer marching through Catholic neighborhoods and getting shot at. I think we definitely have the advantage on that one.

Not that I partake and I am truly annoyed at those that portray themselves as part Irish today, but I can see where the issue lies for your side.

If only you’d move back to your own country, we wouldn’t have an issue

I’ve avoided talking about the Spitzer fiasco in New York because in a lot of ways I think it’s silly. Yes, we all love watching holier-than-thou politicians being hoisted on their own petard, but really it’s a family issue masquerading as a political circus.

Though, I have to give credit to Virgin Mobile Canada for this ad that will be in Canadian newspapers this weekend (hmm… I wonder why they aren’t running them for Virgin US?). It’s timely and actually pretty funny. I doubt they’ll get many conversions but at least they’ll have a lot of free promotion as the news media picks up the story.

If you had told me two weeks ago that the Democrats would take Denny Hastert’s seat, I would have openly mocked you. Having grown up in that district, I knew that the likelihood that any Democrat would take the seat would be about the same as me being named King of Ireland.

Well, I’m booking my ticket now.

Bill Foster, a Democrat with zero political experience, defeated three four-time loser Jim Oberweis in the race for the seat, which encompasses the extreme western ex-urbs of Chicago and points west. Mr. Oberweis already lost bids for US Senate in 2002 and 2004 and Illinois Governor in 2006. His campaigns are nasty and he uses his wealth (from the greatest dairy in the known world) to run ads that do little but try to smear the competition. The Tribune runs down some of these ads on their Swamp blog.

I simply can’t believe it. The GOP is pointing the finger (and I do mean “the finger” at this point) at Oberweis and saying he’s the reason they lost. Of course, he’s their nominee in November when Foster and Oberweis will be running again for the same spot so they don’t want to say it too loudly. This could be a harbinger of things to come. I know that one result does not a trend make, but this is so out of left field and so unlikely that the GOP may need to just duck and cover in November and be thankful for whatever seats they do manage to keep.

It’s funny how quickly fingers begin pointing when a campaign is imploding. The LA Times has an article on the fussing and fighting in the Clinton camp over the weekend.

As the campaign faces a make-or-break moment, some high-level officials are trying to play down their role in the campaign. Penn said in an e-mail over the weekend that he had “no direct authority in the campaign,” describing himself as merely “an outside message advisor with no campaign staff reporting to me.”

“I have had no say or involvement in four key areas — the financial budget and resource allocation, political or organizational sides. Those were the responsibility of Patti Solis Doyle, Harold Ickes and Mike Henry, and they met separately on all matters relating to those areas.”

Howard Wolfson, the campaign’s communications chief, answered that it was Penn who had top responsibility for both its strategy and message. Another aide said Penn spoke to Clinton routinely about the campaign’s message and ran daily meetings on the topic.

Everyone is blaming everyone else for the performance at a time that is critical for the campaign. I’d love to see the internal polling at the Clinton campaign on Friday. I don’t imagine the campaign will last beyond tomorrow, but I’ve been surprised before.

I have a confession to make. Even though I do taxes every day (and passed the CPA exam in October!) I’ve used Turbo Tax for the past three years to do my taxes. The reason? It’s so darn simple. They’ve really made the software just about idiot-proof for those of us that don’t have overly complicated returns. And if you do have a complicated return? Well, look at the benefits that Turbo Tax has.

For me, I can import my W-2 directly into the software, which not only saves a lot of time but keeps me from making mistakes. I don’t have any clue what the codes mean, but I don’t have to because Turbo Tax does. I also import my information (address, dependants, etc…) automatically. Plus, with free Federal E-File, I got my refund in 2 weeks rather than 6-8.

I’ve started running an ad for Turbo Tax on the right hand side. For me to run an ad for a company, I really have to believe in the product. And in the case of Turbo Tax, I doubt you’ll find an easier to use solution for completing your taxes.

The muckracking professor whose research lead to the whole stock option backdating scandal (albeit, a decade later) is back at it again. Apparently, he’s now looking to see whether insiders backdated stock donations to their charitable foundations to “maximize tax benefits”.

As Portfolio points out, there are two ways that insiders could get this lucky: one legal and one not. The legal way is that donations to family foundations are exempt from insider trading rules as the stock isn’t really being sold. The stock could be donated the day before an earnings announcement reporting a big drop in earnings and the executive would get the higher value of the stock as a tax writeoff.

The not so legal way is to backdate the donation to a high point in the stock during the period in which insider donations have to be reported, which is much longer than the time to report sales. This would take some collusion between the foundation and the executive, but most foundations are run by either the executive or his family, so it is not exactly difficult to pull this off.

The professor did not find definitive proof of backdating, but the longer the time between the donation and the report of the donation, the better timed the donation seemed to be. He estimated that, at most, 20% of the donations seemed suspicious.

All this for people that are already wealthy beyond belief. It’s amazing what people will do for money. As King Solomon reminds us “Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income“. It doesn’t seem to matter to some people what they have to do to gain wealth they could never possibly spend, whether it’s cheating investors or the IRS.

Hopefully, this will lead to convictions. Unchecked greed will only lead us down a dark and dangerous path and we seem to be stuck in the eternal downward spiral that Gordon Gekko thrived on.