It looks like Obama has found his own Joe Lieberman – potential running mate Tim Kaine. Surprise! He’s more right than left.

I learned the following from an IRS official who is active in volunteer tax assistance programs in our county:

…we are trying to concentrate our efforts on getting the earned income credit taxpayers to stop taking those refund anticipation loans. Out of the 4700 EIC filed returns in Gallatin County in 2004, over 3600 of them had refund anticipation loans! Not good in my opinion.

Refund anticipation loans are, along with payday loans, about as bad a deal as can be had. Interest rates run from 40% to as high as 700%. From a lender’s standpoint, they are gold – a guaranteed source of repayment, and an unsophisticated client in financial need.

I suppose you could say that people are their own worst enemy – that’s true. Most people haven’t a clue how interest is calculated. It isn’t normally taught in school. But the lending industry has to answer for its own behavior without regard to the sophistication of its clientèle. Regulation is in order, not because I think everything need be regulated, but rather because it would do some actual good. We could either ban the loans entirely, or regulate the rate of interest that can be charged. That would be a moral thing to do in am amoral “Gotcha!” marketplace.

IRS is doing its part – when people file electronically and use bank debits instead of paper checks, refunds are very quick. They are trying to get money to people as fast as possible to keep the refund anticipation people out of the picture. But one problem is that many low-income people don’t have bank accounts. Paper checks take a few weeks longer.

My oh my how we take advantage of one another. This is but one more way. The housing crisis was in large part brought about because of Shylock’s preying on uninformed and unsophisticated consumers. Payday loans may be outrageously expensive, but refund anticipation loans are as bad, if not worse.

I hope liberals don’t make too much of the fact that Jim D. Adkisson, the lunatic that gunned down eight people in a Unitarian church in Knoxville, did so because of the group’s liberal views. What happened was random. That could as easily have been a black church or a white fundamentalist one. There are crazies out there, they can strike anywhere, any time, for any reason.

This time they hit a liberal church. Next time it will be something else – something I can’t even imagine. That’s because it is crazy, and crazy is, by definition, random. These are victims of random violence, but let’s not make a cause of it. It can happen to any one of us at any time, and there is no rational explanation.

Years ago in another life (and another body) I used to play slow-pitch softball. My wife would come to most all the games, and she and the other wives would have the greatest of times though they could not tell you who won or lost the game. But the point is that the men got to do their thing, which was to drink beer after the game, and the women theirs, which was yak with other women. What could be better?

Well, here’s a story about a study that says that cities that have major league baseball teams, on average, have a 28% lower divorce rate than cities that don’t have major league teams, but would like to. As schooled as I am in stats, I can guarantee that that means direct cause and effect, and here’s why: If a husband and wife go to a game, since it is such a slow game, they can have conversation. If two couples go to a game, the women can yak, and the men can cheer for the team and drink beer. Everyone is happy, ergo longer-lasting marriages.

Earlier this year we went to a game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. We were wandering around the stadium before the game, and I determined that I would have a beer for this afternoon affair. I went to the booth, asked for an Anchor Steam, handed the man a $20, and got $10.25 in change.

$9.75 for a beer. Needless to say, there were no seconds. Surely someone somewhere, perhaps Freakonomics, can explain such a high price for a beer. I can think of only one good reason: The San Francisco Giants do not want rowdy fans, and at the same time want to make a lot of money on beer. Therefore they drew a graph and hit on the optimum price that would yield the highest profit from beer sales while putting a damper on rowdies.

AT&T, by the way, is a beautiful facility, and does the city proud. But those prices could well break up a marriage.

Take the autism test – 50 questions, it goes very quickly. Find out if there is a basic and simple explanation for all those quirks you have.

You tell me your score, I’ll tell you mine.

I once had a cartoon over my desk titled “White Guy Problems”, and the picture was of a guy spilling his latte on his suede jacket while driving. I guess I have to look no further than the Wall Street Journal for other white guy problems:

Problem: You packed a bottle of wine for the picnic, but forgot the corkscrew.

Solution: It’s an unthinkable predicament among some instructors at the Sommelier Society of America in New York, but they came up with two options. The first involves driving the cork into the bottle. “Use a narrow, cylindrical thing — a tube of [lip balm] … or the handle of a wooden spoon — and gently, slowly push it down into the bottle,” says Anne Woods, the organization’s assistant to the chairman. “Then you have to be creative when you pour it,” because when you tip the bottle to pour, the cork will block the flow of wine. So you’ll need something long and skinny — the spoon handle again or a skewer — to hold the cork back as you pour. The second method: If you happen to have a screw — preferably one with large threads like the kind used in woodwork — it could work like a corkscrew with the help of a screwdriver, Ms. Woods says. Once you’ve screwed the hardware into the cork, use pliers to slowly wriggle the cork out of the neck. The Sommelier Society instructors admit this is the more difficult of the two methods.

My problem is more basic – what to do in a motel room when you don’t have a beer opener. We had this problem once, and I went down the the lounge to ask for an opener. The bartender had only one – a lethal looking combination knife/corkscrew/opener, and she begged me to return it when we left, and I promised I would. The day we left I put it in my jacket pocket to drop off downstairs, and then promptly forgot. When we arrived at the airport and had to put all our belongings in the basket for the screener, there I was with a nasty looking knife/corkscrew. It was confiscated. I’m sure now I’m on a watch list, this country being paranoid and all.

This exchange over at Rabid Sanity just keeps getting better. Last night Dave Budge chimed in, and said as he exited that he was “not returning to this”. In other words, he was doing a hit and run.

That’s cool. Dave’s a busy guy – far too busy to blog. But pardon me for a minute while I bloviate – I only have a fleeting image of what Budge looks like. He used to post his picture on his web site. But as I imparted my closing words on Budge, it occurred to me that he wanted to do a hit and run because he likes pulpits more than forums. And an image from the 1990’s struck me – one, like the man-against tank in Tiananmen Square that day – is frozen in time. It was this:

It was Boris Yeltsin preaching from atop a tank as the Russian military surrounded parliament. Later on, Yeltsin needed tanks to enforce his philosophy.

I shall forever think of Budge now as a man who preaches from atop a tank, because tanks and rifles, ala Pinochet and Yeltsin, are what it takes for his philosophy to take hold.

I won’t be returning to this.

No – I’m not talking about Prince. This has to do with a real fruit. There’s an interview over at Democracy Now! between Amy Goodman and Adam Leith Gollner that includes a discussion of a fruit imported from Africa and grown in Florida called … well, he only calls it the “miracle berry”. It’s got some remarkable properties – if you put it in your mouth and swish it around, sour things that you eat afterwards taste very sweet.

During the interview, Goodman used the miracle berry and then ate a lime as she talked. She gushed about the sweetness of the lime. She couldn’t get enough. It was “ecstatically sweet”, she said, like a very sweet orange.

The miracle berry has been around for quite a while, and its properties are well known, but it has suffered from a problem associated with many fruits we don’t see – it has a short shelf life. So during the 1970’s, an inventor named Robert Harvey came up with a way to encapsulate the berry’s properties in a pill. The potential was enormous – it would have replaced artificial sweeteners.

OK, so here is what happened. He started making miracle fruit tablets, because these fruits don’t have a very long shelf life, and that’s another reason that many of these fruits from the tropics don’t make it here, is that they just have no shelf life whatsoever. But he put them in tablet form. Diabetics were going crazy for them. Kids were choosing miracle fruit popsicles over regular popsicles by this enormous margin. And companies, other corporations started getting interested. And Harvey was turning down offers in the billions for control—billions of dollars were being offered to him for this, because it looked like it was poised to become an all-natural alternative to sugar. And even the artificial sweetening industry was very concerned about this threat of this small red berry.

But what happened was, that just as it was about to launch, Harvey’s company, his office was raided by industrial spies. His files were stolen. He got into high-speed car chases in the middle of the night. People were following him.

That all sounds unreal, so skepticism is in order, but this is real: The FDA banned his pill, which it regulated as a food additive. Maybe there’s a reason other than the ones intimated here.

But the berry itself is not subject to FDA regulation, and it is possible now to ship it overnight all over the country, so its potential is slowly being untapped. It is not metabolized as glucose, so diabetics can freely use it and taste the wonders of sweetness again. Chemotherapy patients lose their ability to taste sweet food, and it all tastes rubbery and metallic to them, and the miracle berry helps them too. Then there is just the obesity problem in general.

I just had a nice go-round with Steve over at Rabid Sanity and defended market regulation. That’s a polarized position, as I know as well as anyone that the problem with regulation is the those whom we seek to regulate usually wind up running the regulatory agencies. It’s a huge problem, and possibly the reason why the pill based on the miracle berry was taken off the market. Substitute sweeteners are a huge market.

Read more about the magic fruit here.

I have watched with interest the reactions of rank and file Democrats as Obama reversed course on FISA and NAFTA – in fact, stuck it to them. They’ve been had, and on some level, they must know it. But the human mind is a remarkable engine, and denial a powerful ally in coping with reality. Read below, from Sara Haile-Mariam at Huffington Post, about how Obama is no longer a vehicle for specific aspirations, but rather one of “empowerment”. Note how Obama’s reversals on critical issues are not so important as the fact that we must elect Obama. Note how, even though Obama is obviously not a vehicle for achievement of current aspirations, he will be a vehicle for future ones. We must only close our eyes and click our heels …

That’s what Democrats do. They rationalize reality into an amorphous gel and ply it to any issue.

Below is my entry in the contest for the dumbest paragraph ever written:

I don’t agree with Senator Obama’s vote on the FISA Bill, and yet, I’m thankful. A year ago I wouldn’t have understood the ramifications and so his ability to draw me into the process, empowering me to have an opinion, is something to be celebrated. I think it’s extraordinary that thousands of others felt empowered enough to confront him on it, on his website no less. Americans are starting to see the power of organizing on behalf of causes that we believe in. We’ve been empowered by his words, and that power has enabled us to insist on better. Still, the debacle over the Fisa controversy frustrated me. Placing so much of our hope on the candidate is crippling, where were the groups lobbying to other members of the Senate that voted for the bill? We can’t assume that one man will agree with all of his supporters on everything. WE are the change we’ve been waiting for… remember? So before we stalk off yard signs in hand and insist upon keeping our donations and our time hostage, remember that he isn’t the answer to all of our problems. He is the vehicle of the solution. He will be a President who will enlist the American people into a mission to change our country for the better. He will be a President who compels us to ask more of our leadership, understanding that we can disagree without being disagreeable.

From the Wall Street Journal:

This Bud Might Not Be For Them

St. Louis — Jordon Moore took the news that his beloved Budweiser could soon fall into foreign hands very personally: He decided he would scrap his plan to get the logo of the King of Beers tattooed on his right rib cage.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said the 21-year-old concrete worker during his luinch break at the Brick of St. Louis bar, in the city’s storied Anheuser-Busch Cos. brewery, “if Budweiser is made by a different country, I don’t drink Budweiser anymore. I’ll go back to Wild Turkey.” (Wild Turkey, a Kentucky bourbon, is owned by French drinks giant Pernod Ricard SA.)