Coyote Blog

Kevin Drum thinks the mortgage interest deduction is unfair because people with bigger mortgages get bigger deductions.  In particular, he is concerned that people with smaller deductions get no incremental benefit because these deductions are seldom larger than their default personal exemption.

But tax deductions are always going to be like this in a progressive system -- the rates are progressive and the fixed personal exemption is extremely progressive, so the combination of the two mean that tax deductions are going to preferentially help the rich more.  This reminds me of the arguments in Colorado when tax law required a tax reduction and Democrats in the state legislature complained that people who don't pay taxes would be getting no benefits from this.

He tries to posit some silly alternative tax credit system, but why bother?  Haven't we had enough of distortive tax breaks that favor a single industry and/or shift investment alarmingly into a particular pool of assets (thus increasing the risk of bubbles).  Isn't the whole notion of tax-subsidizing home ownership but not rentals inherently regressive, no matter how the deduction or credit is calculated?  Doesn't the labor market rigidity of home ownership most penalize lower income workers who get trapped in a certain geography by their home and cannot migrate for better wages, as blue collar workers have done in past recessions and recoveries?

Why wouldn't a good progressive like Drum be advocating for an elimination of the deduction altogether?  Is this one of those coke-pepsi party things, where the Republicans have taken over the issue of limiting deductions so Democrats have to reflexively defend them, even if ideologically it would make more sense for them to promote their elimination?

NOTE:  We had some sort of massive fail with the WordPress scheduler where this post failed to post at the scheduled time.  For some reason, if it misses the scheduled minute it is supposed to post, it fails (it does not just post a minute late).  So this is 3 days late and we likely won't have many folks join, but its free and a nice bracket site and you are welcome to join between now and tomorrow.

Back by popular demand is the annual Coyote Blog NCAA Bracket Challenge. Last year we had nearly 140 entries. Yes, I know that many of you are bracketed out, but for those of you who are self-employed and don’t have an office pool to join or who just can’t get enough of turning in brackets, this pool is offered as my public service.

Everyone is welcome, so send the link to friends as well. There is no charge to join in and I have chosen a service with the absolutely least intrusive log-in (name, email, password only) and no spam. The only thing I ask is that, since my kids are participating, try to keep the team names and board chat fairly clean.

To join, go to http://www.pickhoops.com/CoyoteBlog2013 and sign up, then enter your bracket. This year, you may enter two different brackets if you wish.

Scoring is as follows:

Round 1 correct picks: 1 points
Round 2: 2
Round 3: 4
Round 4: 8
Round 5: 16
Round 6: 32

We have upped later round scoring to try to keep things more competitive at the end. Special March Madness scoring bonus: If you correctly pick the underdog in any round (ie, the team with the higher number seed) to win, then you receive bonus points for that correct pick equal to the difference in the two team’s seeds. So don’t be afraid to go for the long-shots! The detailed rules are at the link.

Bracket entry appears to be open. Online bracket entry closes Thursday, March 21st at 12:18PM EDT. Be sure to get your brackets in early. Anyone can play — the more the better. Each participant will be allows to submit up to two brackets.

For those who may be interested, we are having a one-day conference on public-private partnerships for park operations on November 7 in Reno, Nevada.  The US Forest Service and those of us in the business have gotten a lot of inquiries from recreation agencies over the last year or so.  These folks are trying to keep parks open despite declining budgets.

The USFS figured out a way to do this over 30 years ago, and only now are other agencies starting to copy the model  (California State Parks just started using it this year, for example).  The USFS, like most agencies, charges a fee for the public to visit certain parks or to use campgrounds.  They found that they could not cover their high operating costs with just these user fees, and so had to use a lot of general fund money to keep the parks open.  Many complain that public recreation user fees are too high, but typically they cover only about half the agency's costs to run the park.  When general fund money started to go away, the USFS faced park closures, exactly the situation today in many state and local parks agencies.

The USFS found that private operators with a lower cost position and more flexibility could keep these parks open using just the user fees, and in fact actually pay the USFS some rent.  So instead of having to subsidize the park's operation with tax money, the parks began to generate funds for the USFS.

It took decades to get this right.  The USFS made mistakes in how they grouped parks into contracts, how they wrote the contracts, and how they did oversight.  The private companies made operating mistakes and some failed financially at awkward times, since when this program started there did not exist a pool of experienced operators.  But over the years, many of these problems have been worked out, and most privately-run sites operate to a standard at least as high as publicly-run parks.  Here in Arizona, three of the top five highest-rated public campgrounds are operated by private companies in the USFS program.

At this conference, both private operators and agency people experienced with this model will describe how it works as well as years of hard-won lessons learned.

The conference is free to most government agency officials, academics, and media and we have obtained a really inexpensive $49 hotel rate  (since by definition the agencies most interested in the model don't have much money).   The web site that describes the agenda and logistics is here.  Readers of this site who don't fit one of these categories but would still like to attend can email me at the link in the above site and I will get you in.

Apparently, he things "moocher" is unfair.  So I will remind you what he wrote a while back:

...for the first time that I can remember, this means that I have a personal stake in the election. It's not just that I find one side's policies more congenial in the abstract, but that one policy in particular could have a substantial impact on my life.

You see, I've never really intended to keep blogging until I'm 65. I might, of course. Blogging is a pretty nice job. But I'd really like to have a choice, and without Obamacare I probably won't. That's because I'm normal: I'm in my mid-50s, I have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, a family history of heart trouble, and a variety of other smallish ailments. Nothing serious, but serious enough that it's unlikely any insurance company would ever take me on. So if I decided to quit blogging when I turned 60, I'd be out of luck. I couldn't afford to be entirely without health insurance (the 4x multiplier that hospitals charge the uninsured would doom me all by itself), and no one would sell me an individual policy. I could try navigating the high-risk pool labyrinth, but that's a crapshoot. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't.

But if Obamacare stays on the books, I have all the flexibility in the world. If I want to keep working, I keep working. If I don't, I head off to the exchange and buy a policy that suits me. No muss, no fuss.

Attempting to remind him of these comments, I commented today:

I'm confused here.  A few weeks ago, didn't you say you support Obamacare because it let you retire early?  You said you could not afford to quit working early without Obamacare, because you would need your work and income to pay for, what to you, is a vital good.   Obamacare allows you to quit working earlier, presumably because other people, rather than you, will pay for at least a part of your health care with their labor.

I understand no one likes the word "moocher."  But you came on these pages really proudly announcing that Obamacare allowed you to retire early while others labored to support your needs.  What word would you suggest as an alternative, then, to describe this behavior?

(Yeah, I can predict the response.  It's not the subsidy you want, just the community rating.  Well, high premiums for 55-year-olds with pre-existing conditions are not some evil conspiracy, they reflect true cost to serve.  Having a government mandate that you pay the premiums of a healthy 25-year-old when you are 60 and sick is still a subsidy, paid for with someone else's labor.  As a minimum, 25-year-old minimum wage workers just entering the work force pay more when they are healthy so you can lead a life of indolence).

Kevin Drum writes:

...for the first time that I can remember, this means that I have a personal stake in the election. It's not just that I find one side's policies more congenial in the abstract, but that one policy in particular could have a substantial impact on my life.

You see, I've never really intended to keep blogging until I'm 65. I might, of course. Blogging is a pretty nice job. But I'd really like to have a choice, and without Obamacare I probably won't. That's because I'm normal: I'm in my mid-50s, I have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, a family history of heart trouble, and a variety of other smallish ailments. Nothing serious, but serious enough that it's unlikely any insurance company would ever take me on. So if I decided to quit blogging when I turned 60, I'd be out of luck. I couldn't afford to be entirely without health insurance (the 4x multiplier that hospitals charge the uninsured would doom me all by itself), and no one would sell me an individual policy. I could try navigating the high-risk pool labyrinth, but that's a crapshoot. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't.

But if Obamacare stays on the books, I have all the flexibility in the world. If I want to keep working, I keep working. If I don't, I head off to the exchange and buy a policy that suits me. No muss, no fuss.

So yes, this election matters, and it matters in a very personal way. It does to me, anyway. It's not just about gridlock as far as the eye can see.

I usually have a pretty thick skin for this type of stuff, but this got to me.  I wrote:

Great.  Those of us who are comfortable actually, you know, working to support ourselves look forward to subsidizing your future indolence.
Sorry, I am not usually that much of a snarky jerk, but really, that is what you are celebrating.  You are not celebrating some medical or scientific breakthrough that allows you to stay healthy at a lower cost.  You are celebrating a system to force other people to pay for your body's maintenance.  All so you don't have to support yourself for over a quarter of your life.

If you were to say that, "wow the health dice really rolled against me and I need help," few would begrudge you the help.  But this notion of an indolent retirement is radically new.  It is a product of our century's and our country's great wealth.  Retirement is a luxury good.  I have no problem with anyone consuming this luxury good out of their savings, but consuming it out of mine, and then crowing about it to my face, is highly irritating.

If I were a Republican, or if I had one iota of trust in them, I might write that this is what the election is about.  Since I don't have such trust, I will instead merely highlight Drum's thoughts as a good representation of modern entitled thinking.  For God sakes this guy is not even trying to use my money to escape, say, a coal mine early.  He wants my cash to escape blogging early, perhaps the cushiest job there is (as indicated by the fact that many of us do it for no compensation what-so-ever).

Fortunately I am not vain, so that I can still post this terrible picture of myself.  I am proudly holding the government-mandated flow restrictor I just removed from my most recent shower head purchase.  I don't buy any shower head until I make sure it has a removable restrictor.

The Federal laws restricting shower head flows have got to be among the dumbest on the books.  Some thoughts:

• Water is not equally scarce everywhere.  So why is everyone required to conserve?  Why is the ideal flow rate the same in Seattle as in Phoenix?
• Government policy for over a century has been to promote subsidized water prices that don't reflect its true scarcity (particularly to farmers).  Then, having guaranteed overuse via its pricing actions, the government then implements silly laws like this to try to offset the harm from its meddling in prices.
• We have a lawn in Phoenix that needs constant watering and a pool that evaporates so fast in the summer one can almost see the water level dropping.  But the state's priority is to knock of a few gallons of water use from my shower.
• With the low flow shower heads, it takes me three times longer to get the soap and shampoo off of me than with a full-flow head.  So we cut the water rate by half, but extend shower times by three.  And this helps, how?  And don't even get me started on low-flow toilets
• The last three hotel rooms I have stayed in have had double shower heads, to make up the lost flow from wimpy government-approved single heads.  This process of cutting back on how much a single head can flow and then adding extra heads is incredibly dumb and wasteful.

• I suspect this is all secret revenge from some English expat that wanted US showers to be as bad as those in Britain.

Wow, did I ever stink it up with my brackets over the weekend.  Worst I have ever done, and it had nothing to do with missing the two 15-2 upsets (everybody missed those).  The only good news is that I am ahead of my son Nic.  My traditional bias against all schools Ohio definitely hurt me.

Anyway, congrats to those who were far more prescient:

I am not sure who does it, but we have a reader who faithfully enters the President's bracket into the pool each year, and I must say that Barack does seem to know his college hoops.

UPDATE:  Special congrats to Mike Langan, who due to the vagaries of the CoyoteBlog traditional scoring system is in second, but his bracket based on number of correct picks is actually in the top 50 of 88,000+ brackets at PickHoops.com.

Note: This post sticky through 3/15.  Look below for newest posts.

Back by popular demand is the annual Coyote Blog NCAA Bracket Challenge.  We typically have about 150 entries.  Yes, I know that many of you are bracketed out, but for those of you who are self-employed and don’t have an office pool to join or who just can’t get enough of turning in brackets, this pool is offered as my public service.

Everyone is welcome, so send the link to friends as well.  There is no charge to join in and I have chosen a service with the absolutely least intrusive log-in (name, email, password only) and no spam.  The only thing I ask is that, since my kids are participating, try to keep the team names and board chat fairly clean.

To join, go to http://www.pickhoops.com/CoyoteBlog and sign up, then enter your bracket.  This year, you may enter two different brackets if you wish.

Scoring is as follows (its the same scoring we have always used)

Round 1 correct picks:  1 points
Round 2:  2
Round 3:  4
Round 4:  6
Round 5:  8
Round 6:  10

Special March Madness scoring bonus: If you correctly pick the underdog in any round (ie, the team with the higher number seed) to win, then you receive bonus points for that correct pick equal to the difference in the two team’s seeds.  So don’t be afraid to go for the long-shots!   The detailed rules are here.

Bracket entry appears to be open.  Online bracket entry closes Thursday, March 15th at 12:18pm EDT.  Be sure to get your brackets in early.  Anyone can play — the more the better.  Each participant will be allows to submit up to two brackets.

From my own state of Arizona (emphasis added)

A group of small-business proponents is asking the Legislature to guarantee startup money for Arizona enterprises.

The backers of a so-called Arizona Fund of Funds made their pitch to a handful of lawmakers Monday, saying businesses need government help to start hiring again.

That help should come in the form of tax credits, said John Kowalski, who is promoting the idea through the Arizona Growth Foundation, a group of venture capitalists working to bring more investment to the state.

The credits would be a safety net to encourage venture capitalists to invest in a pool of money that would be distributed to emerging businesses, said Kowalski, a former executive with the Arizona Small Business Association....

The government's role is to serve as a guarantor, through the tax credits, in case the investments don't yield the projected results.

While this is being sold as something for small business, what it looks like to me is just more of the same socialization of bankers' losses that helped get us into this financial mess.  I suppose this "profits are mine if it makes money, losses are the governments if it loses money" never grows old for investment bankers and VC's, but why is anyone taking this seriously anymore?

Brad DeLong and Arnold Kling have been going back and forth on Fannie Mae and its culpability, or lack thereof, for worsening the recent bubble and financial crisis.   DeLong originally argued, if I remember right, that the default rate for Fannie Mae conforming loans were not worse than those being bought by other groups.  Kling argued that even their based default rate of 7% was awful (How do you make money on a pool of debt paying 5% if there is a 7% default rate).  DeLong countered

Arnold Kling's response is simply not good. It is silly enough to make me think he has not thought the issues through. a 7% delinquency rate on a mortgage portfolio is horrible in normal times, but is actually very good if you are in a depression--ever our Lesser Depression. For an investment with a 15-year duration that's a cost of less than 50 basis points in a "black swan" near worst case scenario. A portfolio that does that well under such conditions is a solid gold one.

I may not be thinking about this right, but I think DeLong is making a mistake in this analysis.  In the comments I wrote

First, I have no clue what a "reasonable" default rate is in a black swan event, and my guess is that, almost by definition, no one else does either.

However, it strikes me that DeLong's argument is a bit off. If mortgage default rates went up in an economic crisis that was wholly unrelated to mortgages, ie due to an oil shock or something, that would be one thing. But in this case, the black swan is in large part due to the mortgages issued. I guess it is sort of a chicken and egg problem, but the mortgages started defaulting before the depression, not the other way around, and helped precipitate the depression.

Remember, we are not talking about how well a portfolio survived the economic downturn.  We are talking about if a portfolio contributed to the economic downturn.

A while back, we finally finished reworking our backyard, one of those 3 month projects that eventually threaten to be a multi-generational saga.  We turned our existing pool, with a bit of trickery, into a zero-edge thing, put a dark bottom in it and ended up with a nice effect.  I probably could have posted it upside down and no one would have been able to tell the difference.  The pool design creates a surface like glass.

The tree is an ironwood.  A lot of the more interesting plants will not grow in the desert, but an exception is the native ironwood tree.  We have three now and every one is a work of art.

For the first time in five years, I am apparently mathematically eliminated after the first weekend, with my best possible finish in 7th.    Congratulations to our current leaders, who navigated through an incredible series of upsets far better than I did:

Perhaps even more incredibly, Todd Ramsey is shown to have a 71+% chance of winning it all, which are pretty unprecedented odds in our pool this early in the tournament.

In 1946, a factory might employ its own cafeteria staff, the people who cleaned the bathrooms and windows, the folks who painted the building, even mechanics for the motor pool.  Today, all that stuff is outsourced.  The work and jobs are still there, but the jobs have been outsourced to service companies so the factory can focus just on production.

Are manufacturing jobs numbers smart enough to take this into account, or is the (relative) decline in manufacturing jobs in part attributable to unwinding of vertical integration and outsourcing of work to service companies?

To be very specific:  Is an accountant in a factory a manufacturing job, or a service job in the government numbers?  Certainly this person is a service worker if he is an independent contractor working for the factory, but what if he is employed in the factory with an office in the factory on the factory's payroll?

Anyone know?

Local swimmers have gotten a court order forcing the City of San Diego to chase away the seals from the Scripps children's pool in La Jolla.  But it is not my intention to blog on that specifically, but on this bit:

The city said it would blast recordings of barking dogs to scare away the pesky pinnipeds at the cost of $688,000 a year. San Diego cannot use force because the seals are a federally protected marine species.

Please, oh please can I get paid $688,000 a year to play loud recordings on the beach?  I have not even cracked a spreadsheet on this, but I am betting I can turn a profit on that.

Meddle in the economy too much, and investment dries up as entrepeneurs sit on the sidelines to see what's next:

"America isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they've been terminated? If so, for how long? Who will pay for all these stimulus checks? If it will turn out to be small business, why would they hire instead of keeping costs low to prepare for the big tax bill? Where will the market move? Are you in the right business or are your clients in a politically disfavored industry? . . . Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's best efforts. They're languishing because of them."

Via Glenn Reynolds

I found out today, the hard way, that Arizona has a law specifying exactly how a pool contract is to be paid for a pool construction or renovation job.  Yes, we sure would not want to leave it to individual choice and negotiation to determine contract terms.  The craziest part is that I am required, by law, to pay 100% of the cost of the job to the pool contractor before the gunite or finish coat of the pool is shot.  In other words, I must pay all of the contracted price before the job is complete with no hold back.

This is absolutely crazy.  I have never in my life not had a hold-back in a construction contract.  Three times  (all with my company) I have had contractors go bankrupt or disappear before the job is complete, in at least two cases leaving so much work unfinished that even the hold-back was not enough to cover the loss.   Typically, contractors bolt before the punch list is complete, and only the hold-back keeps them focused at all on finishing the job to my satisfaction.  I am not happy, particularly since Phoenix pool contractors are going bankrupt right and left in this economy.

This is yet another example where "regulation" in fact means "in the tank for favored industries that make campaign contributions."

Note: This post sticky through 3/20.  Look below for newest posts.

We had a blast with it last year, so back by popular demand is the annual Coyote Blog
NCAA Bracket Challenge.  Yes, I know that many of you are bracketed
out, but for those of you who are self-employed and don't have an
office pool to join or who just can't get enough of turning in
brackets, this pool is offered as my public service.   

Last year we had close to 100 entries, and we expect more this year.
Everyone is welcome, so send the link to friends as well.  There is no
charge to join in and
I have chosen a service with the absolutely least intrusive log-in
(name, email, password only) and no spam.  The only thing I ask is
that, since my kids are participating, try to keep the team names and
board chat fairly clean.

To join, go to http://www.pickhoops.com/Coyote and sign up, then enter your bracket.  This year, you may enter two different brackets if you wish.

Scoring is as follows:

Round 1 correct picks:  1 points
Round 2:  2
Round 3:  4
Round 4:  6
Round 5:  8
Round 6:  10

Special March Madness scoring bonus: If you correctly pick the underdog in any round (ie,
the team with the higher number seed) to win, then you receive bonus
points for that correct pick equal to the difference in the two team's
seeds.  So don't be afraid to go for the long-shots!   The detailed rules are here.

Bracket entry appears to be open.  Online bracket entry closes
Thursday, March 20th at 12:20pm EDT.  Be sure to get your brackets in
early.  Anyone can play -- the more the better.

It's been a while since I posted any tort pr0n, so here are a couple of juicy onces:

From West Virginia:

Joe Meadows was drunk. Very drunk. 0.296 percent blood-alcohol content
drunk, 12 or 13 beers worth. Fortunately, he didn't drive in that
state. Unfortunately, he chose to sleep it off by resting under a
parked 18-wheel truck. More unfortunately, the driver, Doug Rader, who
didn't check to see whether there might be drunks lying under his truck
at 1:40 a.m., ran over Meadows. Rader had EMT training, and was able to
save Meadows's life, but Meadows lost a leg, and sued both the truck
company and the store that owned the parking lot. A Kanawha County jury
decided that Meadows was only a third responsible for his injury, which
means he "only" gets two thirds of the three million dollars they
awarded.

And from Florida:

"A police officer has sued the family of a 1-year-old boy who nearly
drowned because she slipped and injured a knee responding to their
9-1-1 rescue call." Andrea Eichhorn, a police sergeant in Casselberry,
Florida, responded to the pool accident, and now "claims the boy's
family left a puddle of water on the floor, causing her fall during the
rescue efforts. She broke her knee and missed two months of work." So
she's suing the Cosmillo family. "It's a situation where the Cosmillos
have caused these problems, brought them on themselves, then tried to
play the victim," says her attorney, David Heil. Joey Cosmillo, the
infant in question, suffered severe brain damage and lives in a nursing
home now.

West Virginia and Florida -- who'd have thought it?

I hesitated to even post this link, because if you haven't been following the Rack & Roll / Manassas Park story for a while, it is so rich and convoluted that it's almost impossible to catch up.  Like starting to watch the Sopranos in the sixth season.  But Radley Balko has a long update.

Here is the short answer.  A group of folks in Manassas Park, VA, both in and out of the town government, want to take the land where the Rack & Roll pool club and bar sits for a lucrative off-track betting establishment.  As part of that effort, they have worked to deny the owner his liquor license and his business license.  The town has also harassed the club with numerous over-the-top raids, including a full-on 60-man SWAT raid.  The town has in the past tried to portray the club as a haven for drug dealing, in part by having police pay the club's bouncer to allow and/or encourage drug deals on the property and then tip police to them.

The owner has been standing up for himself, and has taken to video-taping the premises at all times and recording interviews with employees and customers.  A lot of the back story is here, start at the bottom.

In this most recent update, the owner addresses the other major charge being used to pull his licenses -- that he allowed lewd behavior on site, specifically girls flashing their boobs on the dance floor.  He has impressive evidence that he threw out anyone he caught doing so, and instructed his other employees to do the same.  In fact, the flashing seems to have occurred when the owner was not present, and was led and encouraged and photographed by the club's DJ.  Ironically, the DJ is the Manassas Park vice-mayor.  So the town is trying to shut the club down for activities opposed by the club's owner but encouraged by the town's own official.  Bizarre.  Now the town finds itself the proud owner of a file of soft-core child pornography, in the form of pictures from the club taken by their vice-Mayor of topless girls, several of whom may have been under-age  (apparently VA law allows under-age patrons as long as they are not served alcohol).

One of my favorite bloggers, TJIC, also runs a business called SmartFlix
which has an enormous collection of instructional videos, from crafts
to outdoors to home improvement, all for rent.  Most of these niche
videos are incredibly helpful, but are almost impossible to find
anywhere else.

Anyway, TJIC apparently wrote James Lileks, a really fun-to-read columnist and author, with the following come-on:

We send you a video.  You watch it, or watch 10 minutes of it, or don't watch it at all.

Then you write something, which might be a review, or might
barely mention the video at all. For example, a short review on a video
that instructs one on how to play pool might mention the fact that you
watched 10 minutes of the video, and then segue onto a story about you
playing pool 15 years ago with The Giant Swede"¦

In short, I propose a business relationship where you do whatever the heck you want to.

Anyway, Lilek's first column is up.

To win in the Coyote Blog bracket pool.

The others get passed because they don't have the right teams in the finals, despite a lot of good picks to date.  They chose...poorly.  Full disclosure, I am in 44th, but I vault up to 27th with a Florida win.  Go Gators.

I know it has become a cliche to point it out, but I am still amazed we can go through a whole season and a whole bracket of 65 and get down to the same two teams who were in the football championship game.

Note: This post sticky through 3/16.  Look below for newest posts.

We had a blast with it last year, so back by popular demand is the annual Coyote Blog
NCAA Bracket Challenge.  Yes, I know that many of you are bracketed
out, but for those of you who are self-employed and don't have an
office pool to join or who just can't get enough of turning in
brackets, this pool is offered as my public service. 

Last year we had over fifty entries, and we expect more this year.  Everyone is welcome, so send the link to friends as well.  There is no charge to join in and
I have chosen a service with the absolutely least intrusive log-in
(name, email, password only) and no spam.  The only thing I ask is
that, since my kids are participating, try to keep the team names and
board chat fairly clean.

To join, go to http://www.pickhoops.com/Coyote and sign up, then enter your bracket.

Scoring is as follows:

Round 1 correct picks:  1 points
Round 2:  2
Round 3:  4
Round 4:  6
Round 5:  8
Round 6:  10

Special March Madness scoring bonus: If you correctly pick the underdog in any round (ie,
the team with the higher number seed) to win, then you receive bonus
points for that correct pick equal to the difference in the two team's
seeds.  So don't be afraid to go for the long-shots!

Bracket entry appears to be open.  Online bracket entry closes Thursday, March 15th at 11:30am EDT.  Be sure to get your brackets in early.

Update: I have managed a lot of bracket pools over the years, with a lot of tools.  I would not hesitate to recommend Pickhoops.com.  Least intrusive, cheap, good tools, easy to use.

I'm not sure this one even needs comment, via Tom Kirkendall

A volunteer waitress and a widowed great-grandmother who tends bar at
the Lake Elsinore Elks Lodge are due in court later this month after
pleading not guilty to misdemeanor charges of operating an illegal
gambling operation.

Margaret Hamblin, 73, and 39-year-old Cari Gardner, who donates her
time as a waitress at the lodge, face up to one year in jail and a
$5,000 fine for allegedly running a $50 football pool [ed: yes, fifty whole dollars] at the facility,
the Press-Enterprise reported.

The charges stem from a Nov. 20 investigation by state Department of
Alcoholic Beverage Control agents into an anonymous tip that lodge
members bet on NFL games.

Behind the bar, the armed agents found an envelope with $5 from each
of the 10 members taking part in the pool. The person who came closest
to guessing the combined score of the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New
York Giants was to pocket the contents, according to the
Press-Enterprise.

"It was just regular 'Monday Night Football,' " said Hamblin, who
has tended bar for 40 years, six of them at the lodge. "We were sitting
at the bar, and the gang wanted to do something," she said, according
to the newspaper.

Timothy Clark, who heads the department's Riverside district, which
issued the citations, said football pools "are a violation of the law,
and we will take whatever we feel is appropriate action to ensure
compliance by our licensees," the newspaper reported.

This is so wrong.  When possessing cash is a crime:

A federal appeals
court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums of
money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the case
entitled, "United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency," the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that amount of cash
away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a "lack of significant
criminal history" neither accused nor convicted of any crime.

I know what you are thinking -- there must be some other facts Coyote is leaving out that explain why a man should have his money confiscated for no other reason than he chose to keep it in cash.  Read the whole thing, because you won't find anything that makes this sane.  I do a lot of business down on the border, and get many Mexican customers (legally) visiting as a tourist.  Almost to a one, they show up with large rolls of cash.  Our preference for key fob credit chips and ubiquitous Visa cards is not shared by every other culture, and the desire to keep one's assets in cash should not be a crime (it may not be smart, but not a crime).  Hell, murderers have more protection under the law than this person carrying cash.

I would be interested to hear more about this from folks with a legal background, but I am surprised that an appeals court even has the purview to find that a crime exists when lower courts found none.  The problem here, I think, is that the cash can (legally, which is nuts) be seized and kept without a trial, just on the say-so of the police, who have the incentive to decide that the cash is seizable because they get to drop it into their budget pool.  So I guess the trier of fact is the police (?) and the lower court reversed the police decision and then the circuit court is reinstating it. 

This is just one example of the incredibly high price we pay in civil liberties for the war on drugs.  See this post to measure the countervailing benefits of the war on drugs.  Hat tip:  Catallarchy.

Update: Via Hit and Run, here is another nice feature of the war on drugs:

Tim takes one 24-hour Claritin-D tablet just about every day. That
puts him just under the legal limit of 75-hundred milligrams of pseudo
ephedrine a month. The limit is part of a new law that Quad Cities
authorities are beginning to strictly enforce.

The law limits the
amount of pseudo ephedrine you can buy. Pseudo ephedrine is an
ingredient in medicines like Sudafed and Claritin-D, and it's also a
key ingredient in methamphetamines.

"It's the only allergy medicine that works for me "“ for my allergies," Tim explained.

The only problem is, Tim has a teenaged son who also suffers from allergies. And minors are not allowed to buy pseudo ephedrine.

"I bought some for my boy because he was going away to church camp and he needed it," he said.

  That decision put Tim over the legal limit. Two months later, there was a warrant for his arrest.

And off to jail he went, with no apologies:

But even if you're not making meth, if you go over that limit "“ of one maximum strength pill per day "“ you will be arrested.

  "Does it take drastic measures? Absolutely. Have we seen a positive result? Absolutely," Sandoval stressed.

Do you see the similarity in these two stories.  Two different people, both punished by the state for taking legal actions similar to those taken by drug dealers (holding cash and buying Claritin) with absolutely no evidence they in fact had anything to do with illegal drugs.  Next up:  Anyone driving a Porche 911 will be arrested since those cars are favored by drug dealers.