I really don’t understand how it is supposed to help small businesses to incent them to buy huge gas-guzzlers like Hummers but not more fuel-efficient vehicles for their businesses. Seriously, WTF?
Federal tax rules that took effect last month allow a credit of up to $3,150 for anyone buying a hybrid car. The credit is the same regardless of tax bracket.
However, owners of small businesses who buy a Hummer, Ford Excursion or other SUV weighing more than 3 tons get a deduction of up to $25,000
There’s a piece on the AP wires today with a long list of all the discrepencies around last weekend’s Cheney shooting. I do think this story is going to fall off the news cycle soon, but it’s a nice summary for those who’re interested.
In the “OMG I can’t believe sane people actually do this’ zone:
A note to China’s half-billion men: no matter how tightly you shut your eyes and wish and wish and want to believe, eating schlong will not help you get boners.
What an amazing world we live in.
Belated Hat Tip: Rangelife.
Kevin Drum’s translation of the new BushCo health plan proposal:
Current system (for those with insurance): When you get sick you go to the doctor. When your kids get sick, they go to the doctor. You don’t have to quibble over costs or spend time second guessing your doctor over whether a test he recommends is really necessary. As Bush himself says, it seems like a pretty good deal.
Now here’s what Bush is trying to sell: When you get sick, you should spend a lot of time shopping around for doctors to find one you can afford. You should put off tests that he recommends if they’re expensive. You should haggle over the cost of drugs as if you were buying a used car. And when you get home you should worry about whether you made the right decision or not.
Indeed. Of course, if you don’t have health insurance the whole issue is moot, and neither the current system nor the BushCo proposals are good ways of solving that particular problem. But given the existing setup, less worry = better.
So a Comcast tech showed up before 8:00AM and fixed our Internet connection. As suspected, it was NOT anything we did. Some hardware downstairs needed to be changed, and the splitter here was also a problem. Those have both been changed out for ‘better’ equipment. We’ll see if that’s the end of it; at this point I don’t really trust anything that a Comcast tech tells me.
So now we get to wait and see if it goes out again or not. This time we’re hedging our bets and have placed an order for DSL from our old DSL provider. We won’t be able to get the 6MB download speeds that Comcast promises, but I’ll settle for slower downloads if the damn thing just stays up and connected 24/7.
The home access outage has put me wildly behind on a number of things but I will try to get back up to speed in the next 24 hours.
Still no Internet access chez Lux and not sure when it’s going to be back up.
This sux.