CoffeeBear.net

Air America Radio

Posted by Mark | Filed under Politics

As much as I love my iPod; some­times I get tired of lis­ten­ing to music and need some­thing else. Recently Air Amer­ica Radio started broad­cast­ing, though not yet in my area of the coun­try. For­tu­nately for me, they do have a live audio stream off their web­site. Ini­tially I was some­what upset by their choice to use RealPlayer, but like CarTalk and the BBC they’re pro­vid­ing links to directly down­load the free ver­sion. I ‘d sort of looked at down­load­ing the free ver­sion of RealPlayer when the BBC started this, but wasn’t impressed with the direct link they were offer­ing. How­ever from what I’d been hear­ing about Air Amer­ica, I really wanted to start lis­ten­ing to it. So I gave RealPlayer another chance and this time it really was a direct link and I soon had RealPlayer 10 installed on my sta­tion. Then I tuned into Air Amer­ica and have been lis­ten­ing to it all week long. Mostly I lis­ten to it in the after­noon and catch Randi Rhodes show, but this morn­ing I tuned in ear­lier and have been lis­ten­ing to Unfil­tered, which I like a lot better.

This morn­ing the Unfil­tered crew pointed out a rather dis­turb­ing quirk in our cur­rent tax code. If you’re self-employed and buy a Hum­mer (or some other 6,000+ lb. vehi­cle); you can deduct upto $100,000 of the cost of that vehi­cle from your taxes. On the other hand, if you buy a hybrid vehi­cle (such as the Toy­ota Prius) in 2004; you’ll get a $1,500 deduc­tion, next year it’ll only be $1,000, the year after $500. This totally encour­ages peo­ple to buy more mon­s­ter­ously waste­ful vehi­cles rather than envi­ron­men­tally friendly ones. I under­stand that the mas­sive cut on the big vehi­cles is intended to help busi­nesses, but shouldn’t it then be restricted to cer­tain types of vehi­cles or busi­nesses (i.e. farm equipment)?

If we restricted it more, then less peo­ple would be likely to buy more vehi­cle than they need, which might hurt the Hum­mer com­pany but would be bet­ter for our envi­ron­ment. And if at the same time we started restrict­ing what busi­nesses could get that mas­sive cut; we increased the deductible on hybrid and pos­si­bly even alter­na­tive fuel vehi­cles; it seems to me that we would enable the peo­ple who need to buy those mas­sive vehi­cles the means to do so while reduc­ing our depen­de­nacy on for­eign oil and the reduced emis­sions from the hybrids would help reduce the amount of dam­age we’re doing to the envi­ron­ment everyday.

For the record, I don’t own a hybrid yet but I’m seri­ously con­sid­er­ing one for my next car. Edmunds.com has an inter­est­ing arti­cle talk­ing about some of the hybrids that are com­ing out in the 2005 year. They’ve also got a bit of pre­view info on a Honda Accord hybrid that’s sup­posed to be com­ing out this fall, but I prob­a­bly won’t have the money for a new car for another year or two. I sup­pose it’s just as well; as I tend to avoid buy­ing new cars (due to the expense) and new cars in their first year as that’s the year I feel most bugs are found in the vehicle.

I’ve kind of wan­der around here a bit, so to sum up:

• Air Amer­ica Radio rocks!
• RealPlayer 10 isn’t as bad as some of it’s older ver­sions were.
• Big sur­prise, our tax sys­tem is screwed up!
• Hybrid vehi­cles are cool and I want one!

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