I've been at work for about six hours now, and I haven't done a damned thing yet. Nor do I intend to.

Spent the morning watch South Korea lose to Germany. A good fight, though, and a damned good run for the Red Devils. I just barely made the 10:18 train into North Station, giving myself shin splints in order to cover the 7/10's a mile from my house to the Lynn stop in a little over ten minutes (ouch!). Trying to imagine how much it would suck if those idiot conservatives manage to succeed in killing Amtrak, leaving all of us who depend on commuter trains up shit creek without a paddle. Thank God the Senators from the Northeast Corridor have risen to the occasion, making it clear that for many of us Easterners the option to drive instead is not always an option. Truth be told, my wife has a car and - rarity of rarities - a free parking spot in the city of Boston, and so we often do drive in, but living along the train route gives us the freedom not to have to battle traffic every morning, especially if it's a beautiful day and the walk down to the station would do us good. Because that commute is for the birds. Who would honestly rather sit in his or her car in bumper to bumper congestion, rather than sit on a fast-moving train for an uninterrupted half hour or so that could be dedicated to reading, napping, or just plain zoning out?

But the conservatives tell us that trains should pay for themselves, that "it's not up to the federal government to subsidize a whole transportation system." Excuse me? Do our highways pay for themselves? Do the airlines? Not a chance. If we ever billed taxpayers by the mile for driving on Interstates, there'd be a revolution in a heartbeat. Highway tolls are already anathema, although they're tiny compared to the true costs of road building and maintenance. And airlines - hah! We gave them $15 billion for allowing the worst terrorist attack on American soil to happen, and then told them they really didn't have to comply with all the conditions Congress originally attached to the handout, like making sure that 100% of all checked luggage is screened before takeoff (and according to the recent figures I've heard, still only 1 in 20 pieces of checked baggage is actually screened prior to being loaded onto an American passenger airline!), and the tax breaks that air carriers and the manufacturers of aircraft were getting already makes the amount Amtrak was asking for in order to stay afloat look like a pittance.

How about this for a modest proposal - instead of slashing the budget for passenger rail, why don't we give it a third of the transporation budget, then give another third to the highways, and then another third to the airlines. *Then* let's see which form of transportation is the dead weight, and which isn't. Does anyone honestly believe that if we had a decent, high-speed rail network that spanned the country that people would prefer to be crammed into tiny flying sardine cans whose security is still highly suspect to say the least? "But airplanes can take you right there..." When's the last time you flew a direct flight to anywhere, without having to pay through the nose for the privilege? Whereas trains don't take you through the corporate hub in Atlanta, when you're going from Boston to Chicago.

I'm sorry. People just aren't thinking straight on this one. So much money has corrupted our transportation policy (the airline industry, the trucking industry, the suburban construction industry, the automotive industry, et cetera, all plunking down major league contributions to ensure that railroads are run out on a rail) and yet most Americans still actually believe that things are the way they are due to market forces and consumer choice. As if! You want market forces? You want consumer choice? Fine - everyone gets a transponder that meters their highway usage, and every plane ticket must cost what it actually costs the company to fly you from point A to point B, sans tax breaks, infrastructure, and multi-billion dollar bailouts. Only then can you lay that out against the cost of keeping Amtrak afloat and make a logical and informed decision. Anything else is motivated by ideology, plain and simple. Or worse.