McCain just had his first vote in 6 months

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Unless he thought it was likely he would somehow crash the train by sending a text, it's the same thing.

If he had had a functioning brain he'd have known that sending a text while dring a train was a really, really fucking stupid to do.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Then you believe the U.S. should not have a passenger rail system?  Because we wouldn't today if Amtrak were not government funded.

Geesh, putting words into my mouth is an epidemic this week. I believe the US should have a PRIVATE train system as it did before Amtrak was created. Since the creation of Amtrak in 1971 they have not showed a profit and only have been a LAG on the US Govt. And if you've ever ridden on Amtrak you'd quickly see how crappy of a system it is. The best thing to do would be for the government to subsidize RAILS and open up the market for competition similar to but less restricted then the current airline system.

Wouldn't the fair thing be to privatize the road system, too?

I never said to privatize either the rails or the road system. I believe the RAILS are an extension of the roads and therefore fall under the Constitution.

Some of the tracks that Amtrak are used are private and don't belong to them. This is a problem for Amtrak, because priority is given to freight. Anyways, to give Amtrak a level playing field, I think that more tracks need to be constructed, and belong to the government, particularly ones that are good for high speed.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

In the period between April 8th and October 1st, in which McCain missed 100% of the Senate votes, Obama missed 85% of them.  Not a particularly impressive improvement.

I assume that those remaining 15% tended to be the more important votes. Of course he's a bastard for his FISA vote.

[Ban my account ffs!]

I agree that the rails should be public and the trains private.  I could see having some government subsidization of passenger rail in areas that could greatly benefit from having it but it still wouldn't be profitable to service it...

Jfern, your argument doesn't hold up.

If anything, doing what we've done with our train system to the road/cars, we'd basically have all private roads owned by various trucking companies... and all passenger vehicles would be owned by the government and the government would have to negotiate with the trucking companies to allow people to drive on the private roads and spend a ridiculous amount of money to do so on roads that were really built for the sole purpose of carrying semi-trucks that hadn't really been updated in decades because the needs of the trucks are much less than your average passenger vehicle....

It would be a big, fat, expensive mess where the inefficiencies of government meet the inefficiencies of the private sector and our economy would suffer greatly for it.

Now why the hell does that make sense for our rail systems?

The tracks should be public and the railroads should pay fees/taxes to use them just like our road system.