Every time I’ve gotten on Amtrak over the past couple of years, especially during peak holiday travel seasons, I’ve had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. And every time I’ve gotten off one of those trains, I’ve done so with a palpable sense of relief.

Ultimately, there’s probably not much you can do to prevent this sort of attack — rail travel is inherently porous; you just can’t impose the kind of security net you see at airports. And in this country, Amtrak barely has enough money to keep the trains rolling, let alone to add layers of security.

Not happy thoughts, especially for those of us who live in the Northeast, where rail travel is still so much a part of daily life.

Incidentally, the demonization of the socialist party is probably starting as I write these words. (It’s certainly not hard to imagine the inflection with which Fox News anchors will be pronouncing the word “socialist.”) However, Kos provides an important reminder:

For the record, while the PSOE is called the Socialist Worker’s Party of Spain, they aren’t socialist in the “communist” sense. They are socialist democratic party such as have ruled France, Germany, and just about all of the rest of Europe on and off over the past decades.

The PSOE has ruled Spain in the past, and negotiated Spain’s entry into NATO in 1986, and provided military support to the US during the Gulf War.

Body and Soul summarizes Diebold’s recent audacity.

Presumably because we’re at the one year anniversary of the start of the quagmire in Iraq, the big guns have been out today — Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice — and they’re still arguing that the case for war was not overstated at all, because no one ever specifically used the word “imminent.”

Sigh.

For the record, my post on this hair-splitting semantic nonsense is here; the Center for American Progress has one here.