Regurgitate Real ID!

States set to fight, defy driver's license rules

"Aha, what have we here?" I enthused, polishing my palms anticipatorily after reading the AP headline above. "Politicians with principles? Bureaucrats with backbones? Public servants with juice in their jockey shorts?

States, stated the opening paragraph of the news piece, were railing against Real ID.

In case you've just jolted awake from a persistent vegetative state, Real ID is a reg recently passed by the US Congerass that will turn every state's driver's license into National-Sozialist travel papers and create a gigantic Positronic Brain ala "I, Robot" to track us all.

And it's all voluntary. States can opt out of this Amerikanski politburo centralized planning program if they wish, but the citizens of those states won't be able to get a job, get on an airplane, enter a federal building (there's always one silver lining) or, a tad on the obvious side, legally drive a car out of their home state. That's voluntarism from our komrads in Vashinktyn DC.

The justification for this, we're told, is to better identify the multitude of terrorists in our midst. What Real ID really does is (a) absolutely identify each of us so the SWAT-bots can swarm us any time we buy more than one bottle of over-the-counter Sudafed, (b) turn identity theft into a convenient one-stop-shopping experience, (c) create yet another bloated black hole bureaucracy to shovel tax billions into, and (d) turn counterfeiting into a growth industry, since, according to this very article, "All but one of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had some form of U.S. identification, some of it fraudulent." (And still they weren't caught, were they?) Better documents simply mean higher prices for better counterfeiters or higher bribes to the docucrats.

But thankfully, many of the gutsy governors of our fifty sovereign states are fighting on their citizens' behalf, threatening court challenges to the Real ID idiocy and even advocating civil disobedience by disobeying the new law.

Arkansas Gov Mike Huckabee is leading the charge. "Governors are looking at all their options. If more than half of the governors agree we're not going down without a fight on this, Congress will have to consider changing this..."

Uh-oh.

Rubbing palms turned into sweating palms.

"Congress," the above quote concludes, "will have to consider changing this unfunded federal mandate."

"That adds to the cost and throws everything into the woods," remarked Maine secretary of state Matt Dunlap.

The Virginia DMV estimates it'll cost them $237 million to comply.

Unfunded federal mandate. These governors aren't grousing about the Soviet-style national ID cards for their citizens. They're perturbed about paying for it. They're angry about dipping into "their own" pockets. You know, those state pockets that were filled by emptying out our pockets. They already have a long list of self-serving vote-buying pork-rolling projects to spend state tax money on. If the federalcrats want a state's citizens to have federal IDs, they'd better pay for it from those citizen's federal taxes, not from those citizen's state taxes. That's moral outrage for you.

Besides, BigGov bucks can be diverted into those wonderful state-level self-serving vote-buying pork-rolling projects easier than the locally stolen stash.

But if you're a libertarian you know all this stuff already. If you're not, and you don't care, you might as well return to your state of persistent vegetableism. In that state, you're guaranteed a national ID card complete with a colorful holographic photo, a universal product code (we're all just products, remember), biometric identifiers like iris scans and fingerprints, DNA swabs and scratch-and-sniff stool samples, and soon enough your life history will be imbedded in an RFID chip implanted in your arm just above your "Give Me Liberty" tattoo where any pickpocket of the future (in or out of government) can stand near you and steal your identity with a miniaturized portable digital chip reader.

Wearing tinfoil hats will become a sign of sanity, not lunacy.

We'll continue to be folded, stapled, crumpled, hole-punched, paper-clipped, shredded, spiked and otherwise mutilated long after the phony "terrorism" justification becomes a faded jaded memory.

If Americans really wanted Real ID, why did the powercrats have to sneak it past us, buried in a "patriotic" war-fighting and "charitable" tsunami relief spending bill? No, our control freak federalcrats have thrust this down our throats.

It's time to barf it back into the bald-faced lying faces of the Beltway Bolsheviks. If freedom is to be the philosophy of the future, the future starts now.