Arizona Governor Napolitano caved on internal US travel control called Real ID ...

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who signed an agreement with Napolitano on Thursday, said the effort to stiffen identification standards is essential to making the country safer in the wake of the 2001 attacks.

"In the hands of terrorists and criminals, fraudulent documentation, phony identification are really weapons that enable people to carry out acts of violence and destruction," Chertoff said.

If the old passports and driver's licences were really weapons when used by the wrong people, then the new super Real ID documents will be super weapons when used by the wrong people? And don't tell me they can't be faked or subverted in some way. The real purpose of Real ID is to control US Citizens, not secure the country. This is obvious from the fact that real security issues, like port security, is ignored by this administration while they pursue such things as wiretapping the nation and consolidating personal information on all Americans.

And the Democrats go along quite willingly most of the time ...

From sea to shining sea ...

... one expansive and nosy police state where anyone with a reader will know where you are at all times down to when you last picnicked at a National Park.

Just think, until my government issued Medicare Card, I had managed to eliminate my SS# from all the junk I carry about my person and my car. NOW my government wants to perpetually broadcast my SS#, along with other ID theft gold about me, some 100 ft (100 yards?) in every direction at all times. A Corporate and Police State dream come true ...

And they will do that to save me from a terrorist? Yeah, that's it.

"This is not a mandate," Chertoff said. "A state doesn't have to do this, but if the state doesn't have -- at the end of the day, at the end of the deadline -- Real ID-compliant licenses then the state cannot expect that those licenses will be accepted for federal purposes."

And will that make me a non-citizen? A de facto illegal alien? If I had been born just 20 years earlier I might have missed this part of the downfall of my country.

Then again, perhaps I will be able to truthfully quote: "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." But we haven't hit "worst" yet have we? In the way of things, at some point we will have to pay for what the US has done to Iraq and the Iraqis and somehow I don't think we are headed for a cathartic Nuremberg Trials.