Massachusetts Joins the Real ID Fight 330
In the battle against big government and the infamous Real ID, Massachusetts has hopped on board. In the words of State Senator Richard T. Moore, D-Uxbridge, "Historically, Americans have resisted the idea, which totalitarian governments have tended to do, of having a national ID. That's the broad philosophical issue. I don't think it's a good move and I would be reluctant to see why we are going to that step." And State Attorney General Martha Coakley thinks "it's a bad idea." Should be interesting to see how it gets voted.
Queue up the "paper's please" post (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Sadly... (Score:5, Interesting)
God bless the government and legalized blackmail
Re:Queue up the "paper's please" post (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sadly... (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Registering for the draft at voting age.
2. Getting a drivers license (barring that a state ID)
3. Registering my car and license.
4. Maintain a passport if I want to travel.
5. Maintain a social security number.
6. File state and federal taxes.
7. Maintain a FOID card.
etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc
I like the national ID because it arguable can fold services 1, 2, 4, and 7 into one stupid card and cut the bureaucracy. Instead the states are busy protecting the jobs of their inane traffic/records bureaucracy and are afraid of the cost of modernization. Sadly, the 'state's rights' conservative crowd will cheer these bureaucracies on pretending they are protecting us from the next hitler or somesuch.
Re:Ron Paul (R-TX) rejects the Real ID! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sadly... (Score:2, Interesting)
A national ID certainly does have the potential to cut down on bureaucracy if it does combine many services that were previous separate.
Re:Passport? (Score:5, Interesting)
What you need to realize is this is a brand new set of circumstances that you are accepting as "normal." I am 50, and I have had many drivers licenses in many states and several countries. Only in the last couple of decades has it been standard procedure for them to worry about your identity details; they used to be primarily concerned with your ability to drive, as absurd as that may seem to you. They used to ask (ask, mind you, not, demand papers proving) your age, your name, test you, and issue you a license if you didn't scare a year off the examiner's life (or maybe sometimes if you did... I used to live in south Florida, and I swear, the one thing you really had to watch out for was a little grey fuzz just barely sticking up over the steering wheel in front of you... the entire concept of "right of way" instantly became a fiction.) Anyway, there was no photo on the license, the number was an arbitrary one issued by the D/L department or equivalent, the name and birth-date were issued as described, and that was it. The issue was "can you drive" and nothing else. That is reasonable. What you accept as normal is what we used to use to laugh and point our fingers at the Soviets over. There are other issues peripheral to this; you can even find old references to them in pop culture. Watch "Hunt for Red October" and ponder when the sub's second officer asks the captain if you can drive "state to state" without papers. RealID is an internal passport. Nothing less.
Re:Libertarians and abortion (Score:4, Interesting)
However not just libertarians but people of a large number of other political persuasions recognize the concept that a slave has a right to be free - even if the slaveowner's must be killed to accomplish this liberation.
By this argument a woman would have an uncontested right to terminate a pregnancy at any time, despite the "unborn child"'s state as a "sovereign individual".
Once the child is capable of independent viability it can be argued that its own rights mandate the MEANS of terminating the pregnancy might be limited to those that attempt to preserve the child's life - within the constraint of not adding risk to the life of the mother.
= = = =
Non-libertarian arguments based on the "personhood" of the fetus/unborn child bring up the question "when does it stop being anonymous tissue and become a person". My own preference for that time is "when the brain begins to function in a human fashion". (Before that you're dealing with either religious arguments over souls or claims that genetic potential = actuality which could justify rape and give cancers human rights.)
A slippery slope that would lead to infanticide and euthanasia of the mentally "sub-par" can be avoided by pushing the cut-point back to the date when the nerve cells of the brain begin to interconnect. (Before that the brain is no more a "person" than a kit of chips and boards is a "computer".)
Interestingly, this occurs about a week into the third trimester - just about the point where the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, put the cutpoint between the sovereign interests of the mother and her doctor/patient relationship on one hand and the state's interest in preserving the life and rights of a new citizen on the other.
Re:Sadder still (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sadder still (Score:3, Interesting)