Yes, the report is at Nice Polite Republicans but you still need to hear out Montana's Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, on the load of crap that is RealID.

CNN:

Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.

The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of ["sort of"???] national identification system by May 2008. The law sets baseline criteria for how driver's licenses will be issued and what information they must contain.

The Real ID Act repealed a provision in the 9/11 Commission Implementation Act calling for state and federal officials to examine security standards for driver's licenses.

It called instead for states to begin issuing new federal licenses, lasting no longer than eight years, by May 11, 2008, unless they are granted an extension.  Read more…

Buried way down at the end of the AP story, we find this:

Particularly worrisome to supporters, including the Bush administration, is a Bipartisan amendment by Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., that would change the bill's new program for weeding out illegal employees from U.S. workplaces.

The amendment would free employers from a mandate to check the identities of all their employees and require them to verify only new workers and those the government has a reason to believe are illegal immigrants. It would allow employees to present any state-issued drivers license as proof of identity, rather than requiring the nationally standardized "REAL ID," which some states have not adopted.

Kaplan said the amendment is the only one the administration is actively lobbying against.

"We've got our work cut out for us," he said.

You'd think the passport fiasco would have taught these guys something, but n-o-o-o-o-o....

Hey, why would I mind having to show ID to get a job? Read more…

Why on earth would be trust the cabal of oligarchs and kleptocrats running the country with a national ID card? I can only hope this monstrosity of an immigration gets quietly strangled, after doing its job of sowing discord amongst the lizard-brained and the Republicans (sorry for the redundancy). Je repete:

As a part of EEVS [employment verification], every person in America would be forced to carry a hardened Social Security card perhaps containing biometric information about the cardholder - essentially a national ID - and present a Real ID-compliant driver’s license to get any new job.

What next? Internal passports? And then there's the fact that everybody, everybody, everybody is going to have to "show ID" before they get a job. I just can't believe we're even discussing the pros and cons of this assault on our liberties. Read more…