Our Wonderful DMV

I recently transferred my driver's license from Missouri to Illinois. Before 9-11, all you had to do to get a license in Illinois was show them a piece of mail with your address on it.

Not anymore. Now, in addition to the mail, you have to have your Social Security card and a certified birth certificate. Fortunately I had both.

The whole rigamarole included those three things, plus surrending my old license. Some poor kid in there had gotten his first license before 9-11, so he had to show them his SS card to renew his license. When it was checked, it turned out when he was born and a number assigned to him, it was the number of a 100-year-old dead woman.

So, of course, he couldn't get his license renewed, until the problem was cleared. I have no idea how long it might take -- two weeks to six months? You know how bureacracies are...

Yay for Homeland Security! They're protecting us from Christian white boys from Illinois! Just like the kind who hijacked all those planes!

Posted by Bob Wallace, who is never, ever gonna fly again.

Comments

[bill harrison]

I have been enjoying your website since I recently discovered it. Maybe I have liberal tendencies. However, as a college rhetoric teacher, my professional skill is to look through the weaknesses and blind spots of arguments on all sides regardless of so-called political party or misplaced hippie alliances. That said... It is not just what a recent post called "hanky heads" that have been responsible for domestic terrorist attacks. Timothy McVeigh was a white "christian" boy from New York State, Klebold and Harris were brought up in hanky-less suburban Denver households, and Eric Rudolph is as dangerous as the rest of them, bombing the Atlanta olympics (this last claim granted not entirely proven, but,
I mean, you know). I just want to make my point. Christians kill just as easily as Muslims. Even given the fact that Western Enlightenment Christian Culture (not counting the Hateful Bible Idolatrists who are no less than the American Taliban) is culturally centuries ahead of Medieval Muslim culture, lets just remember that Muslims have no monopoly on senseless mass killing.

[bill harrison]

Oh, and just sorry if this doesn't fit anywhere else, but the blog wouldn't let me insert a comment after the error-filled half-assed piece dated Sept. 23, 2004 on Yusuf Islam, an artist and purveyor of some truly inspired folk-rock (although all of it produced before his ill-fated conversion to Islam). Don't get me wrong, I'm no great admirer of any of the Abrahamic traditions--however, Cat Stevens or whoever is not nor has ever been an "orthodox islamic jihadist." He is still more of a peacenik than he is a fundamentalist. Purporting that Yusuf would support the hateful idea of "jizya," a practice that he has already forsaken is simply old news. Finally, Yusuf's so-called "fatwa" on Rushdie, by the way, one of the greatest novelists in the world today, was based on missed quotes and was interpreted in its entirety by people who wanted to believe something other than the truth. People do have a write to mistake themselves. Cat Stevens' conversion in my opinion was clearly misquided and his verbal contortions to try to disprove what he tried not to be saying left him in a a difficult position. Maybe he should have converted to Hindu a al George Harrison or Baha'i a al Seals and Crofts.

[Tom Novak]

I forgot all about Cat Stevens aka Yusuful Idiot.

Saaay, I just looked into the archives and there's about a thousand pages of good half-assed, error-filled crap back there. All of it has comments closed tho. That's because years ago there was no easy way in typepad to keep robots from loading the archived posts with comment porn until recently.

I could open them up ... 'course that'd be actual thankless work to do to no real purpose ... and doing that would by default lift the ban on politics at TSC, and who knows what would happen after that.

Or I could just forget the whole thing and go watch cable tv or something.