The Ron Paul Watch

Our latest installment has the most outspoken Republican gynecologist in Congress writing for antiwar.com and being interviewed in the Quad City Times, which is in Iowa (a vastly underrated state, in my opinion).

In the antiwar.com piece, Paul points to a book on the motivations of suicide bomb terrorists. Writes Paul:

"The best news is that if stopping suicide terrorism is a goal we seek, a solution is available to us. Cease the occupation of foreign lands, and the suicide missions will cease."

In a column in the Iowa paper, Paul is quoted about his opposition to the so-called "Real ID" act, scheduled to go into effect in 2008.

The law requires people to provide additional layers of identification when they obtain or renew a driver's license; it requires the states to put all that information into a database that is accessible by all other states and the federal government; it requires the resulting license or ID card to be "machine readable" and says that anyone without one of those machine-readable cards can't get into a federal building, onto an airplane or avail themselves of any number of federal government services.

The bill also gives the diretor of the Department of Homeland Security unprecedented power to determine what information the license/ID cards must obtain and what the machine-readable format will be.

Scared yet? The bill also empowers the DHS director in some instances to waive the provisions of the law, solely at his own discretion; and exempts portions of it from judicial review.

Ron Paul, the arch-conservative representative from Texas who occasionally gets it right, was so upset about the Real ID provisions that he joined the tiny handful of lawmakers who voted against the military appropriations bill because of it.

"The legislation also grants open-ended authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to require biometric information on IDs in the future. This means your harmless looking driver's license could contain a retina scan, fingerprints, DNA information, or radio frequency technology," he warned.

You've got to wonder how much longer the Grand Old Party will put up with Paul's tilting-at-windmills stance before they move to replace him with a "team player." Who could that be?