DMV Rules

[from 9/9/09]

Recently I had the good fortune to visit the Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain proof that I'm an automobile.

Ha! Get it? No, I went there to get my Washington State ID renewed. Proof of identity is issued by the same agency that licenses you to drive. Why not the Department of Fish & Game? Or the Asparagus Commission?

My good fortune actually consisted in the fact that I still had my just-about-to-expire ID, which already established my identity. That meant that I could fully enjoy the show as one after another less fortunate than I tried to get ID without having ID.

That's what I want to talk about today -- the art of getting ID without already having ID. But first, why do we care? Well, we care because it's our job to gripe about all the reasons homeless people stay homeless, and this is one of those. If you're homeless, you are subjected to conditions which can easily cause you to be without ID, due to loss or theft. Then, you can't get regular wage paying work, because you can't show ID. So you are motivated to go to government agencies to re-establish your ID. At which point they say, "We can't give you ID until you prove you are who you say you are." A fan of Kafka is made.

Many Real Change vendors have lost their ID or had it stolen. One was told by the nice man at the DMV he could get ID if he could produce his military discharge papers, so he went to the Federal Building to see about getting the VA to send him a copy. He wasn't allowed into the Federal Building, because he had no ID. After all, he might be a terrorist! I suggested he take off all his clothes for the guards and offer to let them do a full cavity search, so they could be unafraid of him. But that was unrealistic of me, because the law prohibits even naked unarmed potential terrorists from requesting their DD-214's. I knew that much when I made the suggestion, I just wanted to see my friend's reaction to the idea of requesting his own cavity search. Fun times.

My friend was able to get the discharge papers through the mail. He was lucky that was all he needed. While I was at the DMV, one gentleman came in with a pile of papers, including his discharge papers, but was told the pile lacked crucial documents. The nice man behind the counter patiently explained to the gentleman this state's rules for proving identity. The gentleman, rightly, started screaming. The nice man patiently explained again. The gentleman screamed some more. The nice man explained more. And so on, for about an hour, while forty or fifty other clients watched and waited their turn.

You see, they have lists of acceptable documents. There are stand-alone documents, like my just-expiring old ID, and then there are List A documents and List B documents, and some stuff, like, you can have 2 from List A and 1 from List B, or 3 from List B and 1 and a half from List A, or something like that. I don't know, I only heard the nice man explain it 15 times in an hour, and I didn't care 'cause I was good, so I forget.

That's the lesson I take from all of this. I don't have to care because I'm good, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way. Everyone who has a secure house and a lock-box with back-up ID pretty much has List A and List B sufficiently covered.

So don't be worrying about the fact that, thanks to fear of terrorists, there are a couple thousand homeless people in King County alone that can't get the jobs and services they need, so they'll stay homeless, including a whole bunch who have honorable discharges, because they fought for all us chickens.

My Mother the Alien

Let’s talk about Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-WI)!

George Bush may be president and all, but Sensenbrenner is Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Combine that with a majestic style, a love of family, and a willing spirit, and you’ve got real power.

Everything Sensenbrenner does, everything he wants, is for the good of us all. Jim wants to protect us from terrorists, so he sneaks the Real ID Act into law. The next thing you know, instead of the government having to prove you aren’t a native before deporting you, it’s your job to prove you are one.

My mother, whose original birth certificate was lost in a fire, couldn’t prove she was born in South Dakota. If only we had the Real ID Act back when I was a kid, I might have been able to get her a one-way ticket to Belize.

Before Sensenbrenner, your identity was defined by you and your family and how you chose to live. Now the federal government will define you. You will be a file linked to the electronic data on a card issued by the DMV. Only good upstanding citizens who deeply care about your welfare, such as DMV workers, will have access to all your personal information, and there is no possibility that the government will use its information on you except to send you to Guantanamo when you deserve it.

For the good of the Nation and the courts, Sensenbrenner wants to hold up new judgeships for an overworked federal judiciary until the supposedly left-leaning Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals can be split into three more manageable pieces. At the same time he wants to find a way to punish judges, short of impeachment, who stray from his interpretation of the law and the constitution, by means of an “office of inspector general” that Congress and the House Judiciary Committee would establish. He says "The appropriate questions are how do we punish and who does the punishing." My questions also!

Speaking of punishing, and how, check out Sensenbrenner’s new baby, HR 1528, AKA “The Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2005.”

Here are two of the reasons this bill wins my nomination for The Legislation Most Likely in All of Human History to Have Been Written While High on Hallucinogens: 1) It provides two years mandatory prison time for failing to report a drug crime to the police even if the information is second-hand. 2) You get an extra year if the people you don’t snitch on include your own children.

Say you come home early from dinner with the husband or wife and you catch your three teenage kids passing a single joint around the living room. So you think it’s enough to just tell them they’re all grounded for a week, no keys to the car for a month, and no video games until next Whitsuntide? You honestly call that parenting? Sensenbrenner says if you don’t pick up the phone within 24 hours, dial 911, and report your kids to the police, you belong in federal prison. For three years! You drug-crime-tolerating scum!

Here’s another scenario. You’re walking down the street and you happen to see a pair of Nikes draped over a phone line. You can go to prison for two years if you then fail to tell the police you saw signs of drug dealing in that neighborhood. What’s that you say, you didn’t know that was a sign? Yeah, right. Tell it to the judge, buddy.

Just yesterday I was on a bus and overheard some teenagers talking about scoring drugs. I didn’t tell the driver to call it in! I’m so irresponsible, I’m threatening the safety of America and the American way of life. Thank goodness Jim Sensenbrenner cares enough about America to have me and everybody else on that bus put away.

We were all just abusing the Free Ride Zone anyway.

Safe Harbors For All

This is one promise from me to you, my reader: I won’t ever claim to understand politics better than you do. I will never claim to understand politics at all. OK, I might, but when I do it, I’ll be lying. You have my word.

Take the Safe Harbors idea. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Since I don’t understand Safe Harbors, or Tag-n-Trak as we call it here at Real Change, it would be absurd of me to discuss it here.

Therefore I will, because that’s what I do.

Let me start by saying that the fundamental premise, that we don’t know enough about the homeless, their movements, what they do with their time, where they eat, and where they sleep, is an awesome, thought-provoking premise. A premise that just makes me wonder what planet our City Council weekends on.

But then I think, yes, there are clear advantages to our government in knowing where each individual homeless person reports two or more times per day. And instead of resisting this improvement in the way we govern our citizens, I should welcome it. I should see it for what it is: the beginning of a fabulous new future.

Therefore I have decided to go beyond embracing Tag-n-Trak for the homeless. I am ready to embrace this concept for all of Seattle, and promote the adoption of Safe Harbors style programs for all Americans.

Lets say you are an American and you need to use services that our government currently provides. Freeways, for example. Let’s say you want to use a freeway.

The way it is now, people use freeways without any accounting. Oh sure, we are able to know how many cars are on the freeways at any given time. But who are in those cars? Do they really need the freeways they’re using? What entrances and exits are they using? The fact is, we don’t know that information. Information like that is vital when our government allocates funds to improve our freeways, or determines when and where new freeways should be built.

My proposal would make that information available. Each time you entered a freeway you would be required to stop at the beginning of the ramp and supply your name and ID and the names and IDs of all your passengers, and state all of your destinations. When you left the freeway at an exit you would provide your names and IDs again. Any passengers lacking ID would be required to leave your vehicle and obtain the necessary ID before continuing on their trip.

The information so obtained would be kept strictly confidential. It would be used, anonymously, to create a file of your complete travels on the interstate freeways, which would never be used by unscrupulous individuals, corporations, bad renegade politicians, or Tim Eyman. The only way the information would be used is in the aggregate. That’s the “Safe” in Safe Harbors: if you can’t trust your government, who can you trust?

But that’s just the beginning. We need to clear up the Mercer Street mess. There are traffic jams on Rainier Avenue, 45th Street, gosh, even 3rd Avenue. So we’ll have to know when and how each individual motorist and their passengers access every major thoroughfare in the city.

Eventually, I see a day when you won’t be able to pull out of your driveway with Aunt Zelda in the back seat, your Irish Red Setter Big Stupid at your side, and your two sons in the trunk, without all five of you being registered and tracked electronically. You won’t even being aware of it. Won’t that be great? Think of the boost to the surveillance industry! Seattle could be number one in yet another high tech field, and we will have more billionaires!

But it doesn’t end with roads. When you’ve walked down the sidewalks downtown have you ever tossed trash into a public waste receptacle? Of course you have, because tossing it anywhere else is illegal. Well now, with my proposal to expand Tag-n-Trak, you will have to give your name and ID every time you use a public garbage can, and your waste will be weighed. That way, our city will be able to determine just how many public waste receptacles are really needed, and where.

I am looking forward to the day when we apply the Safe Harbors idea to everyone, including City Council members and the computer geeks who are eagerly awaiting their employment. I’m sure we can all agree, that will be a brave new world.