Via the AP:

Nearly all air travelers entering the U.S. will be required to show passports beginning Jan. 23, including returning Americans and people from Canada and other nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The date was disclosed Tuesday by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in an interview with The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department plans to announce the change on Wednesday.

This includes Americans traveling to Mexico, Bermuda and Canada, countries where birth certificates or drivers' licenses have always sufficed.

The cost of a passport? $97.00. For a family of four planning a trip, that's not cheap change. HSA says currently only 1 in 4 Americans have a passport.

What's next? Requiring infants to register for a social security card before the age of three? DNA testing at birth? This is just the kind of overkill that shows that the terrorists have won Bush's War on Terror by causing us to diminish our way of life and the degree of mutual trust we citizens have maintained with our government.

In ten years, will we even recognize our own country? I'll bet Osama will be sitting in his cave giggling it up with five or six of his number two henchman about how easily we fell into his scare scheme.