They Want Your Boat Now
They took the sippy cups, but you didn’t care.
They took the chocolate pudding, but you didn’t care.
Well, Bubba they have their sights on your jon boat, so you better wake up: the Associated Press reports that the Feds fight threat of small-boat terror strikes
Initially the government considered creating a federal license for recreational boat operators, but that informal proposal was immediately shot down by boating organizations. Coast Guard and homeland security officials have toured the country in the past year to sound out the boating industry and its enthusiasts. While the government insists there will be no federal license, the strategy suggests that the government consider registering and regulating recreational boats.
Another internal passport, no doubt tied to the RealID, more regulations, more interference in your life. How do you like being tagged as “a potential threat” every time you feel like casting at line out on the water. It’s not going to be a “license”, just a “safety certificate” that must be with the boat and you must have identification to prove you own the boat. No more borrowing a boat because yours is getting repaired.
You voted for them Bubba, so don’t complain to me.
4 comments
My late father would not be happy with this. No, not happy at all.
Dad’s last boat was a bass boat, a rather nice one- or two-person fishing boat for use on Lake Livingston, just down the street from his final home. He sold it to a neighbor about a year before he died.
Dad’s next-to-last boat was an LST (a troop transport ship) which was off the coast of Normandy on D-Day, delivering troops into some wicked situations. Dad was gunnery officer, doing his best to keep the ship more-or-less intact and the troops covered, to the extent possible. Apparently he did a pretty good job. He always credited the gunners he commanded, but I think Dad may have had something to do with their effectiveness.
Dad was pretty much a stickler for reg’s, but I’m sure the suggestion that he needed to register his well-kept, well-operated bass boat in order to avoid its use by terra-ists would have offended him greatly. When it came to combat, he had seen the real thing. He would have seen all this crap as, well, crap.
This looks like they want to start up a program similar to the KGB’s “druzhinnik” program with “friends” of the DHS keeping track of their neighbors.
They have sliced and diced to the Coast Guard and Florida’s Marine Patrol to the point they can’t react quickly to boating problems, so rather that putting the money back in the budgets. they want a volunteer force. Well dammit if people wanted to do it themselves they wouldn’t have created police departments, but would have stayed with the “hue and cry” of the militia system. The public wanted someone else to do the job with the training to do it right.
And they claim to be the party of “small Government”…HA!
Yeah, they expand the government in every direction, doing less work with more people and want to intrude on very private areas, like between women and their doctors, and now, between men and their bass boats.
Clinton actually reduced the number of Federal employees during his two terms, excluding the military and Postal Service. The Republicans always increase the number.