Clinton actually reduced the number of Federal employees during his two terms, excluding the military and Postal Service. The Republicans always increase the number.

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.

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.