I badly twisted my toe all because Secretary of State James Baker’s children were irresponsible parents.

See, these criminally-negligent (IMHO) parents left their 7 year old unattended in a hot tub and she got stuck to the drain

http://www.poolsafely.gov/pool-spa-safety-act/virginia-graeme-baker/

So now hot tubs (and pools, too, for good measure) have to have these “drain covers”. Think of those little plastic “tables” that pizza delivery companies put in the middle of the pizza. Little devices like this are over the drain.

I got my big toe wedged between the cover and twisted it badly. In fact I thought it was broken. The entire nation of adult spa users now has to have this toe-catcher in their hot tubs because some parent couldn’t accept responsibility for letting their daughter die; and their father–who happened to be Secretary of State–abused his power to absolve their guilt by getting a law passed.

This is one of the biggest outrages of the past decade.

The pool lift is a danger to our youth. When you add a pool lift to a pool, you will have added an unnecessary danger that will endanger our children. If you have been around pools with young kids you have seen them jump before they look at what or who is in the water. When the child lands on another person, at least the other person some is what soft and have some give to them. Now we are going to add something metal into the pool that the children can hit when entering the pool and can injury themselves on. When the chair is in the pool it will become an entrapment danger and when out of the water, it will be inviting to kids to clime on and jump off into the shallow end of the pool. This device could become the reason some child will end up in a wheel chair!

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/03/17/once-model-state-medical-board-lags-badly/VDtX7T3JP5ivpAMdkIg3eL/story.html
[Quoted text copyright (c) 2012 by the Boston Globe
[…]
>Another major omission has resulted from a Catch-22-like requirement in state law. Russell Aims, the … chief of staff
[of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine], said the board used to post digital copies of its disciplinary orders [for medical malpractice]. But an online accessibility law requires that documents be available in a text-to-speech format for the visually impaired.

>Because the PDF format of the disciplinary records is not compatible with text-to-speech software, Aims said, the law dictates that such records cannot appear in the database. If the visually impaired cannot access the information, then no one can.
[end of quoted text]

Chris, that is a strange definition of altruism. Altruism is when you do a selfless act for someone, not where you force someone else to do it.

It was obvious that this bill was a disaster from the start. Worse, the ostensible reason for ADA – to increase the employment rate of disabled people – has not been realized. Instead the government focuses on imposing costly mandates on business so that we can pretend that we are doing something to benefit handicapped people.

Let them prove it by putting in a modest cap on *total* damages and fees binding on both Federal and State legal systems, so that hotels and others can be *sure* that the first visit by an ADA activist or attorney will not be ruinously expensive. Once the hotel is “caught” and assessed a *modest* affordable fine, then they can negotiate with the activists whether an affordable “accomodation” can be agreed on, or whether to shut the pool.