Rights gone wrong:

A high school kid drowns while on a canoe trip with classmates. Turns out he couldn't swim.

Subsequent inquiry turns up info that all the kids participating in the excursion were required to pass a swim test. He didn't, nor did half the participants.

Question: since it was a requirement, why were the non-swimmers allowed to participate? Is this part of the brave new no child left behind initiative that puts delicate feelings ahead of performance while taking teachers off the hook re: failure?

Or: Were the teachers keeping a wary eyeball out for Big Brother Human Rights and privileges tribunals?

Or, since the boy was black, maybe they were concerned rejecting the kid could prove troublesome with the Black Lives Matter mob peering over their shoulder?

Our social consciousness often doesn't know where it's going until something like this happens. Only then are we prompted to go back and re-think some of the dumb social norms we allow to develop.

Prohibition Un-dead:

Pot is not detectable at the roadside. 

Alcohol is.

So naturally, the Liberals in Ottawa are going to make pot legal next spring while lowering the intoxication limits on alcohol from .08 down to .05.

Boy, that makes a lot of sense, eh?

Obamacare??

Replacing the previous administration's medical care system is not as easy as the Trumpsters first thought.

It's probably because any such system is easily targeted by opportunists.

Here's a little anecdote my mother once related re: Medicare, the birthplace of politically-administered health care.

Medicare was first enacted in Saskatchewan back in '47 when CCF premier Tommy Douglas initiated it because he saw as inhumane the idea of sick people with no cash deposit expiring on the hospital steps.

One day, about 30 years later, one of my mother's elderly neighbors invited her over for lunch. The frail little old lady said she could eat at home only to the middle of each month. That was as long as her old age pension lasted, because her unemployable middle-aged bachelor son needed the money to support his alcoholic addiction.

So what did she do? She pretended she was sick and got herself checked into the local hospital where they fed her, provided a bed and care for the remainder of the month until her next pension check arrived.

Apparently, the hospital administration found this acceptable because they could maintain a more desirable quota of occupied beds. The doctors, as part of the system, went along with that.

This was in a small western town where everybody knew everybody. The potential for such abuse in a metropolitan area infested with opportunists of every stripe is staggering.

Republican lawmakers have every right to see universal Health Care as a field fertile with landmines. This is very likely a problem Donald Trump never had to think about in his private life.

He's thinking about it now.