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You might have noticed hotels and other public places with swimming pools making sudden changes to their facilities lately. They’re adding chair lift devices to pools and hot tubs. These devices can lift someone in a wheelchair from the ground and lower the person into the water.

Have the hotels suddenly discovered that there’s a hot untapped market in catering to people in wheelchairs who are hankering to use swimming pools? Not at all. They’re simply being forced to spend a lot of money to comply with new federal regulations handed down by the Obama administration in the name of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And the new rules might close some pools.

The new rules go into effect today. They cover lots more things than just chair lifts, but that’s one of the more prominent ones. The new lifts cost between $5,000 and $10,000 each. If a hotel has a pool and a hot tub — even side by side — it’s not enough to have one unit that can be moved between the two places. No, the regulations require one for the pool and one for the hot tub, even if nobody uses either one of them. And if a hotel fails to comply, the penalty can be as much as $55,000.

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If you missed my radio appearance Tuesday on Steve Gelder’s Los Angeles-based show, the audio is now available for your listening pleasure. Or torture. Your call.

Since it was a phone interview, the sound quality from my end wasn’t all that great. Since I was still a bit sick, I was coughing and wheezing just a bit. And since it was me talking, well, you just might not be able to take a full hour in one sitting. If you’re ready for the challenge though, hit the button. Link

For other episodes of Gelder’s thought-provoking show, check out his archives.

I’ve come to the conclusion that most people are confused about what “free speech” means. It seems as though rude people want to use it as a way to avoid the consequences of their rudeness. I think it’s time we realized what free speech really means — and I also think it’s time for more of us to stand up for public civility.

In a discussion on my Facebook page Tuesday night, a woman decided to act out her childhood anger with people where she grew up by calling everybody in the state “inbreds.” I told her that she was being rude and insulting, in addition to inaccurate. After a few minutes of a thread involving six or eight people — all letting her know she was in the wrong — she finally played her trump card.

“What happened to free speech?” she whined.

Nothing happened to free speech, but as my friend Ike Pigott responded, “Speech is free, the consequences aren’t.”

We’ve become a rude and mean society, with many people believing that it’s acceptable to verbally trash others at will — and also believing that they’re being infringed upon if anyone calls them on the behavior. Sometimes the rudeness is political. Sometimes it’s cultural or based in some form of “tribalism.” And other times, it’s just based on saying what feels good at the moment, for various emotional reasons.

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