In pro sports, when a guy gets waivered, that's a bad thing. But not in health care.

President Obama yesterday gave waivers to 30 large companies and one (surprise!) teachers' union, exempting them from the conditions and requirements of the new federal health care regulations.

I knew I should have read all 2,000 pages of that bill. Somewhere in the small print in there, in language decodable only to lawyers, the President reserved the right to exempt certain big voting blocs from the onerous requirements of the health care law.

And he reserved himself the right to provide those waivers just before the mid-term elections.

Of course, this is simple justice, not politics. Certain pundits maintain this is the fault of the health insurance providers, those evil people whose heartlessness and greed, as we know, made the federal health care legislation necessary. Now they've managed to make it unnecessary?

This is new. This is really smart law-making. Make a law that blankets everyone, so that you smoke out those who really hate it. Then, identify in the midst of those complaining the loudest those with the biggest bloc of voters, and exempt them from the requirements of the law. Someone should have thought of this years ago.

Do we need more evidence of how the pragmatic and secular spirit of the age has turned the doctrine of lex rex on its head? Law is not king anymore; law is Silly Putty in the hands of children, who can make it to look like one thing and then, when it suits them, make it something else.

Should we be governed by children? We were better off, and safer, when law reflected unchanging transcendent standards, rather than the fickle self-interest of desperate politicians.

T. M. Moore