THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† There's No Such Thing As Free Healthcare: The $50 million Healthy DC proposal to mandate health insurance coverage for all residents of Washington, DC (presumably, “residency” is not synonymous with “citizenship”) may neither be mandated nor universal,” reports The Washington Post. Under D.C. Council member David A. Catania’s original proposal the estimated 45,000 residents who currently are uninsured would be fined $250 for failing to buy coverage:
Uninsured residents would have been identified from income tax forms, on which filers would have to say whether they had health coverage. At the hearing Friday, health-care advocates questioned penalizing low-income residents who do not have insurance because they cannot afford it.
Catania’s proposal hit another bump in the road when private health-care provider CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, which would have contracted with the District to provide coverage, “may pull its planned $5 million annual contribution and its doctors network out of the deal.”
† Hillary’s Many Makeovers: “Often ridiculed for adopting a Southern twang when south of the Mason-Dixon line, Mrs. Clinton hauled out her best local pronunciation in her [NC] campaign stops,” writes John Fund, in The Wall Street Journal’s “Political Diary” (E-mail subscription required):
“It's time to quit wringin' our hands and start rollin' up our sleeves,” she told a crowd at High Point this past weekend. The town's name rolled off her tongue sounding like "Hah Point.”
Pretty scary, especially for this “Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer” who, as Washington Post columnist George Will points out, “became, retroactively, a lifelong Yankee fan at age 52 when, shopping for a U.S. Senate seat, she adopted New York state as home sweet home.”
Columnist Kathleen Parker – who is wet-your-pants funny when she wants to be – notes, “All politicians adapt and mold themselves to fit their audience, but Hillary Clinton has elevated the art of identity politics to a science of morphology.” She explains:
She doesn't just show people what they want in order to convince them that she's their “man” - and we no longer use that word entirely metaphorically. She becomes the people she wants to sway. …
In James Cameron's "Terminator II: Judgment Day," the T-1000 android was made of liquid metal and could duplicate others. He “learned” a person by touching him and absorbing his data. …
She's shown that she can speak in gerunds with or without g's. She can summon an African-American pastor's cadence in church or produce tears in a coffee shop surrounded by working gals who are tired, too. …
Impressive, if appalling. But most impressive of all has been Clinton's metamorphosis into a man. She isn't only the alpha dog. She's Cujo.
If you just think of the number of hairdos Hillary has had over the years – heck, just during her presidential campaign – David Byrne’s line “I changed my hairstyle so many times now, don't know what I look like” takes on a whole new meaning.
† Why We Need Gitmo (second item): Former Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detainee Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, 29, accused by the U.S. military accused of fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan, was amongst the three suicide bombers who murdered seven Iraqi security forces in Mosul on April 26, reports The Washington Post. After Ajmi was released into the custody of the Kuwaiti government as part of a diplomatic arrangement inl late 2005, he made his way to Iraq via Syria. While this suicide bombing in Iraq is the first linked to a former Guantánamo detainee, the Defense Intelligence Agency says up to three dozen others are confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorist activities – a claim that international human rights groups and lawyers for Gitmo detainees dispute, contending that “only a handful” have fought U.S. forces after their release. A Pentagon spokesman tells the WaPo, “Our reports indicate that a number of former Guantánamo detainees have taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving U.S. detention. As these facts illustrate, there is an implied future risk to U.S. and allied interests with every detainee who is released or transferred from Guantánamo.” To date, some 500 detainees have been released from Gitmo or transferred to other governments, and 65 of the 270 still incarcerated there will be cut loose as well.
† The Other Shoe Drops (“Well-Chosen Words,” second item): Attorney Joseph Ziccardi is asking U.S. District Judge Eduardo C. Robreno to reconsider sanctions levied against him after his client HTFC CEO Aaron Wider used the “F-word” 73 times in a deposition, reports The Legal Intelligencer. Robreno ruled that Wider and Ziccardi are jointly and severally liable – the former for his “hostile, uncivil, and vulgar conduct, which persisted throughout the nearly 12 hours of deposition testimony,” and the latter for “chuckling at Wider's abusive behavior” – which he denies. In his motion, Ziccardi contends he was deprived of due process because the judge did not put him on notice that it was considering sanctions, thus his "opportunity to be heard was meaningless."
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