What Caught My Eye Today - Healthcare, Supreme Court, Citizenship

Healthcare - Alaska's Governor Sean Parnell announced his state will not set up a program allowing residents to buy health insurance across state lines as envisioned under the Obama administration's new healthcare law, leaving that task to the U.S. government. Parnell said it is too expensive for the state to set up an insurance-exchange program, as required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and that the federal government should bear the responsibility of creating and running the exchange. Bear in mind that this is the same state that in 2011 sent $1174 checks to every one of its residents as a result of Alaska's vast oil wealth. But I digress. Under the healthcare law, states must have insurance exchanges in place by 2014. If states decline to set up their own exchanges, the federal government will establish an exchange. Alaska, at Parnell's direction, was one of the states that sued to overturn the healthcare law. The U.S. Supreme Court last month upheld the U.S. healthcare overhaul, but allowed states to opt out of the provision to expand the Medicaid program for the poor, which is jointly funded by federal and state governments and represents the biggest spending item in most state budgets. Five Republican governors (Wisconsin, Florida, Louisiana, Texas and Alaska) have said publicly they will refuse the broader eligibility criteria that aims to provide insurance to an additional 16 million Americans nationwide.I know we haven't heard to last of this debate, not by a longshot. But I wonder, is it really the interests of the citizens that these governors are basing their decisions on or something more...oh, I don't know...maybe something more political?

Supreme Court - Justice Antonin Scalia said he hasn't had a "falling out" with Chief Justice John Roberts over the Supreme Court's landmark 5-4 decision validating much of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. Isn't that nice? One less thing to worry about. The Supreme Court earlier this month upheld much of Obama's signature health care law, with Roberts siding with the court's liberals to uphold the hotly debated core requirement that nearly every American have health insurance. The decision allowed the law to go forward with its aim of covering more than 30 million uninsured Americans. Since then, Roberts has been the focus of derision from some of the nation's leading conservatives, and there have been reports of fractures in the relationships on the court's conservative wing, of which Roberts and Scalia are members. Scalia emphasized "the court is not at all a political institution" and said he believed "not a single one" of his Supreme Court colleagues considers politics when making decisions at the court. "I don't think any of my colleagues on any cases vote the way they do for political reasons," he said. "They vote the way they do because they have their own judicial philosophy." I want to believe Justice Scalia, I really do. Perhaps I've just become too jaded to accept his assertion as absolute truth. I happen to agree with the Roberts decision and think his rational was spot on. That said, I think Roberts was motivated by something much bigger than this one opinion. Roberts believed that the integrity of the Supreme Court was at risk and he needed to do something to "stop the bleeding" so to speak. Perhaps that is not political motivation, but it certainly goes far beyond judicial philosophy.

Citizenship - Members of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's posse said in March that there was probable cause that Obama's long-form birth certificate released by the White House in April 2011 was a computer-generated forgery. Posse? Really? Now, Arpaio says investigators are positive it's fraudulent. Of course they are. The Arizona posse's chief investigator said numeric codes on parts of the long-form birth certificate indicate those parts weren't filled out, yet those sections asking for the race of Obama's father and his field of work or study were completed. So-called "birthers" maintain Obama is ineligible to be president because, they contend, he was born in Kenya. Seriously, guys, the dude has been in office for almost 4 years. You need to get over this. However, Hawaii officials have repeatedly verified Obama's citizenship, and courts have rebuffed lawsuits over the issue. The Obama campaign declined to comment on Arpaio's allegations. No doubt because they have their hands full playing tit-for-tat with the Romney campaign. But a special assistant to Hawaii's attorney general, said his state's vital records are some of the best-managed and have "some of the strongest restrictions on access to prevent identity theft and fraud." In a other news regarding Sheriff Joe... A civil trial is set to begin this week in a lawsuit that accuses Arpaio's office of racially profiling Latinos. The suit is a precursor to a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit that alleges a broader range of civil rights violations against Arpaio's office. I'm sure these two stories have nothing to do with the other.