Oh, Marion Barry. Despite Reason’s best attempts to throw gasoline on the fire, it really seemed that the controversy over his primary-night comments about Asian-owned businesses in Ward 8 was petered out.

Time for another verbal flap.

At a hearing yesterday with the board of the University of the District of Columbia, Barry seemed to lament the fact that more District residents were not employed in positions like teaching or nursing. But the way he said it just raised more eyebrows.

“In fact, it’s so bad, that if you go to the hospital now, you find a number of immigrants who are nurses, particularly from the Philippines,” Barry said, according to the Examiner. “And no offense, but let’s grow our own teachers, let’s grow our own nurses — and so that we don’t have to be scrounging around in our community clinics and other kinds of places—having to hire people from somewhere else.”

Similar to the uproar over his comments that referred to Asian-owned businesses as “dirty shops,” it appears these comments were also an attempt to chime in on an otherwise legitimate issue. With the Ward 8 businesses, Barry, after some backpedaling, said he was referring to the many carryout restaurants in his part of town that serve greasy, high-calorie food from behind Plexiglass barriers. Last night, Barry seemed to be broaching on what many medical observers see as a shortage in the number of people following nursing careers.

Barry alluded to that in an interview with Fox 5 after the board hearing:

I said, UDC ought to be the premier nursing program, training program, because there is a shortage of nurses, and the shortage is so severe that this country has to invite nurses from other countries to fill those slots. That’s all I said. Don’t try to make anything out of that.

But in calling out Filipina nurses and given Barry’s immediate history, it seems that the any discussion he’d like to have about staffing problems at area hospitals is going to be filtered through this.