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Dana Milbank appeared on Keith Olbermann last night and pointed out most of the problems that the bloggers have had with Jeff (whatever his name is) Gannon having access to the White House. He gives a hat tip to World O' Crap as a source of information. Listening to Milbank talking about the much more serious issue of Jeff "G" as a shill for the White House after hearing Howard Kurtz completely glaze over the story on Blitzer, shows you the difference in reporting that can go on between "columnists from the same paper.

Milbank: As of Monday I saw whatever-his name-is waiting outside there at the White House, in fact he would probably be allowed to continue doing this as of now if their weren't some website called of all things "World O' Crap" that had gotten into all those personal allegations. It was Jeff's decision or whatever his name's decision to uhh step down. He wasn't kicked out of the White House at all. That's really where all the scandal lies in this whole thing.

The NY Daily News gets into the story and names John Aravosis of AMericaBlog as a source:

"The issue here is whether someone with connections to male prostitution was given unfettered access to the White House and copies of internal CIA documents. For a family values administration, that's pretty creepy," said John Aravosis, one of the bloggers chasing the story."

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Here's Sam Alito's "Joe Wilson" moment during the State of the Union speech. When Obama cited the Citizens United v. FEC decision and voiced his concerns that it opened the nation up to the undue influence of special interests, watch Alito grimace and roll his eyes. He says something as well. John Aravosis, from whom we were tipped this video, reads it as "not true," although it's hard to tell from the angle.

Whatever the case, it was sweet to see all the justices sitting uncomfortably while all around them, the audience gave the President a standing ovation for criticizing them.

AmericaBLOG's John Aravosis seems to have discovered a disturbing pattern. I really, really hope he's wrong -- but I wonder:

A day after former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe is elevated to a more senior adviser status at the White House and the DNC, Plouffe pens an op ed in the Washington Post in which he seems to suggest that much of President Obama's promise to ban pre-existing conditions is now being jettisoned. Plouffe wrote in the op ed, which was certainly cleared with the White House, if not written by them:

Parents won't have to worry their children will be denied coverage just because they have a preexisting condition.

Their children? The original promise - even the bad Senate bill - protects everyone, of any age, from being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Now it's just children?

And before anyone argues that Plouffe was simply using children as an example - that the legislation could still cover everyone - look at what else happened in the last two days. CBS News reported that the pre-existing conditions promise was now looking unlikely. But even worse, the NYT talked to folks on the Hill and health policy experts, and they were told the compromise package might just protect kids under the age of 19 from being denied for pre-existing conditions. No one else.

It would sure be one hell of a coincidence if Plouffe, on behalf of the White House, is now talking about kids being protected from pre-existing conditions when the growing chatter in town is that only kids may now be protected from pre-existing conditions - that the rest of us are about to get tossed under the Martha Coakley bus.

As Joe noted the other day, the pre-existing conditions promise, for "all Americans," was the top item on the Obama transition's health care reform page. So, in an effort to appease the masses, they're now considering gutting the one provision that everyone likes, the one provision that defines the legislation.

John Aravosis uncovers an amazing nugget in TIME Magazine. Apparently, there are Democrats who saw Rep. Joe Wilson yell "You Lie!" at the President of the United States and thought, "that guy has a point." And they happen to be the ones writing the health care bill in the Senate Finance Committee.

The controversy over Republican Rep. Joe Wilson's shouting out "You Lie!" at the President over his claim that illegal immigrants wouldn't benefit from health-care reform apparently sparked some reconsideration of the relevant language. "We really thought we'd resolved this question of people who are here illegally, but as we reflected on the President's speech last night we wanted to go back and drill down again," said Senator Kent Conrad, one of the Democrats in the talks after a meeting Thursday morning. Baucus later that afternoon said the group would put in a proof of citizenship requirement to participate in the new health exchange — a move likely to inflame the left.

So many things wrong with this, starting with caving to an extremist. But it's worse than that on the policy end. The exchanges are just health insurance purchasing centers, like a Wal-Mart for insurance. You don't have to receive a subsidy to buy insurance on the exchanges; in fact, if your family makes over $88,000 a year, you can't be eligible for a subsidy, though you can still purchase there. What Conrad is saying is that he would make it illegal for a non-citizen to BUY something.

Not only that, but proof of citizenship laws, which we don't have in most states for voting, are onerous and disproportionately tilted away from the poor and the elderly, as well as potentially restrictive to legal immigrants with green cards, in this case. As the New York Times says today:

Should we take a harder line? Force people to prove citizenship in emergency rooms? That’s illegal, for good reason. Make verification requirements so onerous that not a single illegal immigrant slips through? Very expensive, and not smart. It would be highly likely to snag deserving citizens — like old people who don’t have their original birth certificates. And besides, we’ve tried that: A House oversight committee reviewed six state Medicaid programs in 2007 and found that verification rules had cost the federal government an additional $8.3 million. They caught exactly eight illegal immigrants.

In the case of an epidemic, like swine flu, should illegal immigrants go untreated so they can infect legal residents and American citizens?

Hard-line Republicans insist that they will fight for citizenship verification. They could, in theory, get the country to spend whatever it takes to do that and proudly report back to their voters. But there is a line beyond which antipathy to the undocumented can be damaging to those voters’ health, not to mention the federal budget. Mr. Wilson and his admirers seem to have crossed it.

Not to mention the fact that buckling to these demands will not get one Republican vote on any health care bill.

This is the Senate Finance bill, not the overall bill. But Democrats are so wishy-washy when it comes to, well, anything, that we actually could see this rotten, xenophobic, piss-poor policy in a bill supposedly designed to expand access to health care.

I know a lot of money has been flowing to Joe Wilson's opponent in 2010, but a far better use of those dollars would be to funnel them toward primary opponents for Kent Conrad and Max Baucus.

UPDATE: Conrad is now clarifying that there would be no federal subsidies, and requiring proof of citizenship would just be used to determine qualification for government assistance. Of course, you end up with the same problem, then; those without proper proof of ID would have trouble getting subsidies that could be available to them. The larger point is that there was no need to react to a teabagger yelling and screaming. This was already implicit in the bill, and allowed for the HHS Secretary to determine a best practice. This blunt instrument is not the way to do it, and makes Democrats look weak (but that's redundant).

UPDATE II: As this GAO report notes, checkpoint systems like Baucus and Conrad want were implemented under the Bush Administration to ensure undocumenteds didn't get on Medicaid, and for every $100 they spent, 14 CENTS in Medicaid savings were achieved. It's wasteful and spiteful!

John Aravosis found an angle on the VTech shooting that should concern any citizen who values their privacy. Arianna Huffington lamented the Democrats' silence while passing yet another chip away of your civil liberties by the Bush Adminstration.

John Aravosis debated Jonah Goldberg on "Reliable Sources," today about Iran, the Biolabs and the Presidential leaker in chief.. I had never seen Goldberg before so it was interesting indeed.
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(transcript from CNN)

ARAVOSIS: Yes, he may have just been a total idiot, Howard, who's incompetent and out of the loop. It's possible. But what this story said was, two days before the president said we found WMD, his own people had determined that we didn't find WMD. Four months later, Vice President Cheney went on the Sunday talk shows and said, we found those bio labs. If for four months we had a team that had already determined that these were not weapons of mass destruction, and the president and the vice president were still saying they were, I have a hard time believing somebody in the administration didn't say, uh, Boss, that's not true.

John Aravosis on Connected

John from AmericaBlog appeared on Connected today to discuss the recent nomination of Harriet Miers.

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Check out our fellow blogger go at it with Joel Mowbray from Townhall.com

To every one that has contributed so far to the donation drive; a few other bloggers put into words what I feel so much better than I would be able to write.

Steve Gilliard wrote: "We both realize that anything you give us comes both from the heart and the wallet. We hope we can make the best use of your funds. Without your support the News Blog would be a far more difficult venture to undertake. Every contribution and kind word makes it that much easier to plod along, opining on the world."

John Aravosis wrote a great piece about C&L and explained the bandwidth mountain we climb. He also says: "I wouldn't mind if folks clicked on the ads and read the sites that they take you to. Most of our ads are from folks you'd be interested in anyway..."

Atrios agrees : I would certainly never encourage anyone to click through for the sake of doing so, but a lot of the things which get advertised here are actually things you might be interested in so if you happen to let that portion of the screen filter through to your brain every now and then just in case anything might interest you that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

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DemsTV--Fox News for our Side

John Aravosis of AmericaBLOG.com hosts an online pundit game show called DemsTV, and this week they did a special segment on everyone’s favorite crook or liar (it’s really funny, and yes, a totally shameless online cross promotion).

Check out the special segment for "Crooks and Liars" here -- (Windows Media only) Please check out their whole show.

Here's a QuickTime link

Joe Biden on "This Week," said: Dean “doesn't speak for me with that kind of rhetoric and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats,”

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It's nice to see unity in the party. I don't understand where he's coming from. Any idiot knows that Dean is not talking about Republican voters, just the party leaders.

John Aravosis says: love to eat their own.

John Edwards also jumps into the mix.