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You know, for a guy who says he's sorry for having called President Obama a liar, South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson has a funny way of showing it. Since he basically continues to call the president a liar.

Wilson exposed himself and the modern conservative movement as the idiots they are when he yelled at President Obama during his address to Congress. I was listening to a NY-based sports talk show hosted by Mike Francesa, who is a Republican, and he even mentioned the outburst on his show. He said that he's always been interested in presidential speeches and he's never seen anything like that in his life before and thought it was outrageous.

So it's not just the blogosphere or political news shows that have expressed their disdain for Wilson's outburst. It is all over the country, among all kinds of sensibilities.

For a man like Wilson, there's only one TV show he'd rather be on to try and defuse the situation. And that would be "Hannity." So when he went on last Friday, he basically set the tone for what has followed: He explained that he apologized, but he still believed Obama was not telling the truth.

After Hannity downplayed Wilson's outburst and and after Wilson said that the WH had put it behind them, they went on the attack. No need to bring up an embarrassing event like that, so Hannity went right into his usual hit-piece television and attacked health-care reform. He renewed the bogus claim that health care reform would cover illegal immigrants so that Wilson could attack the president after he called him a liar.

Hannity: Are illegal immigrants covered in this bill?

Wilson: In fact they could get insurance, they could get the benefits, they could get the subsidies and the reason I know this is I serve on a committee where ewe considered amendments and then I foll lowed the amendments on other committees, the energy and commerce, on weighs and means and I noticed that the democrats had defeated the amendments that would provide for enforcement and the verification of citizenship and so when the president said this I knew what he was saying was not accurate, I do apologize for speaking out, but what was said was not accurate.

Wilson was talking about Section 246 in one House bill---HR3200, but even if it's not spelled out in that bill, there are four others, and the House and Senate have to get their bills together first and then head into conference to come up with the final bill. So Wilson was completely out of line for calling the president a liar even by his own logic. Heather and David explain more about this here. (By the way, Mark Williams is one of the most vile people in America.)

The NY Times dispels the Republican lie that Joe Wilson is promoting in an op ed:

Mr. Obama didn’t lie. The bills before Congress declare illegal immigrants to be ineligible for subsidized benefits. It is impossible to imagine any final bill doing otherwise. Mr. Wilson was a boor, but some Republicans still insist that he was right because the bill doesn’t ensure that the undocumented have no insurance.

Time for a reality check. Illegal immigrants are here. They are not eligible for Medicaid, but many still get sick and many get care, often in emergency rooms. The current proposals would likely not stop them from using their money to buy coverage through an insurance exchange, without subsidies. Just as they can do now.

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.

Teabaggers would rather the country go broke by requiring emergency rooms to make people prove citizenship before receiving treatment, but that's teabagger logic for you.

It's just like the logic that says you apologize for calling someone a liar by calling them a liar all over again.

Note from Nicole: With this post, we're very happy to introduce C&Lers to Dave Neiwert, who has graciously agreed to join us as Managing Editor. David was formerly with MSNBC, and is a published author, a National Press Club award-winning journalist as well as the owner of the fantastic blog, Orcinus. We're thrilled to have him here. Please join me in welcoming David.

Max Blumenthal and I recently spent several days on separate visits to Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin's hometown where she was mayor from 1996 to 2002. We talked to a number of local residents and pored over a number of city documents, looking into Palin's associations with a far-right political faction in Wasilla. (We working thanks to a grant from The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.)

The report is now complete and can be read in its entirety at Salon.com. You can also see above the video Max made of his interview with one of the faction's main leaders, a man named Mark Chryson, who headed up the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party during the same time period. It pretty much speaks for itself.

Essentially here’s what we found:

• That Gov. Palin, when a Wasilla city council member, formed an alliance with some of the more radical far-right citizens in Wasilla and vicinity, particularly members of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party who were allied with local John Birch Society activists. These activists played an important role in her election as Wasilla mayor in 1996.
• Once mayor, one of Mrs. Palin’s first acts was to attempt to appoint one of these extremists (a man named Steve Stoll) to her own seat on the city council. This was a man with a history of disrupting city council meetings with intimidating behavior. She was blocked by a single city council member.
• Afterward, Mrs. Palin fired the city’s museum director at the behest of this faction.
• She fomented an ultimately successful effort to derail a piece of local gun-control legislation which would simply have prohibited the open carry of firearms into schools, liquor stores, libraries, courthouses and the like. The people recruited to shout this ordinance down included these same figures, notably the local AIP representative (who became the AIP’s chairman that same year).
• She remained associated politically with the local AIP/Birch faction throughout her tenure as mayor on other issues, particularly a successful effort to amend the Alaska Constitution to prohibit local governments from issuing any local gun-control ordinances.

In general, we found that not only did Mrs. Palin have numerous associations with these extremists, she actively sought to empower them locally and to enact their agendas both locally and on a state level.

We sent an e-mail to the McCain/Palin campaign asking for their reaction to these findings, and have so far received no response. If and when we do, we'll update.

We haven't any insight into Palin's accusations that Barack Obama "palled around with terrorists" by associating with William Ayers. But we do know there are serious questions about her own dalliances with the far right during the same time period. We didn't find any evidence that Palin herself subscribed to their "New World Order" conspiracy theories, but it's clear she was comfortable with not only aligning herself with them politically, but putting them in positions of actual political power and influence.

I'll be back tomorrow with some City of Wasilla documents you can peruse on your own substantiating our findings.

UPDATE: (Nicole) Max Blumenthal appeared on Rachel Maddow to discuss this article

Continue reading »

John F. Harris will be online Thursday, Dec. 15, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss the latest in political news.

Alan Colmes shuts Newt Up

(I got ten emails on this spot)

NewsHounds: "With the Bush Administration up to its eyeballs in political hot water, Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich thought the most noteworthy political news of the day yesterday was Louis Freeh's (former FBI director) new book alleging that President Bill Clinton sought foreign contributions for his Arkansas library. Hannity and Gingrich were almost giddy in their condemnations.

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From Newshounds: But Alan Colmes argued vehemently that whatever Clinton did to seek contributions for his library pales in comparison to the breaches of security going on now in the Bush White House. Gingrich was obviously caught off guard and his smugness quickly disappeared. At the end of the discussion, Gingrich had to agree with Colmes that what's going on now is serious....read on

What's up those Terror Alerts

On Wednesday's Countdown, Keith Olbermann will take a look at the terror alerts that have been issued by the government over the past several years. It will include a look at the political climate at the time of each alert ... viewers will be given the context of those alerts and can determine for themselves if any or all of them were politically motivated.

OLBERMANN: Last Thursday, we spoke of at least 13 coincidences of timing between bad political news for the government and a terror or terror-related event. We will be presenting a special report detailing those and other coincidences on Wednesday night's edition of this news hour, "The Nexus of Politics and Terror" on COUNTDOWN this Wednesday at 8:00 and midnight Eastern here on MSNBC.