Williams blamed his researcher for this apparent plagiarism. He told Salon that he did not know that the "young man" did not summarize the report himself, and instead borrowed the language directly from CAP. According to that reasoning, the disputed sections of his column -- which were rewritten after CAP pointed out the similarities to D.C. newspaper The Hill -- must have simply been cut-and-pasted by Williams from his researcher and into the column that appeared under the highly paid commentator's name.

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Almost two weeks after publication, the column was quietly revised online, with many of the sections rewritten or put in quotation marks, and this time citing the CAP report. It also included an editor's note that read: “This column was revised on March 2, 2013, to include previously-omitted attribution to the Center for American Progress.”

But that editor’s note mentions only the attribution problem, and not the nearly identical wording that was also fixed.

In a phone interview Thursday evening, Williams pinned the blame on a researcher who he described as a "young man."

"I was writing a column about the immigration debate and had my researcher look around to see what data existed to pump up this argument and he sent back what I thought were his words and summaries of the data," Williams told Salon. "I had never seen the CAP report myself, so I didn't know that the young man had in fact not summarized the data but had taken some of the language from the CAP report."

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The movies, intended to be a trilogy, are based on the Ayn Rand book by the same name. The first movie was critically panned  but received heavy promotion from Tea Party groups. The equation added up to a $4.6 million domestic gross on a production budget of $20 million. That's the free market at work, folks. Maybe next time the producers should ask for an NEA grant.

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Williams asked for it, of course. What was he thinking making tough racial queries at a GOP debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.? First, he asked Romney how he squared his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric with his own family's story of moving to and then from Mexico seeking religious freedom. He asked Rick Santorum, who purports to care about poverty, what he would do about high African American poverty rates. He asked Ron Paul whether he thought the nation's harsh drug laws were bad for black people. Then he made the mistake of asking Newt Gingrich about his comments that poor urban children came from communities that lacked a "work ethic," and his calling Barack Obama "the food stamp president."

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Juan Williams, again, works for Fox News. The closest Fox News gets to a regular minority presence is brunettes. (And Geraldo, I guess.) It's the channel of aggrieved white people who think they don't count as "elites" because they don't ... listen to NPR.

"NPR editors and journalists found themselves caught in a game of trying to please a leadership team who did not want to hear stories on the air about conservatives, the poor, or anyone who didn’t’ fit their profitable design of NPR as the official voice of college-educated, white, liberal-leaning, upper-income America," he writes.

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Crown Publishers announced Tuesday the first book by Juan Williams will "focus on free speech and the growing difficulty in America of speaking out on sensitive topics."

Williams was let go by NPR after saying on the Fox News Channel he gets nervous when he sees on a plane people with clothing that identifies them as Muslim.

NPR said his remarks violated its standards of not having on-air personnel giving opinions. Williams said he was hurt by the suggestion he's a bigot.

Williams' first book is due this summer. It's currently untitled.

Crown is an imprint of Random House Inc.

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Crown Publishers announced Tuesday the first book by Juan Williams will "focus on free speech and the growing difficulty in America of speaking out on sensitive topics."

Williams was let go by NPR after saying on the Fox News Channel he gets nervous when he sees on a plane people with clothing that identifies them as Muslim.

NPR said his remarks violated its standards of not having on-air personnel giving opinions. Williams said he was hurt by the suggestion he's a bigot.

Williams' first book is due this summer. It's currently untitled.

Crown is an imprint of Random House Inc.

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But this isn't the end of it! Don't the Democrats know that the midterm elections were a referendum on Nancy Wilson's "Jazz Profiles"?

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R., Va.) said the vote demonstrates that Democrats "just don’t get it" and "are still not ready to listen" to the American people after getting thumped on Nov. 2. He suggested that House Republicans will pursue another vote on the matter when the new Congress convenes next year, when the outcome is likely to be different. "If the Democrat majority wants to continue to ignore the will of the people that's their prerogative, but the new Republican majority will not follow suit next year," he said.

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O'Reilly has some complaints about NPR! Specifically he is upset about the time in 1996 when poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu said he would welcome the disappearance of evangelical Christians (which NPR apologized for), and the time in 1995 when Nina Totenberg wished for Jesse Helms to suffer a poetically just fate for his well-documented hatred.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

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So Garrett was on "Morning Joe" today, and in the middle of a false equivalence fallacy he explained that his former employers at Fox have a vested interest in keeping the culture wars at a fever pitch, for fun and profit.

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I'm still not quite over the most disgusting part of the Juan Williams spectacle yesterday:  watching the very same people (on the Right and in the media) who remained silent about or vocally cheered on the viewpoint-based firings of Octavia Nasr, Helen Thomas, Rick Sanchez, Eason Jordan, Peter Arnett, Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield, Bill Maher, Ward Churchill, Chas Freeman, Van Jones and so many others, spend all day yesterday wrapping themselves in the flag of "free expression!!!" and screeching about the perils and evils of firing journalists for expressing certain viewpoints.  Even for someone who expects huge doses of principle-free hypocrisy -- as I do -- that behavior is really something to behold. And anyone doubting that there is a double standard when it comes to anti-Muslim speech should just compare the wailing backlash from most quarters over Williams' firing to the muted acquiescence or widespread approval of those other firings.

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But even if the rationale is flawed, it's hard to get too upset, because as political commentators go, he's just not very good.

Sure, there are worse offenders out there. And it can be tough for even the most nimble pundit to distinguish him or herself; after all, how many different ways are there to point out that the economy is in rough shape, President Obama's poll numbers are shaky, and Republicans are poised to score big gains in the midterms? At his best, Williams manages to be just average enough to blend in with all of the other left-of-center political analysts.

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Williams did much the same thing this week with O'Reilly: He defended the Fox host against liberal critics, this time for O'Reilly's false and silly remarks on "The View" that "Muslims killed us on 9/11."

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In a statement published on his PAC's website, Huckabee called for the de-funding of NPR and said he will "no longer accept interview requests" from the network:

NPR has discredited itself as a forum for free speech and a protection of the First Amendment rights of all and has solidified itself as the purveyor of politically correct pabulum and protector of views that lean left.

While I have often enjoyed appearing on NPR programs and have been treated fairly and objectively, I will no longer accept interview requests from NPR as long as they are going to practice a form of censorship, and since NPR is funded with public funds, it IS a form of censorship. It is time for the taxpayers to start making cuts to federal spending, and I encourage the new Congress to start with NPR.

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