Will Wednesday be a a day of reckoning for several doctors who handed out fake sick notes to government workers who protested Wiscosnin Governor Scott Walker’s labor reforms earlier this year?

The MacIver News Service reports:

[Madison, Wisc...] We’ll soon know if  Wisconsin doctors who were caught issuing fake sick notes to seemingly healthy protesters in a MacIver News video report earlier this year will face any discipline from the state.

Several medical professionals involved in the incident will be facing the Wisconsin Medical Examining Board on Wednesday, which is expected to make its final decisions about the incident, according to the Department of Safety and Professional Services.

As tens of thousands of public employees skipped work earlier this year to attend protest rallies outside the Wisconsin State Capitol, many wondered if they would face any disciplinary action for unexcused absences.

Their solution? On February 19, a group of men and women in lab coats purporting to be doctors were handing out medical excuse notes, without examining the ‘patients.’

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He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

In February, when protests in Madison turned into a three week occupation of the State Capitol, state officials imposed new security measures to protect the staff and lawmakers working in the building.

Since then, there have been sing alongs and the occasional outburst during from the legislative galleries or committee hearing audiences, but nothing on the scale of the boisterous rallies held inside and outside the building this spring.

That’’s all about to change.

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