VIDEO: GOP state lawmaker accused of plagiarizing Washington Times’ editorial

By GottaLaff

Could this be any more obvious?

Tsk tsk tsk. This can't end well.

But hey, they're just words, right? Wrong:

Rep. Matt Wingard [a state representative in Oregon], who has a degree in broadcast journalism, admitted on Monday that he lifted his speech from an editorial entitled "Osama and Obama on global warming," which sought to link Osama bin Laden's recent declaration on global warming to the US president's policies. [...]

Wingard reportedly also lifted several paragraphs from columnist Margaret Wente in Canada's Globe and Mail. [...]

[Kari] Chisholm [who published a story showing Wingard's speech to be almost exactly the same as the Washington Times editorial] added that copyright infringement is "hypocritical for a guy that goes on and on about property rights." In a follow-up story, Chisholm noted that "[t]his incident is especially damning for Wingard because he's a trained journalist."

Here's an idea: If you're going to call something a hoax, you might try avoiding your own first.

Dems accuse GOP hopeful of stealing Obama's 'O'

"Built from scratch" by a local company? Then they plagiarized the O with your approval, dumbass.

AUGUSTA, Maine—The executive director of the Maine Democratic Party is accusing Republican Les Otten of taking the "O" from President Barack Obama for his own campaign Web site.

Arden Manning says Otten's "O" is nearly an exact copy of the Obama Web site's "O," which is now famous following the 2008 presidential campaign. He says Otten and Obama share "the initial O in common but that's where the similarity ends."

The attack didn't sit well with Otten. He says the Democratic Party seems to have forgotten that Obama was initially accused of copying Pepsi's logo. (ed note- Uh no, Pepsi was accused of copying Obama's O after the presidential hopeful became so popular and they changed their logo in the summer of '08.)

But he says his gubernatorial exploratory committee didn't copy anyone's Website. He says it was built "from scratch" by a locally owned company.

Palin is Pallin’ Around With Plagiarists?

By GottaLaff

Ohhh, say it ain't so, Shmo, er, Sarah Louise! Copyin's just not playin' fair 'n' square, don'tcha know moreover too also... especially if you're copyin' Newtie:

[T]he plagiarist is none other than the Governor, herself.

Geoffrey Dunn over at Huffington Post read my transcript of Palin’s 17 minute introduction of Michael Reagan, and a little bell went off in his head. He had a strange feeling he’d heard all this somewhere before… [...]

I realized I had read some of this before. So I tracked down the original Gingrich-Shirley article, “Republicans Need to Relearn Lessons of the Reagan Revolution” which appeared in the Union Leader, November 1, 2005, and is also online.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Palin was accused by Daily Kos of plagiarizing a Hillary Clinton passage. In that instance it was, at worse, petty larceny; in this case, it’s grand theft.

Dunn goes on to compare passages of the original, and Palin’s knock-off. Here are a couple of the eleven examples he gives:

8. Palin: So Ronald Reagan spoke to us then with us here in our hearts is where he reached us…. He captured our hearts so he could affect positive change by what he did. He focused on our kids, on our children, on their future,
Gingrich/Shirley: The key to capturing the attention and, yes, the hearts of Americans is to focus on their future and their children’s future. Reagan understood this…

9. Palin: He stood strong on his knowing that the framework through which he believed that positive change that framework for our kids, it was freedom [sic].
Gingrich/Shirley: Successful governance means having a framework through which to lead the American people. For Reagan, that framework was freedom.

Click HERE for the rest.

Add this to the 2012 opposition research archives. Stealin' just won't cut it, count on it, you betcha.

Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line From TPM's Josh Marshall

By GottaLaff

Original post here. Now we have this from HuffPo. File under "oops":

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in an email to Huffington Post, admits that a paragraph in her Sunday column was lifted from Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall's blog last Thursday.

Dowd claims that she never read his blog last week but was told the line by a friend of hers. In a follow-up email, she forwarded her desire to apologize to Marshall, writing that had she known, she would have gladly credited Marshall.

Dowd notes that the Times is fixing her column online to give proper credit to Marshall and that a correction will run tomorrow;

josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.

but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.

we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

::singsong voice:: Some-bo-dee's face matches her hair.

NY Times' Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM's Josh Marshall

By GottaLaff

UPDATE: My pal at BuzzFlash, Mark Karlin e-mailed me with the following:

similar phrasing in one line can coincidentally occur.

if marshall post something accusing down of plagiarism then it's a news story, or if there had been several lifted passages

people seemingly write the same passages as buzzflash all the time, but unless it's a pattern i don't say anything

i don't think anyone has accused maureen dowd of being a regular plagiarist. she's too smart to intentionally lift from someone as prominent as marshall.

And so I shall semi-retract the implication of the TPM post below. We'll do a wait-and-see on this one.

This can't end well for MoDo:

Maureen Dowd in today's NY Times:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17dowd.html?_r=1

(click on image to enlarge)

TPM's Josh Marshall on Thurs:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/05/bubbling.php

All Dowd did was change "we were" to "the Bush crowd was".

Did Palin Borrow 'Lipstick' Schtick?

By GottaLaff

Every time she opens her lipsticked lips, she starts a whole new controversy:

Sarah Palin's now famous "lipstick" joke from her acceptance speech Wednesday night is generating lots of buzz in Democratic circles and the liberal blogosphere. Not because of how funny it was, but because of its similarity to another (in)famous one-liner delivered by controversial evangelical pastor John Hagee.

Palin, who, like Hagee, is an evangelical Christian, had Republicans inside St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center doubled over laughing when she said, "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick."

Hagee, in his book "What Every Man Wants in a Woman," wrote, "Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick."

Add plagiarism to the list. I guess Joe Biden is now immune from criticism.

'Tis the season to be busted: John Sidney McLiar

By GottaLaff

You all remember that cross in the sand tale that McPOW recounted at the Fake Forum? Well guess what:

It's been noted that McCain made no mention of this incident in a detailed account of his POW years that U.S. News published in 1973, and no one, so far, has found evidence of McCain telling the story before 1999 -- when his most formidable opponent for the GOP presidential nomination was a man who was making a concerted effort to court religious voters.
I just want to point out that there's a chapter specifically devoted to three Christmases of McCain's captivity in The Nightingale's Song, Robert Timberg's critically acclaimed 1995 book, which helped put McCain on the map as a political celebrity -- and the cross story does not appear. Nor does it appear anywhere else in the book.

No kidding! Why, that would make J Sid a liar!

The chapter is titled "'Tis the Season to Be Jolly." It says that on Christmas Eve 1968, a guard tried to compel McCain to attend a church service that was being staged for the benefit of visiting photographers. McCain decided "to ruin the picture," letting out a series of curses ("'Fu-u-u-u-ck you, you son of a bitch!' shouted McCain, hoisting a one-finger salute whenever a camera pointed in his direction"). There's certainly no mention of a cross in the sand in this account.

On Christmas Eve 1969, we're then told, McCain had a civil conversation with the Cat, the one guard he's said in other accounts was considerate to him -- but again there's no mention of a cross in the sand. (Timberg tells us that McCain and the Cat discussed the Cat's tie clip and cigarette lighter, as well as McCain's decision not to accept early release.)

On Christmas 1970, Timberg writes, McCain was transferred to a cell with his friend Bud Day -- "the perfect Christmas present" because he'd just spent two and a half years in solitary. Again, no cross.
(The chapter also includes an account of the car accident in which McCain's first wife, whom he later divorced, was seriously injured. The accident took place on Christmas Eve 1969.)

Hmm, no cross-in-the-sand under here. Oh, sorry, I was looking for WMD. I didn't find those, either.

It's clear that McCain told Timberg a lot of dramatic stories. Timberg chose to construct an entire chapter around stories about the Christmases of McCain's captive years.

Want to know a secret?

Via Steve Benen, I see that the firstpeople to note the McCain/Solzhenitsyn connection were fellow right-wingers at Free Republic.

H/t: Eve for the link