Sarah Palin Plagiarism Charge is a Massive Overreach

I was reading a story at HuffPo the other day about a speech that Sarah Palin gave, mainly because of the money in the headline: “Screw Political Correctness” — Sarah Palin in Her Own Words.”  The words “Sarah Palin” and “Screw” in the headline seemed like awesome traffic bait, which is probably how that headline got composed.  The article was actually a snarky deconstruction of a subpar speech.  As Thursday was a pretty busy day for me, I didn’t have the time to work it into anything vaguely interesting.

Then, on Saturday, an accusation of plagiarism arose (since denied).  Geoffrey Dunne laid out the case that Palin had lifted portions of the speech from a 2005 article by Newt Gingrich and Craig Shirley (BTW, it must really suck to have a girl’s first name as your last name).  You can plainly see that Palin does, indeed, crib from the article.  So, what’s the problem?  Here’s the problem:

And Now We Are Not Even Safe From the Cubans

Not sure how to talk about this whole AOL/Playboy/Tommy getting fired/laying-off of the Politics Daily bloggers/bullshit shenanigans business. The paranoid cynic in me believes that he was fired because of the article criticizing Playboy, and the optimist in me thinks they’ve just made a mistake and will hire him and Caleb and all the other laid-off PD bloggers back any day now (with a pay raise for any inconvenience caused by this little ‘misunderstanding’, since the site really can’t work without them.)

So, aside from asserting that it was a poor decision and that AOL as a whole will suffer for it (sufferrrrr!!!), I’ma keep my trap shut on this and let Tommy do the crusading. Unused as I am to professional blogging, this is showing me an interesting little slice of the reality it entails.

So I’m going to talk about the news! Wasn’t it great that “Will Sarah Palin attend the GOP fundraising dinner or won’t she? Let’s talk about this for an hour instead of addressing the Supreme Court striking down the DADT challenge,” dominated the news cycle? Actually, my favorite is an odd bit of information that made me smile a little before saying, “wait, spying for Cuba?”

Melinda Henneberger’s New, Stunning Lies About Playboy-Related Firing

In a new interview with Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey regarding the recent Playboy controversy, Politics Daily editor-in-Chief Melinda Henneberger told, perhaps, her most stunning lie to date:

Tommy’s article was not approved for publication before it hit the site, Henneberger said, and she didn’t want it reposted, so she deleted it.