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.SNIPARTnews has reported that the White House has quietly de-listed a painting by Alma W. Thomas that it chose last month, among some 45 pieces borrowed from several Washington museums, to decorate the private White House residence and the West and East Wings. Titled, “Watusi (Hard Edge)” from 1963, the work takes a Matisse collage and, as Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times, praising the selection, “shifts the pieces around, cools the colors down, and adds a title that refers to a Chubby Checker song.” “But through copying Matisse,” Mr. Cotter added, “she began to work out a...

Federal Judge Disregards Eleven Years of Material Facts In Bob Dylan Inringement Suit http://jamesdamiano.yolasite.com/ The James Damiano Story

No closure in Bob Dylan Infringement Law Suit New York 10/29/09 Few artists can lay claim to the controversy that has surrounded the career of songwriter James Damiano. Twenty-two years ago James Damiano began an odyssey that led him into a legal maelstrom with Bob Dylan that, to this day, fascinates the greatest of intellectual minds. Read Press Release

Given all the blogosphere speculation about Bill Ayers ghostwriting for Obama, one major development at the end of September threatened to break the story wide open. Christopher Andersen has just published a fascinating new book: Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage... After Obama had to give up on a $150,000 Simon & Schuster contract because he couldn’t complete the manuscript, his sources were telling him Obama finally had to bring in a ghostwriter... I have been watching this story evolve for over a year. I did nothing until Christopher Andersen blathered on Hannity. And I saw the stricken...

Bob Dylan Retains Same Law Firm as George W. Bush in Fifteen Year Plagiarism Law Suit. Also suppresses Plaintiff’s First Amendment Rights acquiring a protective order designating all video taped depositions that are incriminating to Dylan confidential Bob Dylan retains Illuminati Law firm

Yesterday, the NYT ran a story about the White House acquiring art. It included a slide show of a dozen artworks. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/arts/design/07borrow.html?_r=1 This Freeper took a look and found one abstract work he admired:"Watusi (Hard Edge)," by Alma Thomas, a longtime Washington resident who is an African-American painter. Photo: Gift of Vincent Melzac/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. As I admired it, I thought it reminiscent, even derivative of a favorite artwork of mine by Matisse. I recall seeing that one decades ago at the Tate Gallery in London. A giant collage (about ten feet tall) from late in Matisse's life,...

Barack Obama has displayed a disturbing pattern of work ethics: shirking work; claiming success when he was not entitled to do so; hiding his failures; and claiming the work of others as his own -- when it was successful. These are not character traits that we should associate with Presidents. Barack Obama won praise for Dreams From My Father, a 1995 memoir of his life that was published when he reached the grand old age of thirty-four. The provenance of the book has come into question, led by a series of American Thinker columns by Jack Cashill, who used textual...

Jayson Blair knows his new profession — life coach — smacks some people in the face like a bad punchline. "People say, 'Wait a minute. You're a life coach?' That makes no sense,'" says Blair, the ex-journalist best known for foisting plagiarism and fabrications into the pages of The New York Times. "Then they think about my life experiences and what I've been through and they say 'Wait a minute. It does make sense.'" Blair, 33, resigned from the Times in 2003, leaving a journalistic scandal in his wake. The resulting furor led the paper's top two newsroom executives to...

Bob Dylan Retains Same Illuminati Law Firm as George W. Bush in Fifteen Year Plagiarism Law Suit. Also suppresses Plaintiff’s First Amendment Rights acquiring a protective order designating all video taped depositions that are incriminating to Dylan confidential

LOS ANGELES: Talk show queen Oprah Winfrey is being sued for a whopping $1 trillion by author Damon Lloyd Goffe for plagiarism, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton has claimed on his website. Goffe is suing Winfrey and her production company, Harpo, for allegedly stealing material from his work, 'A Tome of Poetry' and publishing it under her name with the title 'Pieces of My Soul', according to Hilton. In the legal documents filed in court, Goffe claims that the talk show host admitted to the thievery last year. The New York based author has claimed that since Oprah sold over 650...

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. Mr. Biden insisted, however, that he had done nothing ''malevolent,'' that he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully. And he asserted that another controversy, concerning recent reports of his using material from others' speeches without attribution, was ''much ado about nothing.'' Mr. Biden, the 44-year-old Delaware Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, addressed these issues at the Capitol in...

LONDON (Reuters) – Bloomsbury Publishing Plc on Monday denied allegations that author J.K. Rowling copied "substantial parts" of a book by another children's author when she wrote "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." (snip) "The allegations of plagiarism made today, Monday 15 June 2009, by the Estate of Adrian Jacobs are unfounded, unsubstantiated and untrue," said a statement from Bloomsbury, which publishes Harry Potter in Britain. "This claim is without merit and will be defended vigorously." (snip) "The Estate is also seeking a court order against J.K. Rowling herself for pre-action disclosure in order to determine whether to join...

AP Picks Up Huff-Po Blogger's Lame Smear Alleging Palin Plagiarism By Warner Todd Huston (Bio | Archive) June 9, 2009 - 06:43 ET If you would like a great example of how the Old Media takes a story that has no legitimacy at all and uses it as the basis for a smear job, the Associated Press offered a wonderful sampling of the tactic for you on June 8. From a headline that makes the issue seem more weighty than it is, to the lack of competent reporting from both sides of the matter, AP employed this favorite Old Media...

Geoffrey Dunn breathlessly reports at the Huffington Post that Palin committed “pure unadulterated plagiarism”...well, actually, that’s what he said yesterday. Today he scrubbed that statement. He's up in arms about the speech that Gov. Palin gave in Anchorage last week at the Michael Reagan event. Dunn writes:While Palin twice mentioned Gingrich in the speech (she never once acknowledged Shirley), virtually every single reference she made to Reagan was looks to be lifted directly from the Gingrich-Shirley article. The article has been scrubbed. It used to include this sentence at the end of the above paragraph:It’s a pure case of unadulterated...

In many ways, Maureen Dowd and Joshua Micah Marshall personify new and old media. One is former political reporter and venerable columnist who dispenses bon mots from the New York Times editorial page once a week. The other is a blogging wunderkind who has blazed a trail with the liberal TalkingPointsMemo site. So when thejoshuablog (who's not Marshall) blogged over the weekend that Dowd had lifted, almost word for word, a slab of text from a blog by Marshall last week it was inevitable it would become a big deal. Unfortunately for Dowd, the furore shows little sign of abating...

The strangest thing about Josh Marshall’s observation on the suspicious timing of enhanced interrogations is not that Maureen Dowd’s friend passed it off as her own before Maureen Dowd did the same; it’s that anyone would want to take credit for this bit of illogical paranoia. Here’s the twice-published line:

I added the question mark to be on the safe side but there’s really no doubt about it. Josh Marshall, writing at TPM on Thursday: 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. And Dowd, today: 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...

NEW YORK — New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution. Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to The Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall.

NEW YORK It was a wild Sunday for New York Times columnist. It opened with her latest column in the newspaper, which closed by declaring that she had once opposed a wide-ranging probe of the uses of torture, and who authorized and knew about it, during the Bush administration but now favored it. This brought some praise liberal news sites and bloggers often critical of Dowd. But by mid-afternoon she was on the hot seat for using a paragraph almost word-for-word from one of the most prominent liberal bloggers, Jost Marshall of Talking Points Memo, without attribution. Charges of "plagiarism"...

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 image for bigger pic) 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...

Ward Churchill Redux? by: Deborah Lambert, April 27, 2009 The Ward Churchill saga is far from over. After the U. of Colorado prof was fired for plagiarism, a jury ruled that he was the victim of a “wrongful firing suit,” according to the AP and other sources. Churchill was elated by the latest turn of events, and reiterated his firing for plagiarism was “just a cover, adding that he never would have been fired if he hadn’t called the World Trade Center victims ‘little Eichmanns.’” All Churchill wants is to be reinstated at his old job. However, he’ll have to...

She first made national headlines when a hangman's noose was found dangling from her Columbia University office door. Now, Madonna Constantine, the controversial former Teachers College professor fired last year for plagiarism, is resurrecting the image with a $200 million lawsuit that charges her former employer with an "academic lynching." The strongly worded, 92-page claim -- which veers into spy-time territory with its allegations of coverups, evidence destruction and conspiratorial "schemes" -- was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday. A spokesman for Teachers College said the case was "totally without merit, and we intend to defend against it vigorously." Constantine's...

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democratic Presidential candidate, was accused of plagiarism while in his first year at Syracuse University Law School, academic officials familiar with Mr. Biden's record said today. Mr. Biden, who as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is presiding over the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork, has called a news conference for 9 A.M. Thursday to discuss this charge and reports that he has lifted material from speeches by other politicians to use in his public addresses. A Biden aide, who asked not to be identified, declined to comment...

After a four-week trial, a jury in Denver is deliberating the case of Ward L. Churchill, a former University of Colorado professor who says he was fired because of an essay he wrote in which he called victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “little Eichmanns.” The university says Mr. Churchill plagiarized and falsified parts of his academic research, particularly on American Indians, and cited this as grounds for his dismissal in July 2007. Mr. Churchill brought a wrongful termination suit against the university, seeking monetary damages for lost wages and harm to his reputation. He also wants to...

Darwin’s illegitimate brainchild If you thought Darwin’s Origin was original, think again! by Russell Grigg, Australia The concept of evolution by natural selection is sometimes referred to as Charles Darwin’s brainchild, and indeed he often referred to it in his letters to his friends as his dear ‘child’. However, this is a far cry from the facts. At best it was an adopted child; at worst an illegitimate child...

Campus event designed to promote Thursday night rally. Enclosed in a 3-foot-by-3-foot chain-link cage, members of a University of Colorado student group made their case Tuesday that former professor Ward Churchill wasn’t fired for plagiarism, but, rather, for saying the wrong things about 9/11. CU officials reiterated Tuesday that Churchill was fired solely for academic misconduct. The event was staged to promote Thursday night’s pro-Churchill rally at the Glenn Miller Ballroom, which will take place four days before the ex-professor’s lawsuit against CU goes to trial in Denver. CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard said the students’ rally did not provide an...

Former Gov. Bill Owens said in a deposition it's a good thing the University of Colorado ignored him when he urged that professor Ward Churchill be fired over a controversial essay. "I'm glad that the university, its counsel, and others who had a chance over a period of years to look at the law and look at the case didn't follow my advice and, in fact, chose to ignore it," Owens said in the deposition, taken one week ago today. Had CU fired Churchill for the essay - as Owens wanted - the school would have violated Churchill's free-speech rights,...

Members of a committee formed in response to plagiarism accusations levied against a former university administrator received word this week that they need to reconvene and examine documents they may have plagiarized. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the 10-member committee of Southern Illinois University academics and administrators commissioned to develop a plagiarism policy may have borrowed from Indiana University’s definition—without citing IU.

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations with God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com that was nearly identical to a 10-year-old article originally published by a little-known writer in a spiritual magazine. He now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually happened to him. Candy Chand said she originally wrote the piece about her son Nicholas and his kindergarten winter pageant and published it in Clarity magazine in 1999. During a dress rehearsal for the performance, a group of children spelled out the title...

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. ... The plagiarized article, ''Tortious Acts as a Basis for Jurisdiction in Products Liability Cases,'' was published in the Fordham Law Review of May 1965.

http://www.mikefrancesa.com/wordpress/?p=1230Video at the above link: This is Joe Biden, pre hair plugs, defending the art of plagiarism: Joe Biden: “The notion that every thought or notion or idea, you’d have to go back and find and attribute to someone, I think is, quite frankly uh ludicrous.”

LEAD: Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. Mr. Biden insisted, however, that he had done nothing ''malevolent,'' that he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully. And he asserted that...

Breitbart TV picks up Newsbuster's piece which credits FreeRepublic concerning Obama stealing lines from Toles cartoon.

The folks at FreeRepublic have found an interesting... uh, shall we say coincidence... concerning Barack Obama's widely panned September 9 comments made at a rally in Virginia where he seemed to be saying that Governor Palin was a "pig" by referencing the "lipstick" quote from her acceptance speech at the GOP convention. It is looking like Obama's comments were not off the cuff, but scripted. And, not only were they scripted, but they were stolen without attribution from a Washington Post political cartoon by Tom Toles from September 5. Obama tried to quip that "you can put lipstick on a...

*** GENESIS *** #1) Elizabeth Berry, of the Democratic Party, used the "Lipstick on a Pig" template, on Saturday, August 30, 2008: Elizabeth Berry, Democratic Party, used "Lipstick on a Pig" Template, on Saturday, August 30, 2008http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2079250/posts [According to her Democratic Party profile, Elizabeth Berry lives in Garland, Texas. Curiously, though, there is a Wikipedia entry, on an artist named William D. Berry, who was married to a "Liz", or "Elizabeth", and who lived in Fairbanks, Alaska.] #2) Bill Kristol, of The Weekly Standard, first noted that Sarah Palin refers to herself as a "Pitbull", with "Lipstick", on Tuesday, September...

heard a bit of an interesting interview on the Jerry Doyle show; an interview with Timothy English, author of a book called "Sounds Like Teen Spirit". Basically it's about how musicians/songwriters can plagiarize riffs and hooks and sometimes get away with it. Not always, of course; hey, was George Harrison really unaware that he stole the melody from "He's So Fine"? How about how the children of bluesman Willie Dixon noticed a big similarity between "You Need Love" and certain songs by Led Zeppelin and the Small Faces? They played an excerpt from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and then...

"To buttress his assertions of sincerity and openness, Mr. Biden released a 65-page file, obtained by the Senator from the Syracuse University College of Law, that he said contained all the records of his years there. It disclosed relatively poor grades in college and law school, mixed evaluations from teachers and details of the plagiarism."

Wanted to know if you thought this sounded as familiar as I did.

Senator Biden’s plagiarism of a speech by British Labor Party leader Neal Kinnock took place at a campaign stump at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. In closing his speech, Biden took Kinnock’s ideas and language as if they were his very own inspired thoughts, prefacing Kinnock’s ideas with the phrase “I started thinking as I was coming over here . . . “. Little did Biden suspect that video footage of this speech would be spliced together with footage of Kinnock’s speech in an “attack video” which would be distributed by members of the Dukakis 1988 Democratic campaign.

JOE BIDEN: HAIR WE CAN BELIEVE INAugust 27, 2008 Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden's speech at the Democratic National Convention was great. As I write, he hasn't given it yet, but these are my favorite parts: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all...

Teachers and scholars consider the unattributed use of someone else's words and ideas to be a very serious offense, but the public doesn't seem to mind much, at least when it comes to politics. The incidents of plagiarism and fabrication that forced Joe Biden to quit the 1988 presidential race have drawn little comment since his selection as Barack Obama's vice presidential running mate—just as revelations of plagiarism by Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin scarcely hurt their book sales. In 1987, before Biden quit the race, he called the incidents "a tempest in a teapot." Although most reporters disagreed...

The New York Times headline from January 13th, 1988 jumps off the page. "Biden Gives Kinnock Copy of His Speeches." Joe Biden, best known in the Washington beltway as a man who runs his mouth the way the Southland Corporation runs its 7/11 stores: 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Gaffes are inevitable when a politician refuses to takes a breath. Barack Obama has more discipline than the entire client base of a Delaware dominatrix. But Biden can't spell discipline. It was in the very days early days of the 1988 Democratic Presidential Primary Campaign, when Biden embarrassed...

Overview: Joe Biden’s history of plagiarism and “stressless scholarship” gave plenty of ammo to his enemies, one of them choosing to circulate a so-called “attack video” to demonstrate Biden’s outright plagiarism of a British politician’s speech. But this appropriation from Neal Kinnock was not the first occurrence of unacknowledged lifting by the senator from Delaware. In 1965 Biden plagiarized while writing a paper as a student at the Syracuse University Law School in a legal methods course which he failed because of that copied paper. Such “stressless scholarship” as it is euphemistically called has become all too common in...

LEAD: Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democratic Presidential candidate, was accused of plagiarism while in his first year at Syracuse University Law School, academic officials familiar with Mr. Biden's record said today. ==== CBS News tonight quoted an aide to Mr. Biden as saying he had been exonerated. However, an academic official said Mr. Biden had been found guilty, ''threw himself on the mercy of the board'' and promised not to repeat the offense. This, according to the official, persuaded the board to drop the matter and allow Mr. Biden to remain in law school. Mr. Biden's office declined...

Joe Biden’s history of plagiarism and “stressless scholarship” gave plenty of ammo to his enemies, one of them choosing to circulate a so-called “attack video” to demonstrate Biden’s outright plagiarism of a British politician’s speech. But this appropriation from Neal Kinnock was not the first occurrence of unacknowledged lifting by the senator from Delaware. In 1965 Biden plagiarized while writing a paper as a student at the Syracuse University Law School in a legal methods course which he failed because of that copied paper. Such “stressless scholarship” as it is euphemistically called has become all too common in the modern...

Joseph Biden's Plagiarism; Michael Dukakis's 'Attack Video' – 1988 Feeding Frenzy Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr., a U.S. senator from Delaware, was driven from the nomination battle after delivering, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock. A barrage of subsidiary revelations by the press also contributed to Biden's withdrawal: a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years; the senator's boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event; and the discovery of other quotations in Biden's speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.

LEAD: Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. Mr. Biden insisted, however, that he had done nothing ''malevolent,'' that he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully. And he asserted that...

In an indication that he expects to be Barack Obama's vice-presidential pick, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del) has begun writing a 50,000-word acceptance speech, aides to the senator confirmed today. The address, which Mr. Biden has been working on around the clock, is an abridged version of a 200,000-word acceptance speech that Mr. Biden wrote when he ran for President in 1988. According to those familiar with the speech, if Mr. Biden is tapped as Mr. Obama's vice presidential choice the Delaware senator would begin delivering the speech on Wednesday night of the Democratic convention and conclude it on Thursday night....

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, who has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate for White House hopeful Barack Obama, said on Saturday he would visit Georgia this weekend. Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, said he had been asked to go to Georgia by President Mikheil Saakashvili for talks over the conflict with Russia. "I am going to Georgia this weekend to get the facts first-hand and to show my support for Georgia's people and its democratically-elected government," said Biden in a statement. "I look forward to reporting to my colleagues in the...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – While many studies have examined cheating among college students, new research looks at the issue from a different perspective – identifying students who are least likely to cheat. The study of students at one Ohio university found that students who scored high on measures of courage, empathy and honesty were less likely than others to report their cheating in the past – or intending to cheat in the future Moreover, those students who reported less cheating were also less likely to believe that their fellow students regularly committed academic dishonesty. People who don’t cheat “have a more...