General
Here We Go Again (Schmidt Plagiarism Hit: Updated and Bumped)
Update: Bill Sloat has doubled down and sucked Malia Rulon into the land of bizarro, where everyone politician in the world uses canned press releases, but somehow it’s only plagiarism when Jean Schmidt does it.
Scroll down for the updates
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Bill Sloat gives it another try:
Schmidt’s version is here, and The Daily Bellwether has discovered repeated uses of the retired law enforcement officer’s text without any attribution or credit. Even punctuation marks were unchanged. Overall, it looks like an open and shut ethical relapse for Schmidt, who faced a plagiarism controversy last September. At that time, Schmidt was accused of filching her column for constituents from a press release issued by U.S. Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-15, who was seeking reelection in Columbus. Excerpts from Schmidt’s latest column and the Highway Patrol chief can easily be compared.
Relapse? Is Bill Sloat trying to imply that the result of the last plagiarism accusation ended in anything other than a complete embarrassment for Nate Noy and the lefties who were caught up in it? See here and here.
Considering how many times blogs have been embarrassed by fake Jean Schmidt scandals (remember this one?), you’d think they would have learned the lesson by now. Who knows, maybe this time they’ve finally caught her red handed!
I wouldn’t hold my breath.
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Sept 6th Update:
Bill Sloat tried to get something started with the plagiarism “scoop” earlier this week, but despite a few links, it didn’t really go anywhere in the Ohio blogosphere. Really sad, when no one seems to want to taken a piece of Jean Schmidt, but then again, they probably are still smarting from the drubbing they took the last time they went after Jean on plagiarism, either with the Marathon fiasco, or the canned press release scoop. The latter of which would have taken down many a politician, (please check comment #7 by excelsior). But Malia Rulon has never met a Jean Schmidt hit piece she didn’t like, and she bit hard posting in politics extra and a proper article:
Here’s Malia Rulon in Politics Extra:
Schmidt chief of staff Barry Bennett called this latest accusation of plagiarism “ridiculous.”
“We even reference the instructions taken from the Ohio State Highway Patrol. They were safety instructions as recommended from the Highway patrol and appropriately referenced. I would hope that the safety instructions were indeed identical,” he said in an e-mail.
Granted, school bus safety is not something many people would disagree on. But six sentences in the Highway Patrol column were cut and pasted in identical form into Schmidt’s column. Despite one “According to…” phrase, there is no attribution.
Hilarious. Despite the attribution, there is no attribution! I’d refute it, but it’s self-refuting with the highlighted sentence, so I guess that’s that.
But before I move on, here’s a reminder of Rulon’s greatest hits against Jean Schmidt.
We have the famous election eve anti-Jean hit piece here and here, that was most excellently and viciously demolished by NBS and Bizzyblog, (with a side assist by yours truly).
We have Jean Schmidt the imperious plutocrat.
We have the breathless reporting of a poll that was off by about 5 points to Wulsin’s advantage.
We have the Ghost of Mean Jean’s Christmas Past.
We have “Schmidt Misfires”
By the way, are we beginning to see a pattern yet? How about some negative stuff on Wulsin?
Putting a positive spin on a Wulsin fundraiser
And just for fun, do a a google search for “Malia Rulon Wulsin malariotherapy”.
I expected something like this, but the results of this admittedly cursory search surprised me. The fact is, any negative Schmidt story gets heavy ink at the Enquirer while Rulon couldn’t find a negative story on Wulsin despite it being handed to her on a silver platter.
Nice to see the tradition continues…
Now to answer Bill Sloat. Sloat has been quite even handed on his blog, and I am honestly surprised that he is trumping this up into such a huge issue. Here’s the deal:
Let’s stipulate that Jean, like many politicians, uses writers-for-hire, either on their staff or not.
Let’s further stipulate that some of those writers may be low-on-the-food chain just out of college young guys who may not do attribution and sourcing as well as they should.
Or, if you prefer, lets stipulate that Jean uses columns given to her by her leadership, which may turn out to be “recycled” so to speak.
I’ll further stipulate, although the point could definitely be argued, that this latest is technically plagiarism.
After admitting all that, does Bill really think that Jean Schmidt is the only one that should undergo an ethics investigation for this? Because I guarantee you, under these standards, we’d have to throw out half the house and Senate. Not that I’d mind that to be sure, but let’s play fair.
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Update Sept 7th 4:52pm
The Ohio 2nd Blog reminds us of what’s really important about this story. I feel bad that I missed that point, so I’m glad that he did not.
Discussion
Comments are disallowed for this post.
Congresswoman Jean Schmidt’s political strength and personal and public integrity are emphasized by the specious, borderline silly accusations that her antagonists aim at her. The worst I can recall was nutty Nathan Noy, Chillicothe’s finest son, screaming to high heaven that the good Congresswoman didn’t finish a marathon race in Columbus 14 years ago. The “money isn’t everything, money is the only thing” good ol’ boys from COAST are a close second to nutty Nathan with their boring broken record mishmash of “she’s not conservative enough for us.” This latest silliness gives me new hope for yet another victory by Congresswoman Jean Schmidt in the primary and general next year. Cheapshots like Sloat’s are all her opponents have, and it won’t be enough to defeat her.
I’m so unsurprised by the continued incompetence of Jean Schmidt that it’s almost a burden to post now about her frequent bush-league mistakes. Once again, she has made an embarrassment of herself and the district.
Like it or not, her incompetence continues to place what is supposed to be a reliably Republican district into play. Schmidt came within 1% of losing in 2006, in a district President Bush won by 28 points. We need to clean out Schmidt. Preferably in the primary so we can hold this seat.
“…in a district President Bush won [in 2004] by 28 points.” The political climate in 2006 was very different from what it had been in 2004. And the DNC had targeted the district for special emphasis thinking the good Congresswoman would be easy prey. They were wrong, and so are those who think she’ll be easy to beat in the primary and general next year.
Oh yes Nixguy, poor Jean Schmidt. She’s only been endorsed by The Enquirer 4 out of 4 times she’s run for Congress. They must be out to get her!
Seriously, why can’t the Schmidt-heads just accept the fact that she’s an incompetent Congressman who brings all of this negativity on herself. She is not well-respected. For the 3rd election season in a row she is placing a heavily Republican seat in jeopardy of going Democratic. She has had her chance and made a mess of this district. Let’s move on from this disaster and give a new Republican a chance to hold this seat.
[...] NixGuy has reached a boil over two-plus years of this and similar accumulated nonsense, and I don’t blame him. Go [...]
It is simply impossible to plagiarize information obtained from government. Government information does not enjoy copyright protection. Law school 101.
This will soon be followed by other breaking news scandals such as…
My God Jean Schmidt used government funds to travel back and forth from Washington (as did 434 other reps as required by congress).
My God Jean Schmidt used government funds to pay her government staff.
My God Jean Schmidt hosted a town meeting at public expense.
Bill Sloat, I Crown Ye Master of the Obvious.
One only has to google some of Strickland’s or Brown’s weekly articles while they were in the US House to find 10 or 15 identical articles by other Democratic Congressmen. I am surprised that Super Sloat and Malia didn’t discover this while they conducted this massive investigation. But then again we don’t want to question a Democrat’s integrity.
From all the cotton candy attacks and exploding trivialities swirling around Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, I see her political strength and excellent reputation growing.
The cries of “incompetence” and “not well-respected” and “disaster” are applicable–to her would-be detractors and antagonists. If we weren’t talking about such a serious matter, i.e., the election of a good conservative Second District Congressperson, the herd of inept smear artists trying in vain to bring her down would be truly amusing in a Keystone Cops kind of way.
Tom, I believe Democrats should also be condemned for their plagiarism. Why do bloggers such as you continue to make excuses for Schmidt instead of come to the obvious conclusion that her incompetence is needlessly risking a Safe Republican seat?
The opposition to Congresswoman Jean Schmidt supposedly coming from members of her own party has nothing to do with their accusations of “incompetence” and everything to do with the fact that they want a representative who will kowtow to the wishes of COAST, who is from Hamilton County and who is male. Since the good Congresswoman fits none of their criteria, they constantly beat the drum that she’s “unfit.” Everyone sees through their deceitfulness to their hidden agenda, and that, at least in large part, explains why Congresswoman Jean Schmidt’s disloyal antagonists have been unsuccessful in their frenzied efforts to unseat her in four elections over the past two years. And so it will go in 2008. Count on it.
#10 Jeff, Comment #8 isn’t mine.
Tom Blumer
BizzyBlog.com
Mr. Blumer, my bad.
[...] extension of the Wulsin campaign. She just happens to get paid by the Enquirer. See here about the plagiarism hit and here about the election eve nuke waste dump hit. To my knowledge [...]
[...] and Bill Sloat** is ticked off as well and calls her out for “prevarication”. That’s [...]