OH YEAH MAUREEN DOWD: So she had a sentence from a TPM post in her column. Her explanation: she didn’t mean to lift an unattributed quote from Josh Marshall; she meant to lift an unattributed quote from some random friend of hers, who happened to be quoting Josh Marshall, unattributedly. Whatever, this is how the Internet works, words want to be free, and everybody copies everybody else constantly. (There is no actual news anymore.) Josh Marshall seems not to be terribly offended anyhow. [thejoshuablog]

Here is a heartwarming story: a little boy- or girl-child writes to Barack Obama to say, “Hey man whatsup I want U 2 B purznit” (that is how children write today, in America). And Barack Obama, a man with infinite time and letter-writing resources, pens a unique personal response to each and every one of these precious children and signs it with a nice blue pen! Barack Obama is a magical patron of youngsters — like Santa, only real! Except that he is a fraud. MORE »

Liberals are very upset with John McCain, again, because it appears he has PLAGIARIZED the famous website Wikipedia in his speech about Georgia and Russia. John McCain is using Wikipedia! That’s all we care about and are very happy to learn that he’s discovered this completely awesome and accurate website. But as some of those rascally bloggers have discovered, McCain used such words and dates as “in,” “of,” “economic,” and “1922″ in much the same sequence that Wikipedia used them in a historical laundry list of facts! It’s like he’s writing a college history paper’s “background” section in the post-2005 era — by copy-pasting it from any damn website, because who cares. MORE »

If you ever wondered about the secret lives of pill-popping blondes but were too lazy to crack Valley of the Dolls, future First Lady Cindy McCain will help you out. In her memoir, due out just a few months before her angry midget husband is crowned Emperor of America, she will reveal all of her secrets to staying healthy, wealthy, and married to a physically and emotionally fragile war veteran. In other words, the book will be a sort of Less Than Zero meets Deceptively Delicious with a sprinkling of Old Yeller. It will sell one trillion copies after Oprah adds it to her Book Club. [On Politics]

Is there anything new first lady Cindy McCain won’t steal? The beer heiress stole husband John McCain back when he was relatively young and handsome and needed a new wife, she stole dope pills from her own medical charity, she furtively brought home some orphans from Bangladesh one time, she continues to steal “stray” dogs, and now the Cougar Baroness is accused of stealing recipes from the Food Network! MORE »

“I’M NOT A PLAGIARIST, MY FRIENDS” John McCain’s so old that the speeches he plagiarizes are in fact plagiarizing his own speeches from centuries earlier. [Think Progress]

The White House, perhaps impressed with Barack Obama’s success, has plagiarized his greatest asset: plagiarism. Timothy S. Goeglein — a special assistant to President Bush — referenced Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, an elitist Northeastern ex-professor at Dartmouth College, in a column he penned for the News-Sentinel newspaper. After referencing this guy, Goeglin decided to plagiarize an entire 10-year-old essay someone else had written about Rosenstock-Hussey. Why has Barack Obama not apologized for this? MORE »

Barack Obama’s plagiarism has reached levels so brazen, so bizarre, that it borders on the pathological. He descended a notch further in his spiral of doom today when he was caught hauling off a boatload of words that belonged to someone with whom he is intimately acquainted: himself. MORE »

You catch him once, he gets suspended for a semester, then goes on academic probation, and then he plagiarizes horribly again. Will Barack Obama ever learn that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has copyrights on every word? Apparently not, since he may have stolen yet another whole two sentences from Patrick. MORE »

Do you still remember the “Presidents Day Plagiarism Outrage” of 2008? Well now there’s another one — and this time, instead of fancy word-user Barack Obama being blamed for repeating such phrases as “I have a dream” and “The Declaration of Independence,” which were earlier spoken by a different black politician, it’s Hillary Clinton who got caught biting rhymes from yet another “black” politician: ex-president and “first black president” Bill Clinton! MORE »

*BUT HE CHEATS IN HIS TALKING:* American plagiarizer candidate Barack Obama leads Hillary Clinton 53% to 40% in Wisconsin (primary tomorrow, huzzah), according to a new poll from Public Policy Polling. This is a wider margin than some other Wisconsin polls show, and the numbers also resemble a Deval Patrick speech from 2006. [TPM Election Central]