Every On-Line Garbologist Should Own One

Got a look at how an "anti-plagiarism" tool like this worked during the last election. Handy thing to have on hand if your PM might be, oh I don't know, copping material from other conservative writers. A steal at $100.

Buckets Finds More Plagiarism

This a far more serious instance, involving an address on the Canada Wheat Board in which Harper cops material from an earlier speech by Craig Docksteader of The Prairie Policy Centre, a right-wing think tank. As Buckets notes, the material plagiarized is hardly "boilerplate". Even Harper's attempts at sarcasm are borrowed from his source text.

Well, I am off to the West Coast for nine days of fun in the autumn drizzle. I've got a few "robo-posts" coming up through the course of today, and then I will most likely resuming blogging at a somewhat slower pace up until election day.

Harper Channels Harris: More Examples Of Tory Plagiarism?

It looks like Jerad Gallinger has struck again, discovering some rather striking similarities between a 2003 speech by then Canadian Alliance Leader Stephen Harper in response to the 2003 Federal budget and Ontario Premier Mike Harris' December 2002 address to the Montreal Economic Institute. Read it all by clicking through the link above, but here I would like to raise a couple of points.

1) It is no less surprising that Harper should be channeling Mike Harris on the domestic front than he should be channeling Coalition of the Willing partner John Howard on international issues. Watch any Tory Majority to be the Mike Harris government gone national. Expect the three Ds: divisiveness, Deficit, and Debt, as he runs the nation into the ground while setting region against region, class against class, and transferring the nation's wealth up the social scale and out of the cities.

2) On several occasions, Harper's Canadian Alliance gang plagiarized material from other Conservative figures. Both of the examples noted so far come from 2003. Can both be traced to the hand of speechwriter Owen Lippert, who so conveniently fell on his sword over the first incident, or was the practice more widespread? Remember, before these two recent discoveries, Harper insisted to the press that he was always deeply involved in the writing of his own speeches.