Honesty in speaking

Yeah, I know. I haven't posted anything in a LONG time. It's down to less than 50 days before the election so it's time to start putting on the pressure. Not that this little blog can exert any but you as a voter can.

I see a lot of rhetoric about how John McCain picked an unqualified individual for his running mate. Well, lets look at Obama's running mate. We saw a clip of Sarah quoting President Lincoln before her church. Now it was edited out but when you look at the whole thing in context it's clear what she was doing. Now lets look at Joe Biden. The excerpt below is from The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. their website is http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu/plagiarism.html

Scientists and scholars build on the ideas and research of others. Such collaboration, as Isaac Newton observed, is part of the common culture of science. But originality is just as important in science, as reflected in the harsh academic code of publish or perish. Thus scientists and academics of all stripes are sticklers about drawing a clear line between what is original in one's work, and what is not. And since academics are the watchdogs and graders of student writing, it is critically important for students to learn what plagiarism is and why it's so dangerous.

Plagiarism can have catastrophic consequences for one's career as a student and even later on in life—and the higher one's ambition takes one, the higher the stakes. In 1987, for instance, Senator Joe Biden, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, was accused of plagiarizing passages in speeches and interviews from the oratory of a British politician, Neil Kinnock. Here are some of the passages in question:

Kinnock Original :

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

Biden Speech:

I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college?

Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? . . . No, it's not because they weren't as smart. It's not because they didn't work as hard. It's because they didn't have a platform upon which to stand . . .

It turned out Biden had also borrowed passages from old campaign speeches by Robert Kennedy and had inflated his academic record. But oratory has a long tradition of borrowing and even "heavy lifting," as speechwriters call it, so Biden stayed alive in the presidential race. The last straw, however, came when it turned out that twenty years earlier Biden had received a failing grade in a law school course for plagiarizing a legal article (he'd given a single footnote while lifting five full pages from the article). Biden said he'd been unaware of the appropriate standards for legal briefs, but the public was unimpressed. His campaign collapsed and he withdrew from the race.The lesson: be afraid of plagiarism. It creates paper-trail timebombs that can destroy a career you've spent decades building—especially today, when teachers routinely keep copies of papers and the Internet makes it a snap to compare texts and locate sources

Doesn't sound like Sen. Biden was being very honest now does it? If my students did the same thing they would suffer the consequences including failure of the paper/speech, failure of the class and academic probation unless it was anything other than a first offense. If it is the second offense they are removed from school. Sen Biden apparently has done this more than once.

I'll post more about "Qualifications" or the lack there of by others in the race. And a little about being "patriotic" by paying more taxes.

Keep searching for the truth. As the poster in Fox Mulder's office said "The truth is out there"