It all started with free tickets to go see murder-endorsing right-wing talk radio wacko Mike Reagan give a talk in Anchorage last Wednesday. I was invited, but couldn't put down the paint brush (I'm painting the outside of our house). Besides, I'd already covered and interviewedfilm maker John Ziegler and the Alaska Teabaggers last week, and wanted a break from listening to these nuts.
But Alaska bloggers Shannyn Moore and AK Muckraker were there. So was progressive Alaskan videographer Dennis Zaki. AKM and Shannyn wrote about it that night. Dennis recorded the entire event. AKM transcribed part of it.
It turns out that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in an introductory speech, used long, plagiarized sections from a Newt Gingrich article.
Investigative writer Geoffrey Dunn read AKM's article, and saw something the rest of us missed. Here's his description, posted last night at Huffington Post:
Sarah Palin's speech delivered in Anchorage on Wednesday -- the one in which she declared "screw political correctness" and wondered why "we have to pussyfoot around our troublesome foes" -- repeatedly lifted from an article written four years ago by Newt Gingrich and Craig Shirley without attribution.
While Palin twice mentioned Gingrich in the speech (she never acknowledged Shirley), she frequently mixed her own remarks about Reagan with passages that appear to be pulled directly from the Gingrich-Shirley article.
A little background: Palin was on the stage at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts to introduce Michael Reagan, the conservative talk show host and son of the former president, Ronald Reagan. Her introduction lasted about 17 minutes and has already garnered significant national attention.
The indomitable AK Muckraker of The Mudflats undertook the near impossible task of transcribing most of Palin's address (my wife filled in on a couple of spots as well), and after slogging through the muck of verbiage while listening to a recording of the speech, I realized I had read some of this before. So I tracked down the original Gingrich-Shirley article, "Republicans Need to Relearn Lessons of the Reagan Revolution" which appeared in the Union Leader, November 1, 2005, and is also online.
Dunn goes on to compare the earlier Gingrich/Shirley lines. Her lifting certainly appears to go way into questionable territory.
Way to go, AKM, Dennis and Dunn!
Eric Boehlert will be discussing his new book, Bloggers on the Bus, over at firedoglake, beginning at 5:00 pm EDT this afternoon. Chapter 13, called "Saradise Lost," is about these same Alaska bloggers and some of their colleagues, who are keeping watch on Palin's antics.
Video of Palin's plagiarism is being posted at YouTube, by Denis Zaki, as I write this diary. If it isn't all up yet,it will appear here, in minutes.