When Red America/Washington Post blogger Ben Domenech was caught plagiarizing multiple articles, the Washington Post allowed him to resign within the week.

Now that Golden State/L.A. Times blogger Michael Hiltzik has been caught plagiarizing multiple personalities, will the L.A. Times have the integrity to "allow" Hiltzik to resign as well?

Pre-publication Update: The answer appears to be yes.

Notice from the Editors

The Times has suspended Michael Hiltzik's Golden State blog on latimes.com. Hiltzik admitted Thursday that he posted items on the paper's website, and on other websites, under names other than his own. That is a violation of The Times ethics policy, which requires editors and reporters to identify themselves when dealing with the public. The policy applies to both the print and online editions of the newspaper. The Times is investigating the postings.

Interestingly enough, when Domenech was caught plagiarizing, quite a few conservative bloggers let him have it. Why aren't any liberal bloggers condemning the dishonesty of Hiltzik?

Further Update: Hiltzik's Golden State Blog has suddenly ceased to exist.

Is this a temporary condition, or how the L.A. Times decided to solve the problem?

Yet Another Further Update: The blog is back, but Michael Hiltzik is still suspended.

Oy...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I wrote once before about a group of UC Santa Cruz students calling themselves Students Against War (SAW), who apparently committed felonies by blocking military recruiters from the U.S. Army and National Guard attempting to participate in a job fair on campus.

Three of SAW's leaders, Sam Aranke, Janine Carmona, and David Zlutnick, placed their phone numbers and email addresses on press release fficial">disseminated widely across the internet, in apparent hopes of using this contact information to help organize even larger felonious acts.

Blogger Michelle Malkin posted these publicly available and fficial">still easily found contact numbers, which apparently led to some ill-advised and indefensible threats being made against these student criminals.

In retaliation against Malkin, some radical left wing web sites and blogs have taken the extraordinary step of posting not only Malkin's phone number and already publicly accessible email address, but satellite pictures of her house, her physical home address, and descriptions of her family. Malkin is unbowed. Goldstein is calling for a "very public condemnation and ostracizing" of those responsible for targeting Malkin's family.

I'm a little more direct.

This is the link to the FBI Tips and Public Leads form, which I have used to report several of these sites for possible hate crimes investigations based upon specific language used in some of those pages. Those of you who are guilty of these hate crimes undoubtedly know who you are.

I'd advise sleeping light.

That knock at the door ain't Avon calling, and answering it promptly might save you repair work after the warrant is served.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:40 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Pretend that you are a political "undecided" or a moderate, and you read the Washington Post. You don't follow politics much (you life is too busy for that) and you've run across the following stories.

Who would you rather associate with, the blogger profiled in this Q&A several months ago, or this one revealed today?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:30 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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A touching tribute to character at Phin's Blog.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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...and apparently, I'm doing okay in Fargo.

I'll be doing my first talk radio segment (ever) on "Hot Talk with Scott Hennen" on WDAY at 11:30 AM (Eastern). We'll be talking about the WaPo "trailers of mass destraction" story I debunked yesterday.

You should be able to listen through the Listen to Hot Talk link.

The Hot Talk blog is here.

Update: I just got off the air. For a first-timer I don't think I did that bad, talking with the host for a few minutes and taking a call from a liberal. I'll update with a link to the MP3 as soon as I have the audio.

Update 2: We have audio (6802K MP3). Rush Limbaugh won't feel threatened.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It seems like some folks, such as UNC-Chapel Hill law professor Eric Muller, have too much time on their hands:

Some have maintained for a while now that a person other than Michelle Malkin is writing and posting some of the material that gets posted with her byline on her blog. She has denied it.

To my eyes, the jury has always been out on that question.

But let's look closely at the last 36 hours at michellemalkin.com.

At 7:16 a.m., she posted that she was "back from vacation."

Sizeable posts followed at 8:00 a.m., 8:46 a.m., 9:31 a.m., 10:16 a.m., 10:52 a.m. (a short one), 11:25 a.m., 11:37 a.m., 12:37 p.m., 2:09 p.m. (subsequently updated), 4:06 p.m., 7:45 p.m., 8:01 p.m., 8:19 p.m., 10:36 p.m. (subsequently updated), 5:49 a.m., 6:05 a.m., 8:00 a.m., 8:25 a.m. (subsequently updated), and then 12:31 p.m.

In that last message, Malkin explains that she is in Minneapolis, where she'll be giving a speech at 12:00 noon. Controlling for the one-hour time difference between the East Coast and Minnesota, I infer that she posted this update a startling 29 minutes before her noontime speech.

One wonders: when did she drive (or get driven) to the airport, fly at least three hours (if non-stop) to Minnesota, and then drive (or get driven) to her Minneapolis destination? And is there a red-eye from the DC area to Minneapolis?

The jury may not be in, but they're knocking on the door.

The knocking at the door, Professor Muller, may be the men in white coats asking for you.

Muller is just one liberal with the apparent obsession of "getting" conservative blogger/journalist Michelle Malkin, who they claim must have a ghostwriter because of her prodigious output as a journalist and blogger.

What evidence does the law professor bring to bear?

His "evidence" is not that there are tell-tale differences in grammar, syntax, or tone in some of her posts (traditional, recognized "tells"), but simple fact that Malkin was able to put up 20 blog entries in 36 hours. That is impressive output if you are looking at the raw number of posts, but the raw number itself means nothing without considering the style and length of the blog posts in question.

If long-form bloggers such as Richard Fernandez or Ed Morrissey were posting 20 entries in 36 hours, people would have a right to be suspicious. Long form blog entries from these and similar writers are intricate, and they take substantial time to compose, because they require substantial independent research, analysis, synthesis, and of course, composition.

But Michelle Malkin is not in general, and definitely not in the examples provided, a long-form blogger.

Malkin writes in other forums for her primary income, and as a blogger, she typically aggregates news stories and blog entries that are often sent to her electronically either via email, RSS feeds, news media web sites, and presumably other sources.

The telling question in the equation is this: how much original written composition occurs in these 20 posts cited, and how much is aggregation?

If you strip out the images and quoted text in the 20 posts selected by Eric Muller, Michelle Malkin wrote a grand total of 938 words over 3 days, or just shy of 47 words a post (46.9, Eric, since you seem to obsess so much about the fine details). As the vast majority of those 47 words are straightforward descriptive writing that comes as easily as speech for journalists, this level of output is well within her capabilities, even while traveling.

20 brief short-form blog posts over three days is hardly difficult for a full-time professional writer. For that matter, it is not even all that difficult for part-time bloggers.

Liberal Duncan Black released a total of 57 short (often very short) posts over the past three days while holding down a Senior Fellowship with Media Matters. Glenn Reynolds (a law professor without too much time on his hands) managed to teach class, pay his final respects to a much beloved grandmother, and release 60 mostly short posts and 18 updates in the same amount of time. Perhaps he should investigate both of them as well?

For someone teaching law, Eric Muller presents a laughably weak case. Perhaps his obsession has cut too much into his sleep.

For his student's sake, I hope he gets the help he needs.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:32 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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