If you haven’t been reading Manzine this week, here’s what you’ve missed:

• James Bond Ruined the Martini Sean Connery’s Bond was the essence of cool. But he drank lousy martinis.

• Steakhouse Steak at Home You don’t need to spend $40 at a premium steakhouse to enjoy delicious steaks. Here’s how to do it in your own kitchen.

• Man Laws That Should be Repealed Remember those commercials in which athletes and actors sat around a table discussing questions about manhood such as whether it’s permissible to put lime in one’s beer?

• Margaritas: Skip the Blender Booze in the blender may render a frozen concoction. But it won’t be a real margarita.

• What is an American Car, Anyway? Chrysler has been sold to Fiat and GM has gone bankrupt. But the American auto industry is alive and well.

• 10 Manliest John Wayne Quotes You could do worse than John Wayne as your role model for manliness.

• Real Men: Harald Hardrada He fought in Sicily and Bulgaria, and visited Jerusalem. He married a Russian princess, and ruled as a Norwegian King. He died a thousand miles away from Byzantium and Kiev, fighting on the shores of England.

We’ve also started a sideblog, which shares a name with the title of this post, for shorter posts:

• Hot Waitress Economic Index

• Obama, Clinton, and I Play Golf

Let us know what you’d like to read about and we’ll try to write about it.

In a sidebar on the Iraq War casualty predictions post, regular commenter Odograph observes, “I think ‘Bush was famously against nation-building’ is a retroactive political claim.”

Not at all.  While it’s hard to imagine in hindsight, Candidate Bush ran against nation building and promised a “more humble foreign policy.”

Remember, Realist Condi Rice was his chief foreign policy advisor during the campaign and he appointed Realist Colin Powell as his first Secretary of State.  The events of 9/11 changed his mindset considerably and his policy was shaped by Neoconservatives for a few years before quietly shifting back to a more conventional Realist policy agenda toward the end of his administration.

A website called zFacts rounded up several relevant Candidate Bush quotes.  I’ve reformatted them in cleaner fashion below:

• “Let me tell you what else I’m worried about: I’m worried about an opponent who uses nation building and the military in the same sentence. See, our view of the military is for our military to be properly prepared to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place.” – Nov 6, 2000

• “Somalia. It started off as a humanitarian mission then changed into a nation-building mission and that’s where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price, and so I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow a dictator when it’s in our best interests. But in this case, it was a nation-building exercise. And same with Haiti. I wouldn’t have supported either.” – Oct. 11, 2000

• “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean we’re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America. Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That’s what it’s meant to do and when it gets overextended, morale drops.”  – Oct. 11, 2000

• “I think we’ve got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in national building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders.” Oct. 4, 2000

The above video, obviously redacted, is amusing in hindsight.  But that’s who Candidate Bush was.  I believe that this was his honest and sincere intention for conducting foreign policy.  But, like most presidents — including the current one — things look a little different from the Oval Office.

Apparently, a lot of people who use Yahoo! are searching for “Rumsfeld bible quotes” today.

This rather odd happenstance is apparently a function of a story that circulated earlier in the week about Rumsfeld putting bible verses on the cover sheets of “Worldwide Intelligence Updates” intended for President Bush.  Apparently, the story is largely untrue.

AP Photo/Fionn Kidney

The erstwhile Dr. Leopold Stotch passes along news of the exploits of a fellow Irish prankster:

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.  They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.

“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia. “I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin. “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”

Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.

This was something of a perfect storm:  The sudden death of a notable but relatively obscure figure combined with a superbly crafted quote.

Wikipedia spokesman Jay Walsh says, “We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too.”  That’s generally been my practice.   Trouble is, once a quote is out there, it quickly loses its Wikipedia moorings.   My guess is that many of those who used the quote found it at The Guardian or elsewhere.   Yes, journalists use Wikipedia without attribution.   Even more lift quotes and story ideas from other journalists, with or without attribution.

I’ve been quoted or asked for interviews many times based on blog posts that were mostly excerpts of media stories or others’ blog posts.  Given the formatting of this site — which has long used very well marked blockquotes and which highlights the name of the source being quoted — that would seem rather obvious.  But those searching for information stumble on the site via Google search, where we tend to rank well, and see an authoritative byline and go with it.

Similarly, the Atlantic Council put out a report on Afghanistan in January 2008 which began, “Make no mistake: NATO is not winning in Afghanistan.”  A subsequent edition of the report two months later changed that to, “Make no mistake: The international community is not winning in Afghanistan.”  It has thus been more than a year since the original quote appeared on the Council website or was available in a fresh print copy.  I still see the original version with some frequency.   It’s the quote that’s being quoted, not the report.

Indeed, were this report on the fake quote written differently, I’d expect that people would have used this report of the fake quote — and reports on the reports on the fake quote like this one — as a source of the quote. I’m not sure if AP’s Shawn Pogatchnik, whose report I quote above, intentionally broke up the fake quote with the phrase “Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read” to forestall that happening or whether it’s a happy accident.   I have had enough blog comments and emails resulting from blog posts to know that quite a few people will mistake, say, a commentary about Jesse Jackson as a posting by Jesse Jackson.  People doing Internet searches will glom onto a single sentence and ignore everything else on the page.

“It was easier for Obama to fire the CEO of a private company than it is to fire most federal employees.” – Radley Balko

“I don’t know if you know this or not but starting today the United States government will stand behind your warranty on a newly purchased General Motors car.  Now, that’s going to be cool, isn’t it?  You take your car in for a problem and you’re going to have to argue with the government representative you’re dealing with as to whether or not it’s really a problem and whether you caused it.  You think dealing with the DMV is a struggle now, wait ’til this kicks into gear.” – Rush Limbaugh

Regular readers know I’ve become increasingly annoyed with Limbaugh in recent years (although I was a faithful listener for nearly a decade) but it’s an amusing thought.  One wonders, indeed, how the government will manage warranty service if, as seems likely, GM goes through bankruptcy proceedings.

Hat tip to Kate McMillan for the Limbaugh link. Graphic via Limbaugh.

“As bad a precedent as the AIG bill is, there is one positive. Congress has established the principle that $165 million is not too inconsequential a sum as to require strict budget hawkishness. I can’t wait to apply that standard during the next earmark fight.” – Bob Krumm

“I was thinking: How about imposing a 90% tax on the income over $100,000 of some of the people who caused this mess? Perhaps not at the top of most lists, but fairly near the top, should be Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, and the leaders of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and ACORN. ” – Jim Lindgren

Lindgren’s jibe is partisan, since surely a large number of Republican politicians bear some responsibility, too.  But, surely, the chairmen of congressional committees with oversight over the financial sector are more culpable than mid-level analysts at AIG or CitiBank?

Both via Glenn Reynolds

Gina Trapani transcribes a corporate whiteboard offering solutions for “Workday Quality Over Quantity.”

Check email ONLY:

• 10AM
• 1PM
• 4PM

Send any time
Set email to check every 3 hours.
NO email on evenings.
NO email on weekends.
EMERGENCY? = Use phone.

FOCUS 1-3 Activities max/day
LOG 1-3 Succinct status bullets every day on team wiki

MINIMIZE chat
MAXIMIZE single-tasking

OUT by 5:30PM
~No excuses~

This sounds great.  But it strikes me as implausible and even inefficient.

For one thing, other people in the office are going to be rendered rather unproductive if they email me things and I go three hours — or even eighteen or sixty-six hours! — without checking it.

Screw them, you say — it’s about maximizing my efficiency?  Well, presumably, they’ll then learn that email isn’t an efficient way to get information from me and they’ll start calling or banging on my door.

Now, granted, I check email pretty much constantly unless I’m in the middle of a significant writing task.   So, maybe I should shift to, say, answering email once an hour or so during workdays and a couple of times in the evenings and on weekends.

Christine Rosen has a good piece called “The Myth of Multitasking,” which begins,

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”

She also quotes a study that found “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

Former Alabama football coach Gene Stallings used to say, “Don’t confuse activity with accomplishment.”  A lot of people work hard all day but accomplish very little because they’re not focused and can’t prioritize.   Most would almost certainly be better off getting a significant task or three done each day that working on a dozen tasks and making hardly any progress.

Then again, most people don’t control their own schedules and are often putting out fires and dealing with the latest “emergency” someone higher up the ladder is screaming about.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was on ABC’s “This Week” this morning and two quotes in particular are garnering some attention.

Taegan Goddard awarded “Quote of the Day” honors to this one:

Well, Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money. And I want to say to him: I’ll take it. I’m more than happy to take his money or any other governor in this country that doesn’t want to take this money.

And Steve Benen is fond of this one:

You know, you’ve got to go beyond just the principles. You’ve got to go and say, ‘What is right for the country right now?’ I think that, if they — they should make an effort to work together and to find what is best for the people, because by derailing everything, it’s not going to help anybody, and it creates instability and insecurity.

Now, Schwarzenegger is a centrist Republican trying to run what has become a very Democratic state, so compromise is especially necessary in his case.  But, aside from being good political pandering, there’s not much to recommend those lines.

Yes, I’m sure California would love to have more “free” money courtesy of Uncle Sam.  The problem is, the money isn’t free.  Somebody has to pay for it.  For the most part, it’s not going to be the people getting the money.  Sanford said that:

We’re a nation that has $52 trillion of accumulated liability, $52 trillion of political promises that have been made, but not paid for. And the idea of stacking up another trillion, another trillion, another trillion, we really do get to that tipping point.

Will Sanford take the money since it’s going to be spent one way or the other?  One imagines he will.  Be that’s hardly the point.

The second point is simply asinine.  The actual quote from the transcript is even more so than George Stephanopoulos’s blog synopsis above:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But these are real differences of principle.

SCHWARZENEGGER: I know, but that’s why I said, you know, you’ve got to go beyond just the principles. You’ve got to go and say, “What is right for the country right now?” I mean, I see that as kind of like, you go to a doctor, the doctor’s office, and say, “Look, can you examine me?” The doctor says, “You have cancer.”

What you want to do at that point is you want to see this team of doctors around you, have their act together, be very clear, and say, “This is what we need to do,” rather than see a bunch of doctors fighting in front of you and arguing about the treatment. I mean, that is the worse thing. It creates insecurity in the patient.

The same is with the people in America. That creates insecurity when you have those two parties always arguing and attacking each other, rather than coming together and saying to the American people, “Here’s the recipe. This is going to be tough, but this is what we need to do for the next two years. And we both believe in that.” That will bring calmness to the market and stability to the market.

If the two parties agreed on what was best for the country, there wouldn’t be two parties.  And, goodness gracious man, our politicians aren’t oncologists and we’re not their patients.

Schwarzenegger was a novelty when he came onto the political scene five years ago and decided to transition from movie star to candidate for governor of the biggest state in the union.  But he’s been at the wheel now long enough to know that there isn’t some happy medium where “we both believe in that” on most matters of consequence.

When I woke to an NPR report that Barack Obama had pledged, “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” I had to laugh.  Not because I doubt his sincerity but because we’ve heard this sort of thing before.

Bill Clinton promised us “the most ethical administration in the history of the Republic,” a quote often attributed sneeringly to George W. Bush — who merely promised to “restore honor and dignity” to the White House.  Both meant it, I think, as does Obama.  Reality has a way of unfolding a bit differently.

Looking for similar homilies, I stumbled on Will Bunch’s column, which lists longer versions of those quotes and jokes that the inauguration of Obama’s successor will almost certainly be closely followed by a report such as this:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hours after taking the oath of office in the wake of the scandal-plagued Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Reagan administrations, President Rodriguez yesterday released strict new ethical guidelines and promised his administration would be “the most honest since the time of Plato.”

Under the new rules proposed by the 45th president, White House who so much as look at a lobbyist will be immediately fired, fitted with an ankle bracelet and not allowed to travel within an 100-mile radius of Washington for the next 35 years.

Not a bad idea, come to think of it. . . .

Photo from Getty Images

Publius thinks it’s time to ban the phrase “Sister Souljah” moment, not just because it’s hackneyed but because it has been misused.

The more benign interpretation is that a Sister Souljah moment occurs when a candidate criticizes some group or idea nominally aligned with that candidate. In short, it’s criticizing your own coalition – or some idea valued by your coalition – to show independence and courage, etc.

The less benign interpretation is that “Sister Souljah” means distancing oneself from black people. When used in this sense, the Sister Souljah label masks an uglier, racial dimension lurking below the conceptual surface.

Let’s have a little straight talk – Clinton’s original Sister Souljah moment falls squarely within the latter sense. His statement got publicity not because he was speaking out against some interest group or idea, but because he spoke out against a black rapper.

John Cole, independently, agrees.  He goes much further, though, listing 21 shopworn phrases he’d like to see banned from punditry and “challenge[s] anyone out there to find ten minutes of any of the various shows with the idiot talking heads without multiple infractions from the list.”  Among his pet peeves are “flip-flop,” “Middle America,” “rock star,” and the “-gate” suffix.

Many of these are indeed verbal ticks.   Still, they’re intellectual shorthand, which serve a useful function of condensing complex ideas into instantly understood phrases.   Conversely, they can also hide a lack of insight or candor, as empty rhetoric that sounds, at first blush, like substantive analysis. Recall this classic scene from Bull Durham:

Crash Davis: You’re gonna have to learn your clichés. You’re gonna have to study them, you’re gonna have to know them. They’re your friends. Write this down: “We gotta play it one day at a time.”

Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: Got to play… it’s pretty boring.

Crash Davis: ‘Course it’s boring, that’s the point. Write it down.

Distinguishing legitimate shorthand from obfuscation can be tricky.

Jesse Jackson’s statement that Barack Obama’s “talking down to black people” makes him so angry that he “wants to cut his nuts out” has caused quite the stir.

Charles Hurt of the NY Post has the most concise report:

In a vulgar tirade caught on tape by Fox News, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he wanted to “cut his [Barack Obama's] nuts out” and he accused the fellow Chicagoan of “talking down to black folks” by giving moral lectures to African-Americans, source said Jackson’s shocking quotes were picked up by a hot mic before an interview on health care in Fox’s Chicago studio last Sunday. Fox planned to air the recording on Bill O’Reilly’s “The Factor” show.

Jackson has apologized for the remarks and the resulting hubbub, CNN reports.

Speaking to CNN Wednesday, Jackson said he feels “very distressed” over the comments.
“This is a sound bite in a broader conversation about urban policy and racial disparities. I feel very distressed because I’m supportive of this campaign and with the senator, what he has done and is doing,” he said. “I said he comes down as speaking down to black people. The moral message must be a much broader message. What we need really is racial justice and urban policy and jobs and health care. That’s a range of issues on the menu.

“Then I said something I regret was crude. It was very private. And very much a sound bite,” he also said.

In a statement issued earlier Wednesday to CNN, Jackson said, “For any harm or hurt that this hot mic private conversation may have caused, I apologize. My support for Senator Obama’s campaign is wide, deep and unequivocal. I cherish this redemptive and historical moment.”

My reaction was along the lines of Andrew Sullivan’s: This is “the kind of electoral gift any politician dreams of. Obama gets his Sistah Souljah moment handed to him on a plate … by Bill O’Reilly.” Indeed, getting castigated by Jesse Jackson furthers the whole mainstream, articulate, bright and clean vibe.

I do wonder, however, what so peeved Jackson. In what way was Obama “talking down to blacks”? Simply because he channeled Bill Cosby in a speech and forgot to add the usual caveats about how everything is ultimately society’s fault?

I’m also a bit curious about Fox News’ editorial judgment. The event happened Sunday but they held off the tape until Wednesday? I could understand saving it for their Monday prime time lineup. But three days?

Meanwhile, Kate McMillan and her commenters amuse themselves with various plays on the “nuts” theme.

“What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing.”
– Robert A. Heinlein

This story is a few days old now, but Noah Shachtman’s post is the first I’ve seen it:

Chinese elite anti-terror police officers are wheeling into action ahead of next month’s Beijing Olympics on two-wheeled scooters.  Members of the country’s armed police unit practised on the Segway models that have been re-named ‘Anti-Terror Assault Vehicles’ in the eastern province of Shandong.

Officials have bought 100 Segways and painted some in military camouflage to patrol airports and sporting venues during the Games.

In one drill, police posing as terrorists held ten badminton audience members hostage, ’shooting dead’ four ‘hijackers’, capturing two and defusing a mock car bomb.

A picture is, they say, worth a thousand words.  Perhaps more in this case:

Noah quotes someone named RYP,  “Ya gotta love a country that turns a Segway into a tool of oppressing the masses.”  That’s a great line although, in this case at least, it appears that they’re actually providing necessary security services.   Even police states have a legitimate requirement for police, after all.

The Manufactured Outrage of the Day comes to us from Joe Stephens and his page A3 piece for today’s Washington Post, “Obama Got Discount on Home Loan.”

Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate and while enjoying a surge in income, Barack Obama bought a $1.65 million restored Georgian mansion in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. To finance the purchase, he secured a $1.32 million loan from Northern Trust in Illinois.

The freshman Democratic senator received a discount. He locked in an interest rate of 5.625 percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such loans at the time in Chicago. The loan was unusually large, known in banker lingo as a “super super jumbo.” Obama paid no origination fee or discount points, as some consumers do to reduce their interest rates.

Compared with the average terms offered at the time in Chicago, Obama’s rate could have saved him more than $300 per month.

Why, that’s not right! A millionaire Senator getting a more favorable home loan than some average schmoe? How could that be?!

Actually, that’s rather a question that answers itself, no?   Nate Silver issues an “Irresponsible Journalism Alert” and points out that:

[T]he amount of the loan and the nature of the property are not the only factors that determine a mortgage rate. Another major consideration is the creditworthiness of the borrower. According to current rate quotes from myFICO.com, a borrower with very good credit can expect a mortgage rate about 30 basis points better than someone with pretty good credit, and a borrower with excellent credit can expect about a 50 basis point discount.

How credit worthy was Obama?  Well, aside from being a United States Senator, a steady gig if ever there was one, and having just received a $2.27 book deal, he and his wife combined to make around half a mil a year.  Not Rush Limbaugh money, to be sure, but he was probably a decent credit risk.

Ed Morrissey wants to know, “Can the lender identify (anonymously) any other borrower during the relevant time period that got the same favorable rate and, if so, what was the basis for setting the rate that low for the other borrower(s)?”  Not an unfair question especially, as Ed notes, when “Obama has spent plenty of time castigating credit lenders in this campaign for their capricious practices and bad management.  He has rung the populist bell, saying that ordinary Americans can’t get a break from lenders while the powerful play by different rules.”  But, yes, I’d be willing to bet that other well-heeled folks got these kind of rates.

Obama’s spokesman claims, “Obama received the same rate as would have been available to anyone with his financial profile and with an offer from another institution.”  I’m inclined to believe him.

To the extent this has legs it will, like the Cindy McCain back taxes scandal, be because it draws attention to the fact that the Obamas and McCains make a whole lot more money than regular folks and get treated better because of it.  But who didn’t already know that?

Major caveat:  Larry Johnson promises that “shortly, we will reveal additional details.” Given how famous he is for doing that, I’ll be refreshing that page every few minutes.*

Other responders at memeorandum: The Crypt’s Blogs, TownHall Blog, Redstate, MSNBC, Flopping Aces, michellemalkin.com, puma pac, Right Wing News, The Caucus, The Campaign Spot, Fox News, Confederate Yankee, Salon, Ben Smith’s Blogs, TBogg, Brilliant at Breakfast, Political Machine, Comments from Left Field, TPM Election Central, The Swamp, JammieWearingFool, Macsmind, Bark Bark Woof Woof, The Political Carnival, Whiskey Fire, Washington Monthly, The Campaign Spot, and Jack & Jill Politics

____________

*Yes, this I’m being ironic here.   Like a pony.

Bernhard Warner brings an interesting perspective to the fight between the AP and the blogosphere over copyright law. In attempting to bolster the AP’s case, he actually weakens it considerably.

To understand where the AP is coming from with this caveman approach to copyright enforcement, you have to understand what it’s like to work for a news wire. When I joined Reuters in 2001, nobody prepared me for the level of theft I would witness daily. Newspapers regularly carved up my stories and those of my colleagues and claimed them as their own. Often they’d plug in a word at the bottom indicating it came from Reuters or they would include some vague reference to “wire reports.” But just as often they would not. And, I’m not talking about pipsqueak newspapers. I’m talking about the biggest news outlets in the world blithely copying and pasting my original reportage and making just a few cosmetic changes — typically, removing the “By Bernhard Warner” part and inserting their own name; another trick was keeping my name in and describing me as a “special correspondent” of the newspaper – and hoping I wouldn’t notice. I’m not naming names because the list is simply too long. It seemed to be every newspaper. Out of sheer frustration, my colleagues and I gave up trying to police the theft because we were always hit with the same incredulous response from a newspaper editor: “But you’re a news wire. I’m fairly certain we have a contract with you that says this is fair use.”

Warner, who now teaches journalism in addition to doing freelance work, also observes that, “If a student is caught lifting text from a website and claiming it as his own, that’s grounds for failure. End of story. And, if the crime is particularly grievous, it could lead to expulsion.”

You don’t have to search too deep into a blog to find examples of flagrant plagiarism. Again, I’m not talking about pipsqueak blogs. There is a generally accepted practice among bloggers to lift the majority of a story or even the entire text of an article from a news site and re-paste it on the blog. As long as there is a link to the original article, the thinking goes, it’s OK. It’s not. That’s not “fair use”. That’s theft. My students can tell the difference.

But, aside from scraper blogs, the norm in the political blogosphere is decidedly different from plagiarism or the practice Warner describes as the norm in journalism. Bloggers link to the sources that they quote and give credit. No blogger I read with any regularity expropriates copy from the AP or anywhere also and passes it off as their own work.

Back in my teaching days, I had a few occasions where students turned in papers that were one long quote. Sometimes, they would quote several paragraphs from one source and then a few more from another source or two — especially if I had given them minimum source guidelines. And, yes, they’d fail for doing that. But it’s not plagiarism if it’s sourced; it’s not scholarship, either.

No “non-pipsqueak” blog I can think of consists mostly of extensive quotations and links. A handful of link blogs, of which Glenn Reynolds‘ InstaPundit is the archetype, have more quotes and linkage than original commentary. But those sites typically have very short excerpts and they invariably link and thus send traffic to the original source. In Reynolds’ case, often massive amounts of traffic. (A point Warner acknowledges.)

Some blogs, including this one, frequently have extensive excerpts. But they’re generally set off in obvious block quotes, as is done in this post, and interspersed with significant amounts of original commentary. Admittedly, I have the occasional post with little or no added value, simply pointing to a news story, including an excerpt, and a one-sentence reaction. Usually, this is a breaking news type story that I think my readers, who spend less time than I do combing the news, would like to know about. But no significant blog comes to mind that does mostly that.

Warner and I are in agreement that we need to come to some consensus as to what constitutes “fair use” and do a better job of educating bloggers on the issue of copyright. But the culture of blogging, especially political blogging, has naturally evolved into something that does a much better job of that than is the norm in the mainstream press.