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Obama Congrats Resolution a Copy ‘n’ Paste Job

David Kinkade

Updated: Apr 15, 2024

As an aside, I’ll note that the Arkansas House resolution to congratulate President Barack Obama that legislators voted down on Wednesday—Rep. Dan Greenberg explains more fully here—appears to mostly be a lazy copy and paste job sourced from two news articles (or possibly Wikipedia), with minimal changes.

Here’s the PDF version of the congratulatory resolution, as introduced by Rep. Stephanie Flowers. Paragraphs one through four of the resolution, along with the speech quote from paragraph nine, can be found almost verbatim in this November 5, 2008 story from the Los Angeles Times (including the sloppy “nation founded by slave owners” language that caused the dissenting lawmakers so much heartburn).

The biographical background info on Obama appears to have come from this news story from ANI, whatever that is, which I tracked down on Yahoo! News, though some of the language in this story is also found on the Barack Obama Wikipedia page. (Actually, I think the info in the ANI story is copied from the Wikipedia page, but I don’t feel like going to all the trouble to sort it out. Any obsessive sleuthing types out there want to nail it down conclusively, have at it. What’s clear is that the House resolution is a lame copy stitched together from these sources).

Legislators, be forewarned: This is the type of stuff that would garner you a failing grade at any of our state’s fine colleges and universities.

(And since this post is all about crediting sources, I’ll note that I picked up on the LA Times piece from a comment in this post at RedState.org, and filled in the rest with my own research. And by “research,” I mean 2 minutes of looking around on Google. Yay, I’m a professional journalist now!)

UPDATE: Max Brantley at the Arkansas Times blog notes that the Arkansas Senate passed a “virtually identical” resolution on January 5. The Senate version is also plagiarized.

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