Oppo and Plagiarism

Joe Rodota at Oppo File says that opposition researchers used to have a hard time detecting plagiarism.

That changed in 2000, as “plagiarism consultant” Jonathan Bailey explains:

Though plagiarism had long been against most schools' ethics codes, detecting it was a challenge. In 2000, Turnitin.com was launched. Though the technology was originally designed to detect “frat file” plagiarism, a pre-internet plagiarism technique that involves storing copies of physical essays for use in later years, it was adapted to deal with internet plagiarism, as well.

There are other “content similarity detection” programs out there, and oppo researchers use them every day.

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In an earlier campaign cycle, oppo researchers in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee busted a Republican for plagiarism. In 2014, GOP oppo researchers decided to return the favor. They started with a universe of “targeted races” and winnowed that list down, focusing on campaigns that shared consulting teams. The NRCC oppo researchers figured the same people in those firms might be writing copy for two or more candidates, thereby increasing the possibility some of the content might be duplicated.

With that list of campaigns in hand, it became a simple matter of taking pages from candidate websites and entering them into Google. Examples of plagiarism leapt from their laptop screens and a target was identified: Staci Appel, candidate for Congress in Iowa’s 3rd District.

Believing J6 Myths

Tom Jackman, Scott Clement, Emily Guskin and Spencer S. Hsu at WP:

Twenty-five percent of Americans say it is “probably” or “definitely” true that the FBI instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, a false concept promoted by right-wing media and repeatedly denied by federal law enforcement, according to a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

The Post-UMD poll finds a smaller 11 percent of the public overall thinks there is “solid evidence” that FBI operatives organized and encouraged the attack, while 13 percent say this is their “suspicion only.”

Among Republicans, 34 percent say the FBI organized and encouraged the insurrection, compared with 30 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats.

The results confirm that misinformation about Jan. 6 is widespread as the United States heads into a presidential election year, during a campaign in which the former president and leading 2024 Republican candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed support for those who participated in the insurrection. Despite a detailed congressional investigation and more than 725 completed federal prosecutions of Jan. 6 participants that did not yield evidence of FBI involvement, a substantial minority of Americans still embrace conspiracy theories not unlike the ones that drove many rioters to storm the Capitol three years ago.


“The people that went there to express their views, to support Trump, were peaceful,” said Richard Baum, 61, an independent voter from Odessa, Tex. “The government implants were the violent ones: the FBI, the police people that were put in there, the antifa and BLM hired by George Soros; everybody knows that.”

The Post-UMD poll finds 39 percent of Americans who say Fox News is their primary news source believe the FBI organized and encouraged the Jan. 6 attack, compared with 16 percent of CNN or MSNBC viewers and 13 percent who get most of their news from ABC, CBS or NBC. The poll finds 44 percent of those who voted for Trump say the FBI instigated the attack.

The Right v. Claudine Gay

Calder McHugh at Politico:

Almost a month after a widely panned congressional hearing where she said it was context-dependent whether calls for genocide against Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct, President Claudine Gay announced that she was resigning, a coda that followed a pronounced pressure campaign led by conservatives in Congress, prominent donors and right-leaning media and activists.

Gay’s departure marked the rare exit that occasioned widespread congressional comment. House Speaker Mike Johnson argued “the resignation of Claudine Gay is long overdue,” giving voice to the disdain held for Harvard and other elite institutions by an increasingly populist Republican Party.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the Harvard grad whose line of questioning during the hearing produced the viral moments that doomed Gay — and led to University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill’s resignation — took a victory lap Tuesday.

“TWO DOWN,” wrote Stefanik in a post on X.

Yet it was the conservative media ecosystem, not Stefanik, that struck the crowning blow leading to Gay’s resignation. Gay managed at first to escape Magill’s fate with the support of the Harvard Corporation, the smaller and more powerful of Harvard’s two governing boards. But a sustained pressure campaign that focused on allegations of plagiarism in her scholarship ultimately led to her downfall.

It began Dec. 10, when conservative activists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet published a newsletter on Substack titled “ Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?”

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“The right has excelled at and outperformed the left when it comes to television and radio opinion … where the right has always lagged is in reporting,” Eliana Johnson, the editor-in-chief of the Free Beacon, said (Johnson formerly worked at POLITICO).

Liz Cheney on Oaths

Many posts have discussed oaths of office.

Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (New York: Little, Brown, 2023), 49.

  In Article VI of our Constitution, the founders required that every member of Congress, all state legislators, and “all executive and judicial officers” of the federal and state governments take an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution. For elected representatives, the oath must supersede any duty to represent their constituents. They must represent constituents’ interests solely in a manner that complies with their representatives’ paramount duty to the Constitution.

The president’s oath is arguably the most consequential. The president has tremendous power to enforce his will—not only as our commander in chief, but as the constitutional officer who can command the actions of critical executive branch agencies. The founders had utmost confidence inthe wisdom and grace of George Washington. But they were not convinced that every future president would be so honorable. This is why Article II of our Constitution details precisely what the president must pledge: to“faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to“preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”Under our Constitution, the president is selected by a separately organized group of Americans, called Electors, chosen nowadays through popular election in each state. The founders were concerned that a faction in Congress might conspire to control the selection of a president. They granted Congress what is, in most circumstances, only a ministerial role: counting the electoral votes that have been certified and transmitted to Washington by the individual states. As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 68, “No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States” can serve as a member of the Electoral College.

She had written a speech against the effort to stop the count.  Because of the insurrection, she never gave it on the floor, but presents it in the book (86-87):

Our oaths are not given to any specific president. They are given to preserve the Constitutional structure that has governed our republic for over 230 years. The oath does not bend or yield to popular sentiment, mob rule, or political threats. We do not compromise our oath. It compels us to adhere to the Constitution and rule of law… always.

 

Original Meaning of the Disqualification Clause

Steven Portnoy at ABC:

In 2024, the originalists on the Supreme Court will likely seek to determine whether the ratifiers could have had it in mind 158 years ago that Sec. 3 might not only be applied to the "late insurrection," as the House-passed version originally had it, but also to any other rebellion that might later take place.

But originalists might take note of what Sen. Peter Van Winkle of West Virginia said as he sought to have the threshold for congressional amnesty in Howard's version lowered to a simple majority, rather than two-thirds.

"This is to go into our Constitution and to stand to govern future insurrection as well as the present; and I should like to have that point definitely understood," Van Winkle said at the time.

It's also worth noting that there was just a single reference in the Senate debate to the fact that the president and vice president were not explicitly mentioned in Howard's draft as "officer(s) of the United States," the way members of Congress and state officials had been itemized in the text. Would the disqualification clause of the amendment not cover the top posts in the executive branch?

"Why did you omit to exclude them?" asked Maryland Democratic Sen. Reverdy Johnson.

Maine's Lot Morrill jumped in to clarify.

"Let me call the Senator's attention to the words 'or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States,'" Morrill said, ending the discussion on that point.

Withdrawing from a Treaty

 Gary J. Schmitt at AEI:

Arguments have been made that Congress must approve such a decision or that the Senate, given its role in sanctioning a treaty, should also have a say in terminating that pact. Yet presidents acted on their own in the two most recent decisions to end America’s adherence to a security-related treaty. In late 1979, President Jimmy Carter announced that the 1954 security accord with the Republic of China (Taiwan) would end on January 1, 1980. And then, in December 2001, not long after 9/11, George W. Bush announced that the U.S. was pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Carter’s decision did not go unchallenged. Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that treaty termination required Senate concurrence. Eventually, the case made it to the Supreme Court, where six of the nine justices ruled that it should be dismissed, with no hearing or oral arguments required. Justice William Rehnquist, concurring with that judgment, issued a statement along with three other justices that said the issue at hand was a political question—a dispute between Congress and the president over how foreign affairs should be conducted—and, therefore, not something for the court to decide. It was up to Congress to defend its claimed prerogatives. Justice Lewis Powell also concurred in the decision, but argued in a separate statement that the case might in fact have been one for the court to hear if the Congress had acted as a whole by passing a resolution formally opposing Carter’s decision.

Goldwater v. Carter (1979) undoubtedly influenced how Congress reacted to Bush’s decision to pull out of the ABM Treaty two decades later. While there were certainly Democrats who criticized the decision, the party itself was in the minority in the House and held a slim, one-vote margin in the Senate. With the precedent of Goldwater v. Carter, individual members stood no chance of contesting the White House in court and, just as importantly, they lacked the political wherewithal to challenge the decision by passing a resolution that the court might have then taken cognizance of.

American Journalists

The American Journalist Under Attack

 This survey continues the series of major national studies of U.S. journalists begun in 1971 by sociologist John Johnstone and continued in 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2013 by David Weaver, Cleve Wilhoit and their colleagues at Indiana University. Few studies of a profession as important as journalism can claim a half-century’s analytical perspective on the work, professional attitudes, and ethics from large samples of the people working in it. That’s what this study does with its contribution of important decennial measures of the pulse of American journalism. This present study, based on an online survey with 1,600 U.S. journalists conducted in early 2022, updates these findings and adds new ones concerning democracy and threats to journalism. Overall, the findings suggest that the past decade has had significant effects on U.S. journalists, some more negative than positive. Compared to 2013, the latest demographic profile reveals that U.S. journalists are now slightly more educated on average and more likely to identify as Democrats or Independents. While the gender pay gap has narrowed, there are still significantly more men than women in the profession, and fewer racial or ethnic minorities than in the general population. U.S. journalists today are slightly more satisfied with their work and more likely to say they have complete autonomy to select stories. However, about six in 10 journalists say that journalism is headed in the wrong direction, and more than four in 10 say that that their news staffs have shrunk in 2021 rather than remained the same or grown. Other findings also indicate that U.S. journalists are less likely to consider reaching the widest possible audiences and getting information to the public quickly as very important roles, and more likely to emphasize the importance of investigating government claims. U.S. journalists continue to rely heavily on social media in their daily work, despite more than half of the journalists also thinking social media have negative impacts on their profession. Most use social media to check for breaking news and to monitor what other news organizations are doing, and few use these interactive media for interviewing sources. One of the starkest findings is the gender differences in abuse now experienced by a majority of journalists. Female journalists were 7-to-14 times more likely to have experienced sexism and about 10 times more likely to have encountered threats of sexual violence, both online and offline. Additional findings are available online at www.theAmericanJournalist.org Lars Willnat, Ph.D. John Ben Snow Research Professor, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University David H. Weaver, Ph.D. Distinguished and Roy W. Howard Professor Emeritus, Media School, Indiana University Cleve Wilhoit, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Media School, Indiana University