The University of Oklahoma, like every higher education institution in the country, is opposed to plagiarism.  So why did the home of the Sooners invite admitted plagiarist Fareed Zakaria to deliver the class of 2013's commencement address after the CNN anchor and Time plagiarism scandal?

In a statement announcing Zakaria's selection, University of Oklahoma President David Boren insisted that, “Fareed Zakaria is truly an educator…he uses his forum through the public media to educate a worldwide audience about the important issues we all confront and how we can work together to meet them.”  Yes, he sure does, especially when he lifts other people’s work to convey his point of view.

Last summer, Zakaria lifted material from Jill Lepore of the New Yorker in his column about gun control almost verbatim. Here’s a paragraph from his Time piece:

Some serious fur flew on the Morning Joe set today, as Joe Scarborough clashed with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.  Setting Scarborough off was the magazine's endorsement of Barack Obama that lauded the president for relieving the "national shame inflicted by the Bush administration."

Scarborough saracastically asked Remnick "who got paid the bonus for being able to squeeze in, quote, 'the shame of the Bush years?'" Scarborough went on to scald Remnick for the left's hypocrisy in giving President Obama a pass for pursuing many of the same policies that it had accused Bush-Cheney of undermining the Constitution for establishing.  Remnick feigned ignorance of what Scarborough meant by "the left," and accused Joe of having "within two seconds, leapt down my throat" about the endorsement.  View the video after the jump.

The title of John Cassidy's column in the New Yorker is "Rational Irrationality" but after reading the reason he gives for Barack Obama ditching his outdoor stadium speech at the Democrat convention in Charlotte, NC, I think it would be safe to ditch the "Rational" part of the column title.

One of the big reasons why Cassidy pretty much comes off as completely irrational was his explanation as to why Team Obama really moved the convention speech from the 75,000 seat outdoor stadium to the much smaller indoor venue. At first Cassity does seem a bit rational in his Six Unanswered Questions From Charlotte, which is also notable for his complete lack of curiousity about the "two-thirds" platform voice vote, since he admits what most of us already knew---that the excuse of poor weather was bogus. However, he provides an "answer" so off the wall as to be a real howler:

On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, CNN host Howard Kurtz lashed out at CNN’s own host Fareed Zakaria for committing plagiarism in a gun control article for Time magazine. Kurtz gave credit to us: “A conservative watchdog site Newsbusters, acting on a tip from the NRA, broke the story that Fareed's column was not entirely his own work.”

Kurtz put the two passages side by side on the screen to underline Zakaria’s copycat routine and pounded Zakaria for committing a “cardinal journalistic sin,” and the “latest case study of an insidious journalistic disease.” It’s too bad journalists aren’t this upset about sloppy bias. (Video and transcript below)

Anticipating “a real defeat for Obama and the end of health-care coverage for many,” The New Yorker had several covers ready to go if ObamaCare was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, including one which depicted Chief Justice John Roberts poised to push an elderly woman in a wheelchair down the Court's stairs.

Francoise Mouly was so sure that ObamaCare would be struck down that she instructed her artists to come up with possible sketches for the magazine cover before the ruling. Yesterday, Mouly decided to publish an article showing readers several of the possible covers that the artists came up with but never used.