How is Obama on Gay rights...Just ask the Mayor of San Fran and he'll tell ya...

Obama wants the Defense of Marriage Act (banning gay marriage) and Don't Ask Don't Tell (banning openly gay military members from serving) over-turned. I seem to recall Clinton being behind both of those.

lots of people, you among them, do not seem to understand what plagiarism is.

You said: re: Hillary's closing comes nowhere near Obama's plagiarism

They were worse. Patrick suggested using those lines to Obama, and its well know each has allowed the other to pick up snippets from each others speeches. Patrick used lines from Obama's famouse 2004 convention speech.

Obama made no offense against Patrick if he had Patrick's permission to use his words. That is true. However, that is not what made it plagiarism. The offense is against the intended audience when Obama used a previously orally published speech lines by Patrick without attribution. In other words, he did no wrong to Patrick; it was the audience which was deceived.

Clinton's closing words in the debate, while the concepts and some of the words are similar to Edward's just do not constitute plagiarism because the words were too generic and not in the same order and the concept is too general. "We are going to be fine" is something people say all the time.

When the concept is unusual or striking and the words are arranged in much the same order and the basic idea is distinct, then you have plagiarism. When I used to grade student papers, plagiarism was often pretty easy to spot when it was plugged into an essay. Tone and style would shift and suddenly the writer would be a much much better writer. Red flag! Time to go to Google and other search engines to see if I could find where they lifted it. Lots of times it would come up immediately because the words were in the exact same order.

There are other things students do that do not catch them out. For instance, take the following sentence:

"I felt as if my world had been turned on its head; as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in a yellow sky ..."

The student likes the sentence and wants to use it but writes instead:

It seemed the world was upside down, as if that morning I had glanced out my window and the sun was blue instead of yellow and the sky was yellow instead of blue."

I will tell you who wrote the first sentence later, but you tell me this; is the last sentence plagiarism?

Goes to speak again to "Words vs Action"...Go ask Gavin Newsom about that...

She said "we are going to be fine, but is the country going to be fine," or words to that effect. That is the plagiarism, not the abbreviated version that numerous people mis-quote over and over.

I'll still vote for Clinton if she somehow wins the nomination, but I have no enthusiasm for all her weird junk.

Sadly, it seems Hillary xeroxed TWO passages into her "majestic" closing remarks. Hillary actually said last night that we should watch Obama's "plagiarism" on Youtube. So it is only fair we now watch TWO of hers that came mere minutes after her "Xerox" and Youtube comments:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=H60y8mHMpmU

So, there's the xerox taken from John Edwards, but there is also a lengthy one from a Bill Clinton speech in 2000. My guess is her staff collects these xeroxes into grab bags and then forget that these are actually appropriated material.

Mr. Shapiro obviously has a favorite in this horse race, as evidenced by his referral to Senator Obama's remarks as "blather" and Senator Clinton's words as "emotional" and "powerful".

On the issues, I like both of these Democratic candidates. I do wish, however, that Senator Clinton did not have such an aura of political gamesmanship about her, which seemed very evident to me in her "closing" moment at the end of the debate. You can always tell when she is leading up to what she believes to be a "gotcha" moment. . . .which, of course is just the kind of "politics as usual" that Senator Obama is trying to transcend.

Besides that she only borrowed a few words, debates and prepared speeches are very different things. I don't really think you can plagiarize in a debate. She repeated something that she had heard before in informal remarks, perhaps not even remembering where she'd heard it. People inadvertently repeat other people's phrases all the time. A speech is very different; you can't offer the excuse that you were saying whatever came to your head, because it's all prepared and written down. Obama clearly intended to take Patrick's words, while we have no way of knowing whether Clinton intended to take Edwards's. Also, Edwards's words were less obscure than Patrick's. You can't plagiarize something if it's so widely known that no one's likely to think you made it up yourself. No one knew when Obama trotted out the line about people voting for their own aspirations that he'd actually expropriated it from Patrick. In fact, reporters wrote about what a great line it was for weeks until it came out that it wasn't his. People instantly knew, on the other hand, that Clinton's words were taken from Edwards because everybody saw those debates just a month ago. It's like if she said "where's the beef" - nobody could call that plagiarism, because we all would know where it came from. If you take words from some obscure Massachusetts politician on the other hand, you ought to cite them.

Maureen Haughey is the widow of a rapscallion Taoiseach now deceased and disgraced before his death. I disliked him intensely but his wife was not a politician and stayed out of the public eye. This woman is a grandmother who has always chosen privacy and, Golden Boy, you are a %*"---to make such ill-judged, malicious statements. The paramount reason for my supporting Hillary Clinton is that when I came to this site I felt sheer revulsion at the viciousness of the Obamites' attacks on Hillary Clinton. "The narrow-minded cosmopolitanism" of the Irish is something you're an expert on, you'd have people believe. Well, Mr. Mediocrity, the "narrow-minded" Irish had a Taoiseach who publicly flaunted his mistress while everybody shrugged and got on with their own lives. That Taoiseach was Charles Haughey and he was disgraced because of his financial dealings not because he was a randy old goat. If you want "narrow-minded" you should look closer to home and particularly to the sanctimonious Obama supporters who, in the absence of anything intelligent to say, have dredged the Lewinsky story up again, regardless of the feelings of that particular woman and ten years after the scandal.

It's completely illogical to find such nasty people, some quite foul-mouthed, expressing support for a squeaky-clean candidate. I've become a target now but you are so obvious and inept that it doesn't bother me. You're only showing yourselves up with your blundering attempts to shut me up. I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to learn that you are stalking-horses for the Republicans because you certainly are very strange representatives for "Senator Sweetness & Light".