Sherrod Brown is a leftist U.S. Congressman from Ohio's 13th District. He's also recently announced his candidacy for the Ohio senate seat held by Republican Mike DeWine. Sherrod Brown is also a plagiarizer.

It all started when Brown decided to write a letter to Senator DeWine regarding Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's record on "worker's rights"; only he didn't write a letter. He apparently decided that the work of liberal blogger Nathan Newman was better than anything he or his staff could come up with on their own -- pretty sad Congressman Brown. Although Newman's site is cited as the reference material for the letter, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Roughly 90 percent of what Brown, an Avon Democrat, wrote in his letter was lifted from an Internet posting by a blogger, as Brown's office acknowledged Monday when The Plain Dealer presented the similarities.

And I'd be curious to know if Newman's blog was cited as a source before the Plain Dealer "presented the similarities" to Brown's staff. It apparently wasn't in the original letter to DeWine.

For Newman's part, he says he doesn't care that Brown ripped off his intellectual property:

So in the case of Brown using my blog post, clearly I'm not a victim. So the only other possible victim is the public that was somehow deceived.

It's very big of Newman not to care that he did all the work and Brown and his staff get all the credit. I didn't see any copyright notice on his site as you do on this one, which informs potential plagiarizers of the need to obtain permission before using substantial parts of a post. But Newman's excuse for not caring about his work being ripped off is about as lame a one as you will find:

This is the comparison to academic plagiarism, but the difference between students (and I teach two classes) and politicians is that we expect students to do their own research. Politicians have speech writers and use other peoples ideas without attribution all the time.

The old "they all do it so who cares" excuse. It's curious that Newman would hold his students to a higher standard than he would hold as U.S. Congressman and his entire staff. Apparently not realizing that he's digging a hole with this lame excuse Newman happily keeps digging:

So the problem isn't using other people's ideas, but that somehow the American people assumed that Brown paid good money to staff for these unattributed ideas and the fact that he got them for free from a blogger is a scandal.

Well, yes I guess it is kind of a scandal and a pretty big ethics issue as well. I don't know about Newman, but I don't want someone representing me in the halls of congress who can't come up with an original thought and doesn't mind ripping off the thoughts of others. If Brown is ripping off Newman, what other ethical malfeasance is he engaging in that he hasn't been caught at? But Newman's response gets better:

Now, if I was a volunteer on the Brown campaign, and not a paid staff person, would all these conservatives beating their breasts over plagiarism still see a problem? I doubt they could do so with a straight face.

Give Newman a gold star!!! He knows that if he was working for the Brown campaign anything he wrote for them wouldn't be plagiarism. That's pretty smart for a liberal! But it gets even funnier. Newman doesn't mind that another liberal rips off his work without attribution, it's the conservatives who object to plagiarism that he's pissed at:

The only scandal in this story are right-wingers who refuse to engage in the substance of the original post. Why don't they spend as much time trying to defend Alito's rightwing labor decisions? Why don't they explain why workers should be denied the minimum wage or the freedom to form unions or access to jury trials to prove discriminatory treatment?

Hate to break it to Newman, but "the substance of the original post" isn't the issue. I'd be more than happy to debate Newman all the livelong day about Alito's "rightwing labor decisions" but that's a topic for another time. The issue here is that a plagiarizer is running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. But that's apparently okay with Newman:

This is the fakest of fake "scandals." It's actually about a bunch of intellectuals, reporters and journalists, who are so frigging self-absorbed with admiring their own words that they don't understand that people who care about the actual substance of politics give away our writing for free (both in terms of payment and attribution) all the time.

This is all very philanthropic of Newman, and I, like Newman, enjoy writing about politics enough that I do it for free. But on those occasions when someone wants to use something I've written, I appreciate it when they bother to ask first -- it's the respectable thing to do. But I've followed politics long enough to know that unrespectable Democratic politicians are the rule more than the exception, which Newman, no doubt knows as well, which is probably why he doesn’t mind being ripped off by them.