Dan Coleman's blog

Folks may have heard that Orange County School Board Chairman Keith Cook cribbed his commencement speech delivered at Orange County High School last week. This is a serious infraction given the problems with plagiarism among students and the efforts by teachers to prevent it. Cook surely ought to be a role model in such matters.

Perhaps even worse than Cook’s plagiarism is his continuing denial of it. He initially denied it to the Herald reporter. Moments ago, he told the WCHL reporter that it was not plagiarism because he did not know who wrote the speech and that what was important was the content. He might talk to any English or history teacher to find out just how important they would consider the content if a student turned in a speech by Donna Shalala.

Meanwhile, Eleanor Murray embarrassed WCHL by repeatedly agreeing with Cook that it was inadvertent plagiarism. Yet Cook admits to making a web search for “graduation speeches” and making liberal use of the one he found. That is intentional plagiarism even if he did not trouble himself to find out who the author was.

They may have their tongues in cheek (it's hard to tell), but the editors of the Chapel Hill Herald today told us that "We know all about global warming. We just don't believe it."

The reason for this leap into irrationality: the several snow events that we've had this winter.

The Herald appears to be committing the common error of confusing climate with weather. Weather is the state of the climate at a given time and place. Climate describes long term weather patterns. Global warming is about climate change. Yesterday’s storm was the weather.

Among the impacts of climate change are increases in and changing patterns of precipitation. Increased precipitation during the winter, even at a degree or two warmer, will usually result in more snow.

I say "part II", because readers should be aware that Mark Marcoplos was for many years a columnist for the Chapel Hill Herald and was dropped (fired?) for being too politically active (as I understand it).

On December 27, the Herald editorialized: consider the example of Mark marcoplos, longtime spokesman for the Orange County Greens and the chairman of the Orange Water and Sewer Authority. In recent weeks, marcoplos has used a variety of forums to argue that compulsory schooling at the K-12 level is little more than a day care system, part of a capitalist ploy to depress wages. That's right. "If children weren't forced to go to school, then both parents couldn't take jobs outside the home and there would be great pressure to pay people more," he wrote in one newspaper column. I recommend reading the whole editorial to get the context.

Mark has responded to this editorial on orangepolitics and with his own op-ed

Apart from the issues of education raised and covered here on another thread, this spat raises serious questions of the mis-use and abuse of public figures by the press.