stoop a little lower, there

Keith Cook, chair of the Orange County School Board, plagiarized his commencement address to O.C. High School:

The speech, which incorporated lessons from the movie "Titanic," was virtually identical to a 1998 speech given by Donna Shalala, then U.S. secretary of health and human services. Cook did not attribute his remarks, made Friday night at UNC's Smith Center, to Shalala.

When asked Tuesday by a Herald-Sun reporter where he got his speech, Cook said, "I wrote that."

But later, after The Herald-Sun e-mailed him a Web site link to Shalala's speech, Cook called back and acknowledged he had gotten his remarks off the Internet. He said he downloaded them from a Web site he found after typing "graduation speeches" into the Google search engine.

I've caught plagiarizers a few times in my teaching career (which is going on two strong years now). They always do the same thing: deny, rinse, repeat. Until you show them the exact website you googled. (Why they assume you don't know how use Google is beyond me.)

But come on. A speech that references Titanic? That is so 1998.

[hat tip to obscure store]