Ann Coulter NOT guilty of plagiarism

Liberals have been trying to nail Ann on charges that she plagiarized much of her new book "Godless." They even employed some no-name know-nothing with some unproven computer program to back their allegations. Well, the jury's in and the verdict is not guilty on all counts:

Universal Press Syndicate, which carries her column, has now rendered their verdict. According to them, there was no plagiarism. Says the president of the company: "There are only so many ways you can rewrite a fact and minimal matching text is not plagiarism." Back to square one for the Coulter-haters.

This comes on the heels of Coulter's publisher, Crown Publishing Group, which also laughed off the allegations, saying they were "as trivial and meritless as they are irresponsible." So much for that. So what exactly did she write that had the left's panties in such a knot? Well, nothing really. While some of the passages in question did somewhat match the source material, they were just rewrites of what someone else wrote about what happened.

One widely reported plagiarized passage was this, from her book "Godless:"

"The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River in Maine, was halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant previously believed to be extinct."

It originally ran in 1999...in a Portland, Maine newspaper:

"The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River, is halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant believed to be extinct."

While the passages are quite similar, it makes sense that they would be. They're describing a factual event that took place.

Even uber-lefty blogger Markos "Kos" Moulitsas Zúniga dismisses the allegations (keep in mind, though, that his opinions are filtered through a lens of hatred of Ann):

TPM Muckracker has an itemized list of Ann Coulter's supposed plagiarism, and sorry to say, there's not much there.

Coulter is a lot of things, but it doesn't look like plagiarism is one of them.

...

What these examples show is that Coulter is a lazy writer who rips off other people's research, but stealing someone else's arguments isn't "plagiarism". It's just being a lazy, unimaginative writer.

And as Kos noted, another lefty blogger, Josh Marshall, also doesn't see any substance to these allegations (keep in mind the same thing I said about Kos above):

To me personally, some of the examples/accusations seem strained -- simply similar statements of the same basic facts. And sometimes there are only so many ways to describe one set of facts. In other cases the similarities of the wording strike me as hard to see as a coincidence. Especially when there seem to be multiple instances of similarities in the same column coming from the same source.