Avoiding ‘Plagiarism’

Editor:

I am writing in response to a letter in your May 8, 2014 edition by John J. Tarantella Sr. where he lists House of Representative bills supposedly killed by Republicans in the House. The data he uses, by the way, can be found on the internet at Democratic Underground.com. But, really there is no need since he quoted the entire article verbatim (we used to call that plagiarism).

In any event, the house bills he quoted as being killed in the house were HR 466, 1168, 1171, 1172 and 1293. If anyone wants to look up these bills online (Congress.gov or govtrack.us or opencongress.org, etc.), they will see that all of them were passed by the house (both Democratically or Republican controlled). If they died, it was in the Senate, which has been and remains in Democratic control.

I suggest that Mr. Tarantella Sr. search his sources before he makes accusations and that he learns not to plagiarize material. But, perhaps, Howard Dietz (look him up online) was right when he quoted, “composers shouldn’t think too much, it interferes with their plagiarism”.

David A Lindsay, MD
Mill Hall, PA