What is it with Democrats and plagiarism? Doris Kearns Goodwin. Molly Ivins. Mike Barnicle. Ward Churchill. And now everyone’s favorite aging sluttard Maureen Dowd. Modo’s Sunday column began predictable enough, by mentioning her bete noire Dick Cheney, for whom she blames for everything from the war in Iraq to Michael Douglas refusing to take her phone calls after using her for a cum dumpster. The interesting thing about this column - that there’s something interesting about a Dowd column is a first for the 21st century - is that it contains a verbatim quote from a blog written by some dope called Josh Marshall. Dowd claims that she never read the quote at issue. Instead she claims that she was discussing her Sunday column with a fuckbuddy friend and that during the conversation he made a telling point, which point she wrote down and subsequently put in her column. The quote, which she claims never to have read, and which she claims to have transcribed from a conversation with her friend, is exactly the same as Marshall’s paragraph, right down to the commas. Which seems to make Dowd something of a liar. Or more of a liar, anyway.

 The actor Dom Deluise, star of such films as Cannonball Run, Cannonball Run II, Smokey and the Bandit II, and Spaceballs died May 4th in a Los Angeles hospital. He will be missed.