Washington D.C. Mayor Sets a Bad Example for Students

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Plagiarism

If a student in the Washington D.C. school system submits a paper that is plagiarized — he or she can be in big trouble. But that apparently does not apply to new D.C. Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty.

It turns out much of his 31-page plan to revamp city schools was directly lifted from a plan developed by officials in Mecklenburg County and Charlotte, North Carolina.

A plagiarism detection system found that 32 percent of the D.C. document was borrowed — about 8,000 words. In some sections, entire passages were lifted, with only the names of the school systems changed.

The mayor today admitted it was a mistake. His deputy mayor has apologized and taken the blame. Fenty has sought to take control of the schools away from the Board of Education.

Under Investigation

Filmmaker Michael Moore is being investigated by the Treasury Department for taking some ailing 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba without U.S. government permission. The trip will become part of Moore's upcoming documentary about the U.S. health care system.

But the Treasury Department says Moore may have violated the U.S. trade embargo restricting travel to Cuba. Moore's film — called "Sicko" — premieres at the Cannes Film Festival next week.

Video Pulled

Talk show host Glenn Beck says CNN would not let him air the video of the so-called "Martyr Mouse" being run by the terror group Hamas on a Palestinian kids TV show.

The program features a Mickey Mouse rip-off character urging children to fight Israel and work for global Islamic domination.

Beck says producers told him the CNN Arab desk had a problem with the translation and that the video had been pulled from the CNN networks.

An official with the organization that translated the video says that only one word was disputed and that CNN officials did not properly interpret the original Arabic language. Meanwhile, there are conflicting reports about whether Hamas will pull the video — or broadcast it tomorrow.

Data Mining

The New York Times last year won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the data mining of ordinary citizens by a government intelligence agency. But now the Times is going to do its own data mining of regular people — in the name of corporate profits.

The Village Voice reports Times stockholders were told recently of a project to learn more about the readers of the Times' Web site — so the paper can target ads toward them.

But critics say compiling such a data base could be dangerous — citing the possibility that the government could subpoena the information.

One official from the Cato Institute points out the Justice Department is already pushing a bill requiring companies to warehouse their customers' online activity in case investigators want to access it.

—FOX News Channel's Martin Hill contributed to this report.