Can't say I'm surprised that Les Otten has continued to appropriate other people's work for his own purposes.

Matt Gagnon caught the plagiarized passages, which are from this report by Steve Bowen at the Maine Heritage Policy Center and were used in this response to an education policy questionnaire by Derek Viger.

This, obviously, comes after several other instances of plagiarism were brought to light early in his campaign.

The Otten campaign offered a stunningly inept denial/apology.

Now the author of the report, Steve Bowen, has written a long post on the MHPC blog criticizing Otten for both the plagiarism itself and his campaign's response once the deed was uncovered.

Some excerpts:

Had the Otten piece simply been comprised of big sections of unedited text from my work, they could plausibly argue that they cut and pasted it into a new document with the intent of later adding quotation marks and citations. But what they did was rewrite and reorganize whole sections of it. You don't accidentally turn a paragraph into a bullet list, take out the bullets with which you disagree, then accidentally forget to cite the author of the original paragraph from which the bullet list was crafted.

Are they joking with this? [...]

We do not intend for our work to be used in a way that implies we endorse a specific political candidate, nor do we expect candidates to slyly suggest in their statements that we are somehow working behind the scenes to advance their campaigns. That appears to me to be what the Otten campaign is implying and it is both offensive to me and to the organization and potentially damaging to our credibility.

The Otten campaign has taken steps to apologize to me and to MHPC, but not for stealing our work.In their mind, it seems, this was simply an unfortunate accident, not a blatant attempt to pass off my work as the work of Les Otten.

I, for one, am not buying it.

In related news, fake Leslie Otten is back up on Twitter.

Update: Gagnon has found more plagiarized passages sprinkled throughout the policy documents on Otten's website.