Once Again, I've Been Plagiarized By Fellow "Liberals"

I've been running this blog now for a little more than 5 years. Since October of 2010 when I ended up in Louisiana due to a series of events that included the economy, my rocky relationship with Sprint, and a bitter divorce - I've managed to crawl my way back to a position I never imagined possible when riding that Greyhound bus from San Francisco to Lafayette, Louisiana.

I ended up here with a quarter left in my pocket, and relied for almost a year on my conservative Republican mother who I love dearly, despite our disagreement on issues like abortion, or the fact that Bobby Jindal sucks. Since the day I stepped off that bus, only to find all of my luggage was stolen, I've worked my way back to a life better than the one I left behind in Florida.

In this time, I developed a following for my personal thoughts here on Whiskey and the Morning After, as well as my regular contributions on Forward Progessives which I have been doing for almost three years now.

When I first started, I was surprised that people beyond my small circle of friends which includes people of all political persuasions, wanted to hear what I had to say. Five years later, we've grown Forward Progressives to over 300,000 followers, my public Facebook page to over 30,000 - and have seen people from all around the world leave comments on my latest musings about science, religion, and whiskey.

It's also both flattering and maddening when other individuals with little or no creative abilities have decided to take my original content and pass it off as their own. As an example, today I found out that far-left/libertarian website Free Thought Project basically plagiarized my story about Muslim clerics rejecting extremists. Then another site that has previously plagiarized my material copied their story, and also passed it off as their own.

As a writer, I fully understand deadlines and presenting stories that your colleagues have missed, but representing someone else's story with little or no credit is plagiarism - especially when you take their story and just change a few words.

I've dealt with this for years, and my long beef with Being Liberal and their website Addicting Info goes back to 2012 when images I had made were being used to promote their page, with no credit to me. Since I've called out Addicting Info, Occupy Democrats and other people in their circle of friends for not properly crediting sources, or just for widely exaggerating stories for additional traffic to their websites - I have periodically been subjected to mass reports against my page and harassing emails.

These aren't angry conservatives who are upset about my ruthless fact-checking of their lies, these are people who call themselves liberals or progressives who want to easily profit off the hard work and creativity of others - without giving the original creator any credit.

These organizations do not care about advancing liberal causes as much as they care about putting money in their pocket monthly from ad revenue checks - and they don't mind ripping off original content creators to do so.