UPDATE, SEPT. 27, 10:17 A.M.: Before Bill O'Reilly labeled Derek Reeve a “pinhead” for naming one of his dogs after the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the San Juan Capistrano city councilman was being called out for plagiarism.
Editors say Reeve was questioned about a passage in one Patch.com column that was apparently lifted word-for-word from another publication without attribution. The councilman reportedly explained it away as human error, but his defense and Patch work stopped about a month ago when more examples of plagiarism were found in dozens of his writings.
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Reports San Juan Capistrano Patch editor Jenna Chandler, “as much as two-thirds of Reeve's essays were a patchwork of paragraphs
identical to material written by newspaper columnists and reporters for
such publications as The Oregonian and The Hill.”
Chandler's piece includes multiple examples of Reeve passing off the prose of others as his own. It's bad enough that a city councilman is plagiarizing, but he's also a lawyer who lectures at local colleges. One, as Chandler points out, is Concordia University, whose employee
handbook states: “Plagiarism may be unintentional or intentional. Both are
serious academic violations.”
A Concordia spokeswoman did not return Patch's messages seeking comment.
ORIGINAL POST, SEPT. 23, 1:09 P.M.: Time was, you'd have to wait for Keith Obermann to label a San Juan Capistrano city councilman who named his dog
after the prophet Muhammad the World's Worst Person. But Obermann is now on some channel you can't find without a program guide, so it is up to another flaming liberal chatter to tar Councilman Derek Reeve as a “pinhead.”
Uh, check that: it was Obermann's arch rival, Bill O'Reilly.
Voting on a local dog park at the Sept. 6 City Council meeting, Reeve let it slip that his pooches are named America and Muhammad. That prompted his colleagues to seek “decorum” at future council meetings–and the Greater Los Angeles office of the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR) in Anaheim to later seek an apology.
But Reeve has been unrepentant, explaining that he did not mean to offend Muslims but to teach his children about free speech, noting that in some parts of the Islamic world he could be put to death for naming his dog after the religion's prophet.
Besides, the Pattersons across the street already took that name Saxnōt for their cockapoo.
Well, the whole dust-up prompted Papa Bear to put Reeve in the first category during The O'Reilly Factor's “Pinheads & Patriots” segment on Fox News Thursday. “Why offend Muslims if you don't have to?” O'Reilly reasoned. “You want to teach your kids about intolerance, there are plenty
of other ways to do it.”
Here's the video:
Reacting via his Facebook page, Reeve wrote, “”I'm a pin head, lol.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.