The Weekly Standard has a long story on Blair Hornstine. They place a lot of the blame for her behavior on the father. It sounds like he was taking care of some of her charity work. However, I bet a lot of parents help out with their children's charity work. I'm more upset about the plagiarism in her newspaper work. As if any bright high school student wouldn't know that you can't cut and paste quotes into your story without acknowledgement. Her excuse is that footnotes would have interrupted the flow of her story.

Whenever I catch kids in plagiarism, they all give the same excuse: "I didn't know that that would be plagiarism." As if they thought it would be okay to paste someone else's work into their paper without any attribution. Anyone headed for Harvard, as Blair is, knows the difference.

Reading all the things Blair was supposedly involved in makes it clear that those applying to top schools have to compete on a level that my generation never did.

Now, this whole mess is going to civil trial since the Hornstines want $2.7 million dollars in damages. Is that the going price for being a sole valedictorian rather than a co-valedictorian these days. Even with a sympathetic judge, I can't see any jury of citizens from this town finding in her favor on this. Whta a mess! And this poor school system has to shell out money for a lawyer to defend against this mess!