Dam, that's inconvenient
In Chapter 1 of Godless, Coulter lays out many of the themes she will repeatedly hammer throughout the book, one of which is the evils of environmentalism and that worrying about how humans affect our planet is inconvenient for conservatives. "The various weeds and vermin liberals are always trying to save are no more distinguishable than individual styles of rap music."
While mocking conservationists' efforts to keep our planet healthy by incongruously equating its importance to that of rap music — both of which apparently annoy her — we find Godless' first instance of possible plagiarism… and we're only on page 5.
The sentence Coulter uses to follow the one quoted above is remarkably similar to an item contained in a January 1, 2000 article that appeared at MaineToday.com. The article, "Maine stories of the century: The results," contains the results of a poll to determine which events in Maine's history readers felt were the most important. Number 38 reads:
38. 1976: The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River, is halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant believed to be extinct.
On page 5 of Godless, Coulter writes:
"The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River in Maine, was halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant previously believed to be extinct."
By inserting "in Maine," changing "is" to "was," and adding "previously," Coulter apparently feels she changed the MaineToday.com item sufficiently that it no longer warrants credit or attribution in the book's footnotes. In the context of the paragraph, she presents this example of conservationists intervening on behalf of nature as her own, but it's clearly material copyrighted six years earlier by Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Source:
MaineToday.com, "Maine stories of the century: The results"