Update: Stealing other people's designs, using music without permission, a Trump family problem

We know that Donald Trump used a fake identity to deal with PR issues, a character he named John Barron.  His son with Melania Trump is now named Barron William, same spelling.  I suppose it is a measure of some small impulse of originality that the son is not named Barron John.

A conspiracy theory circulated briefly that the woman who took the fall for Melania Trump was a fake, like the John Barron persona; good investigating by Snopes shows that to be incorrect.  The woman,    is real, but there is no independent verification that she was really responsible for the plagiarism, given an absence of evidence for that as a pattern of behavior.  She appears more competent than that. However the original speech, per investigation by NBC, did not include the plagiarized paragraphs. Those appear to be inserted by the campaign; McIver is not part of the campaign.  If she did contribute to the speech, as a paid corporate employee, that would be an inappropriate use of corporate resources by the campaign.  Which is to say that there may be an investigation into what she did and did not do in terms of the plagiarism at some future point.

.In the same vein, daughter Ivanka, aka Yael (the name she took upon converting to Judaism) has been sued for theft of shoe designs. (The suit is for one design, but the allegations are that she stole an entire line of shoe designs.) This is on top of the recall of 20,000 of her scarves for violating the US Federal Flammability Standard earlier this year.  No surprise that daddy dearest wants to undo regulation; they don't give a damn if the customers are burned by the products they sell.

Throughout the convention and at the opening of his campaign, Trump has been plagued by artists who are appalled at the use and abuse of their music to sell Trump, whom they appear to pretty universally despise and with whom they deeply disagree.  It began with Neil Young, and continued with the opening night use of We are the Champions by Queen and throughout the convention.  George Harrison's estate objects to Ivanka Trump using Here Comes the Sun without permission. The Harrison estate however indicated they  might have approved Beware of Darkness. Apparently there are no conservative song writers and musicians with music worth stealing / using.

It does not bode well for the GOP that they have nominated a crook, married to another dishonest person, with dishonest offspring.  But good on the so-called liberal media, like the Huff Po, that they quickly and effectively debunked a conspiracy theory about the alleged plagiarist.