I received a nice note from Ronald Bourret in response to this post.
He pointed out that there is no evil plan afoot, that O'Reilly is not the shameless corporation may have painted them to be and that re-packaging articles is common practice. "Freelance writing pays so poorly that, if you researched every article from scratch, you'd literally make a dollar or two an hour." So, I stand corrected and offer my apologies.