Will Google ban me from republishing complete articles? Ezinearticles.com lets you do this, but is there a chance Google will penalize my blog?
That is called "duplicate content" you won't be penalized but the content won't be indexed so there is little SEO value except for readers already on your site. If you don't clearly credit the source, the author might get angry however.
Just submit your article to 1 or 2 main article directories where actual people will read it (not bots) and post it on your blog and you'll be fine. I hear people posting the same article to 100s of directories. They're just wasting their time since nobody even visits those less-known directories and Google's Web crawler will just ignore duplicate copies anyways.
If you can link that duplicated content article to High pr thematic links, then your url can rank higher in search engine results...
this is`nt entirly true, i run a website that uses a lot of content from other websites that i always link back to, all the content is indexed and in some cases outranks the original content
Google love fresh content so be original with your content. Posting of same content again n again will do nothing for you.
I would suggest not doing this at all its not worth it , you can get new quality articles writen for quite cheap price ; and for submission here are a few sites for your review; 1) http://www.ezinearticles.com 2) http://www.goarticles.com 3) http://www.212articles.com 4) http://www.articlespro.info 5) http://travel-health-insurance.info/