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Friday, March 14, 2008

and the public affairs bureau award goes to...

... good old Neil Waugh, for his gushing endorsatorial of Ed Stelmach's cabinet. As I wrote yesterday, it's not an awful cabinet, but it's certainly nowhere near as orgasmically charged as Waugh's column would have Edmonton Sun readers believe.

Is the one-sentence-a-paragraph bandit gunning for a job at the top? Say, maybe as Tom Olsen's assistant? It would be a shame though, because Waugh is the best fish and game columnist in town.

5 comments:

Idealistic Pragmatist said...

I love this: "Change with a whole lot of continuity thrown in is the best way you can spin it."

And "spin it" you will, Neil. Good to know we can count on our journalists for that.

Anonymous said...

"Regular readers already know about the seven women in the premier's new inner circle. That's something that his spokesman Paul Stanway says goes a long way to "reflect today's Alberta."

Today's Alberta has women in it? As opposed to yesterday, when Alberta didn't?

Anonymous said...

Am I the only person in the province who thinks it is idiotic to evaluate a cabinet based on (a) where the members are from, and (b) their demographic characteristics?

Jebus. Pick the best people. If the best people aren't from a certain place, or if there aren't enough visible minorities, then encourage more good people who are from a certain place or who are visible minorities to run in the first place.

I just hate this suggestion that a cabinet has to be representative of a bunch of different interest groups. The worst is how the media buys into it all. The Journal columnists used a lot of paper the other day evaluating the picks NOT on the basis of whether the people are competent, but instead based on what, in any reasonable system, would be completely irrelevant: race and hometown. I suspect it is because it is hard to figure out who is actually competent on the government benches, but it is trivially easy to hammer out a column about how Shelbyville is getting screwed because there are more cabinet ministers from Springfield.

Robert McBean. said...

more fish than game, generally.

Anonymous said...

The reason that cabinet ministers need to be from all around the province is that there needs to be someone advocating for the needs of those regions in caucus. The idea is that power should never be concentrated in the hands of any region or special interest group.