Ms. Smith has just heard the sound of one hand clapping as the electorate saw the Wildrose Alliance for what it is: a bunch of angry old men hoping to ride a pretty face into power.

These are the people who fired Stephen Carter and hired Vitor Marchiano, who re-wrote their party constitution and lied to their membership about it, and who abandoned the future to embrace people like Hunsberger.

If Redford has enough guts she'll invite Smith into cabinet - thereby both rescuing a valuable political talent from oblivion and re-energizing her own party's conservative wing.

Weird.

Redford is part of a progressive surge in the PC party - but her willingness to use billions in taxpayer dollars to buy union votes has already had the predictable response: a strong conservative renewal that now promises to remake the PC party as what the Wildrose Alliance set out to be: socially progressive and fiscally conservative.

One of the "interesting" things happening on both sides of the border is the legitimization of anti-christian hate.

As a Canadian I cannot, for example, post real video of Muslim animal slaughter practices without being accused of hate speech and consequently bankrupted by a human rights commission with no interest in my rights -but most of the national media use "Christian" as an intentionally derogatory term and leave the strong, but rather lonely, ethical stance taken by the Catholic church in Canada essentially unreported.

A parliamentary democracy requires that the people elect representatives who then direct government policy. For that to work the representatives have to have a voice in policy formation and the press needs to keep the people informed about who is doing what and to whom.

Scary - we're running a presidential election without the checks and balances that go with that.

There's a secret "unite the left" movement featuring a couple of Obama fellow travellers and the usual Quebec opportunists.

This budget is neither fish nor fowl - it changes nothing, suggests no vision, and appears utterly disinterested. I suppose that's the intent, given the leadership contest, but the world around us is changing and this budget should have set the fiscal stage to accomodate that.

The PC problem is that Stelmach didn't use his leadership years to rid the party of the idealogues at both ends of the political spectrum - so now we have both an NDP guy (Hancock), and a far right Republican (Morton), running for the leadership of the same Progressive Conservative party.

In early April of this year the party's newly hired chief bureaucrat took over the policy development process leading up to the June 25th, 2010, AGM.

I protested his actions to the executive committee, nobody cared.

When the AGM letter came out in mid May it did not have the constitutionally required list of executive committee nominations.

I protested this to the executive committee, nobody cared.

This budget has three major problems:

1. it ignores the reality that there's only one taxpayer to direct taxpayer anger away from provincial politicians and toward others - particularly the municipal, school board, and University officials who normally don't support the PC party anyway.