The Cabinet/and Michele

Hard to be grumpy with the McGuinty mini shuffle this week. Putting pit bull George Smitherman in charge of nuclear power and infrastructure was an astute move. I'll take odds this keeps George at Queen's Park and out of City Hall, where the field is not nearly large enough for his talents anyway. Who in their right mind wants to be part of something with Rob Ford, George Mamaliti and Frances Nunziata?

David Caplan to Health is a safe move. His Mom did a good job of holding the fort during her time there and David will likely do the same. The ministry cries out for bold new initiatives but those are not Caplanesque traits - David is likely to manage things reasonably well but not to push the envelope and make some of the changes that are needed. At the same time, he won't endanger the system by taking reckless chances so this is a reasonable and safe move. In his sleep Caplan will be an improvement over Tony Clements, the deer-in-the-headlights minister who served as health minister here and is the same under Harpoon - with the same results, one might add. Zippo.

And keeping Gerry Philips in Cabinet as Chair is a good move. Calm and clear in his thinking, Philips is the kind of seasoned pro you want at the table when hard choices need to be made.

In all, good marks to McGuinty for avoiding the temptation to tinker, and making only those changes that strengthen the cabinet.

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The knives that were sharpened and honed on Hillary Clinton have now turned on Michele Obama. E. D. Hill, one of Fox TV's mental midgets, called her fist bump or "dap" with her husband on the night he won the nomination a "terrorist fist jab". There are morons, there are jackasses and then there are slimy white men in suits who crawled out from rocks and who all applied for and got jobs on Fox, Christian radio and talk radio generally. What they all have in common is the ability to lie outrageously about Obama and his wife.

They have concentrated thus far on his religion - he's Christian but the party lie is that he's Muslim; his lack of patriotism -he didn't wear the US flag on his lapel; and Michele's so-called raging anger and her use of the word "whitey", both unsubstantiated but repeated nevertheless.

Just watch how they try to turn a woman born on the south side of Chicago and raised by working parents, who worked her way through college (including Harvard) by dint of hard work and scholarships, and who has obviously been a loving and successful parent, as their two daughters attest to - but just watch how they turn this into some kind of unAmerican story while positioning Cindy McCain, who inherited beer millions, as a real all American.

We don't have nearly enough strong leaders to be allow us to trash capable women like Hillary and Michele with impunity. Both of them put 90 percent of the men in public life to shame but as long as we tolerate the vacuous commentators like Hill and Limbaugh, Stern and Imus and the lies they spew about strong capable women, we will deserve the likes of George Bush.