Revolutionary Moderation

Who needs "Friends" with headlines like these?



Sitcoms are irrelevant - just turn on the evening news for your laughs.



A little background for the out-of-province - earlier this week, a Liberal discussion of public auto insurance brought the Premier to wax rhapsodic on his concern that too much democratic socialism caused revolution in Chile, and brought Pinochet to power:

"Pinochet came in, Mr. Speaker, and I'm not saying that Pinochet was any better, but because of the only elected communist in Chile, Allende, and the socialist reforms he put in, Pinochet was forced, I would say, to mount a coup."

Wow! Public auto insurance causes fascism, so look out, Winnipeg! I wonder if there's some sort of academic paper that could extend this argument?



It turns out that there is, and it was written by none other than our Premier!

Alberta Premier Ralph Klein has been accused of plagiarism while writing a paper for his university degree in communications, the Edmonton Journal reported.



About five pages of the 13-page paper on Chilean politics and media were lifted directly from various Internet sites without benefit of quotation marks or appropriate attribution, the Journal reported.



...



Klein, 62, released his essay to the public last week to rebut criticism that he made sympathetic comments about former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the legislature.

Whoops! That sorta backfired. But it sure took the heat off the Pinochet thing, eh?



Update, the wee hours of Sunday morning: since the searchers through Google have been finding me through so many variants of "Ralph Klein" "essay" and "plagerize", I thought you should make up your own minds if it was truly plagerism, or simply shoddy attribution. I think it's the latter, which should still give some pause, but that's certainly a lesser sin. Nonetheless, the CBC has helpfully posted the entire thing in PDF format here.