Thanks, but I'm going to anyway...

This is good. The fact that a person's right to defend himself is even in question is not.

Thy Master's Bidding

Although Dizzy has covered the issue well here, now would be a good time to remember how the City's corporate governance guidelines operate in "The Combined Code: Principles of Good Governance and Code of Best Practice."

As the chickens come home to roost after ten years of economic sleight-of-hand, juggling the stats, cooking the books and outright lies, we are reminded that were the Labour government an accountable institution (ie, to its constituents/shareholders) Gordon Brown's move to PM might not have been so easy to manage.

This issue was raised before during the Blair/Brown coup succession and damn if I can't remember by who, but the gist of it is the Higgs Report rules of corporate governance for the City states:

The Code’s overall aim is to enhance board effectiveness and to improve investor confidence by raising standards of corporate governance. Its main features are:

• ........

• the separation of the roles of the chairman and the chief executive to be reinforced;
  
• a chief executive should not go on to become chairman of the same company;

The point being that a person in a position of responsibility for the financial performance of a company - and it's reporting - should not move into a position of authority over his successor for the simple reason that it is far too easy to cover up past misdeeds. A situation we have now with Gordon Brown and his very own personal Renfield, Alastair Darling.

It couldn't happen to a nicer country

It seems that Belgium, in the throes of dissolution has found a buyer on eBay, and while that may not be a bad thing all round, the people at eBay decided the deal was off since the site "cannot host the sale of anything virtual or unrealistic". In the words of James Taranto, "We've been to Belgium, and that's a pretty good description of the place".

Never one around when you need it

If there was a functioning semblance of a conservative opposition in this country they would see the massive clusterfuck of personal debt, mortgage flameouts and this as reported by the Telegraph as the wellspring of angry voter discontent and ride it to overwhelming victory. But fuck me if there's not.

When people are trapped between a state education system that looks like it was dreamt up by a particularly vicious sadist and a private system that can't keep up with demand, tempers will rise. When the "opposition" response is to threaten to tax your holidays out of existence, they will not rise to your benefit.

Drunks 'should pay for treatment'

With a headline that, in context, could charitably be called 'unfortunate', the BBC presents us with what the LibDems consider to be a meaningful health care policy.

How do these people manage to get elected?

The Lights Are On, But No One's Home....

In comments to digital industry trade journal NMA (sorry no link, subscription content), Jane Lighting, CEO of broadcast tat-merchant Five, makes it crystal clear why she is running a second-rate afterthought of a television channel that few people can get and fewer people watch:

The chief executive of broadcaster Five has hit out at the lack of regulation surrounding the rise of Google as a competitor to media companies.

Jane Lighting told NMA that if the company was a traditional broadcaster then it wouldn't have escaped regulation. And she warned that it was almost too late for anyone to put the brakes on the rise of the search giant as a dominant player in the media market.

"Google is clearly an incredibly powerful company," Lighting said. "It has a very substantial share of the advertising sector and it has a hell of a lot of leverage.

"If you had a broadcaster with that kind of leverage there would be all sorts of regulations. You couldn't have that much leverage in one place in terms of ad monies," she added.

Clearly new to this internet thing, she attempts to redeem herself by demonstrating her monkey-grip on the bleeding obvious,

"By the time Google is regulated, it will be too late, is my ultimate feeling. It's growing too fast for that so I think the market's going to do what the market's going to do."

You don't say! Markets are funny that way. And it may seem strange that someone in her position would be totally oblivious to the events of the last twelve or so years, but I have had much direct experience with mainstream broadcasters and can tell you they live in a world all their own. It's just at the junction of the small and large intestine, as demonstrated by this dazzling bit of analysis:

Lighting claimed that companies like Google escaped regulation because the competition authorities considered it too hard to take on.

"I do find it strange that we have broadcast regulation all over the place on the basis that it comes into people's homes, and then we have this other thing called the web that, because it's rather difficult to regulate, we [simply] let it get on with it," said Lighting.

Bad regulators!! Bad, lazy regulators! Can an upward career move to the BBC be far behind for Jane?