Some quotes and bits to keep you happy, while I am on holiday.
Football Is Fixed returns to its Daily Format next Tuesday.
Thaksin Shinawatra is spinning his innocence, after being found guilty in the first of six cases standing against him in Thailand. By a 5-4 majority, His Excellency was sentenced in absentia to two years in jail over a corrupt land deal.
His wife was acquitted in a 7-2 verdict.
His Excellency claims that the sentencing is politically motivated.
His narrow 'defeat' and his wife's acquittal might suggest otherwise.
The British government should bear this in mind when decisions are made about extradition.
Richard Scudamore should bear this in mind when he weasels his way to a justification for Shinawatra still being able to hold a 25 % stake in Manchester City.
And, in that Ben Bernanke is brown-nosing his way towards a further three-quarters of a trillion dollars of government handout, the FT suggests that we are having the michael taken: "The US authorities are, perhaps, being kinder to bankers than is politically prudent."
These are not bailouts.
They are handouts.
Banks will not lend to each other while the Toxic Monster is still at large.
Declan Hill has written an excellent book, "The Fix", about how football USED TO be corrupted.
The current template is not to be found within its pages.
Good read though...
"The fixing has destroyed the credibility of these [Asian] leagues. Across the continent, the attendance at matches has collapsed, the FIFA rankings of the teams are declining and so the fans and the bettors have turned their attention to Europe."
While the financial world was imploding, New Labour nipped into spin mode, the standard tactic of bury away the bad news beneath the really really bad news. The Minister for the Police State, Jacqui Smith announced that we should look forward to intercepts on all of our communications as the Deep State seeks to look after our interests by confronting those pesky terrorists.
A couple of points, if Psycho-Blair had not launched his illegal wars, there would be no fear of terror - even Stella Rimington can see that.
Secondly, in a country of getting on for 5 million CCTV cameras, phone-taps, email filtering, internet usage monitoring, would it not make some sense developing equivalent surveillance techniques so that we might prevent a repeat of the scurrilous antisocial behaviours that underpin the banking scandal from ever being repeated again?
My long-dead Grandad: "If you don't tell them, they'll never know."
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
