the corner office

The world today:

• South African democracy, gotta love it. Jacob Zuma will win, and people will fear for the country's future, and justifiably so. As I've said before though, hopefully he'll be so easily corruptible that big business will pay him handsomely to maintain the status quo. The alternatives aren't pleasant to contemplate.

• So the USA tortured people. Hardly a shocking revelation (bzzt bzzt), but the scandal isn't that it happened, it's that Obama had the audacity (integrity?) to publish the memos. At what point do outraged right-wing Americans stop and ask themselves exactly what values they think they're defending? Waterboard for Jesus! God loves it when non-combatants scream... Hmmm hmm!

  Obama did the right thing and prosecuting the evil people who authorised and encouraged the torture is also the right thing to do. How can any moral person think otherwise?

• Darling's budget can be summarised as 'we are soooooooo fucked'. There's plenty to be annoyed about but the 2k car trade-in annoys me the most because it's just so cruelly arbitrary, and the unintended consequences so patent. Incentivise people to not buy new cars for a decade at a time. How great for the British car industry that'll be!

  I want to know whether Brown and his sorry gang will get to keep their pensions when they get booted. Their incompetence and vote-buying is costing us a lot more money than a bunch of inept bankers ever did.