flyingrodent

Well, you'd better hope for some cracking Bosman deals then, because your player budget is going to look diddy in the extreme. And I have to point out that even the best teams in the works have to deal with patches of bad form, unlucky runs of injuries, unrest in the dressing room and other unforeseeables. Given that and the vast financial gulf there is and will be between us - probably the most extreme in Scottish football since Souness was your manager - I can't for the life of me see why you'd be confident of second place, far less of worrying us.

Really? You'll be doing it with cash earned from the Championship, and likely with players picked off other SPL sides. While I don't doubt Rangers will be able to buy some of the best players the SPL has to offer, I don't see how this translates into a guaranteed second place finish, even if we assume that it'll all be plain sailing for you between now and then.

Even assuming you're right about Celtic, are you aware that no bank will be willing to lend you anything like the gigantic fvckloads of cash that helped you win titles in the 00s?Even if your club was a rock-solid investment, the climate has utterly changed from ten years ago. Even if Celtic suffer badly in transfers and European competition, they're not going to be *a wee bit* richer than you. They're going to be *a lot* richer than you. This is before we consider the fact that we're presuming a straight head to head between the OF when the likelihood is that your setup will be closer to, say, Aberdeen than it will be to the one at Parkhead. ETA: also worth mentioning that Celtic wouldn't say they "didn't strengthen when in a position of power" - they'd say that they spent within reasonable boundaries, based on the rewards and limitations at the time. They'd also point out that this is why Celtic are in the top division winning titles and cups, while your lot... Aren't.

While it's true that Celtic are downsizing (and have been for almost a decade), they're still coining it in, in far greater sums than Rangers will. They'll continue doing so for years and even if there won't be £20m cheques wafting in from Uefa every August, it's still going to look like the early 90s in reverse. How exactly are your lot going to counter that, once you finally claw your way back to the top tier? Are you going to buy two Ian Blacks for every one that Celtic don't?

Without wanting to sound triumphalist about it, Celtic made almost enough money last year on player sales and European games to buy New Rangers outright - club, company, stadium, staff. Even if Celtic arse up their European campaigns for the next five years, they're still going to out-earn you by maybe five times, annually. The financial gulf between the two will likely be even greater than the one that existed when Celtic were teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Given that this is the case, what is it that makes you think Rangers will be winning the title any time soon? Do you think some new sugar daddy is going to plough cash into the team, or is Jesus Himself going to step in with a miracle or two to help out?

No doubt Charles Green will tell us all the unvarnished truth, eh? And just look at this - of all the scandals and chicanery and scams of the last couple of years, the one that strikes you as *really* outrageous is... The one that had no real world effect whatsoever! Bless.

Well, you can imagine what would happen if there was a good reason to believe Celtic's PR men were having cozy chats with the hacks about how to make the Rangers look bad, can't you?You'd hear the shrieks on the other side of the planet and nobody would ever, ever be allowed to forget it.

Unpossible! Everybody knows that the mhedia are mind-controlled by the Celtic CEO and hate Rangers. If that's not the case, why would "mhedia" have an H in it? QED.

To be fair, they're clearly very interested in finding out about how everything was Craig Whyte's fault; about all the shenanigans at the SPL & SFA, and maybe how Peter Lawell is pulling the strings with his amazing superpowers. It's all the other stuff they're not interested in. If they were *literally* shooting messengers rather than metaphorically, it'd be a bloodbath.

Not so far, at any rate. Mind, the point here isn't "are these plainly crooked activties legal", since they effectively are at present. It was "how come these plainly crooked activities are legal, yet this one far less serious (and potentially public-spirited) activity definitely isn't?". To be fair, it's probably a question for a wanky politics forum, rather than a football one.

Bullshit is a crime, if you bullshit the DSS or a bank or a copper but not, it seems, if you bullshit the taxman, and Maybe it's not more police or taxmen we need, but fewer crooks?

Well, 1) Whether they were a "sham" in law or not, they were quite plainly bullshit of the first order, so transparently that even the dopiest football fan could spot it, and 2) I'd say that this implies we *probably do* need more police.

I should probably remind folk here that laws don't grow organically in cabbage patches, perfect and natural, but are crafted and redrafted by human beings with specific reasons in mind. Knowing that as we all do, it surely tells us something that indulging in back-breaking contortions to avoid tax and deliberately obstructing justice can be legal, while publishing some emails is so flagrantly against the law that the cops will bust you at the first whiff. It's almost as if the law was drafted in the interests of wealthy crooks, rather than the man in the street, would be my interpretation.

God, alright then... Doesn't it strike you as odd that out of the three following activities, only one will result in the coppers slapping you in handcuffs? 1) Pretending massive cash payments that never need repaying are "loans" in an effort to dodge huge sums of tax *as part of a legal tax avoidance scheme* 2) Deliberately doing everything within your power to obstruct the authorities from investigating your *legal tax avoidance scheme* and 3) Making private business emails public? After all, 1&2 are things that only wealthy people can do, whereas 3 is an option open to everyone. So isn't it weird that 3 is the only one that will bring PC Plod rushing to your front door to arrest you? And that being the case, are there any lessons we should draw about the governance of the UK?

And, let's imagine for a moment that we're not talking about a football club, so we can be a bit less partisan about it. Let's imagine this is Tesco, or Vodafone, or Scottish Power. What does it tell us about criminal law, if 1) the cops will sit on their hands if you evade vast tax payments by pretending that massive cash gifts that never have to be paid are "loans"; 2) the cops won't intervene if you actively obstruct the tax authorities to conceal this, but 3) if you divulge private business emails, the cops will be at your door with handcuffs? After all, not one of the folk on this thread will ever be able to make use of multimillion pound tax dodges. None of us will ever obstruct HMRC. But it's conceivable that at least one of us might want to blow the whistle on a dodgy employer at some point. Isn't that odd, that you get arrested for one of those activities but not the others? Kind of makes you wonder who, exactly, business law is designed to protect, I reckon.

Christ on a stick, this is looking less like "shooting the messenger" than it is a genocide of deliverymen. It's like they have a firing squad working round the clock, and the penalty for driving a DHL van is death.

Not even I expected you to be dense enough to come back with that response.

Surely another world record broken, there.

I reckon McCoist got hungry for sausages on the way to a game and fired up a disposable barbecue on the back seat.

Another crushing victory for the world's most successful extinct club. Worried About Transport Pyrotechnics?

For every five team buses New Rangers buy, Celtic should buy ten.

I see. So in many ways, it's the folk who *weren't* attacking the police - and indeed weren't even present - who are to blame for the violence.

While it's certainly true that both sides have bigots and idiots, it's not really relevant in this particular instance. There really isn't any useful comparison to be made between drunken, aggressive thugs fighting with police and folk who are peacefully minding their own business.

Though when you see stuff like that, you do have to admire the giant, titanium testicles on folk who come on P&B to tell us how harmless it all is.

It's the hanging man in a tracksuit that really makes you feel the legislative power of the historic parliamentary settlement, isn't it?Ah, celebrations of modern democracy. They're so bracingly hate-filled and religiously targeted, aren't they?