...debate and pass by a vote of 372-9 this motion on Christmas and Christianity.

So let me see..while we are stuggling with a property price recession, the CIA has been destroying tapes of interrogations of suspects to hide evidence of torture, the budget deficit continues to be out of sight, the US is bogged down in an imperial misadventure in Mesopotamia, global warming is still continuing, evidence continues to build of massive administration malfeasance on multiple fronts...our corageous representatives found time to debate and pass this?
Sheesh. And the House Democrats wonder why the popularity of Congress is hovering around the same level as that of the President?

Congratulations to the following members of Congress who had the common sense and the spine to speak against this egregious waste of legislative time:

Gary Ackerman

Yvette Clarke

Diana DeGette

Alcee Hastings

Barbara Lee

Jim McDermott

Bobby Scott

Pete Stark

Lynn Woolsey

As for the rest of the Congress..you are a waste of space. Remind me, just why did we elect you?

In a move somewhat reminiscent of that by Nick Saban, Bobby Petrino resigned yesterday from his position as head coach of the Atlanta Falcons to become the head coach at the University of Arkansas.
His departure was apparently sudden, first rumored last week, and seemingly discussed Monday between him and Falcons leadership, where he assured the Falcons that he was not leaving, only to resign the following morning.
Petrino's leadership style clearly did not sit well with the Falcons players, especially the older players in the team. When a new coach arrives in an under-achieving franchise, there is always an element of "will he be tough when he needs to be" in the air, the "Big Question" that the coach is expected to answer in the affirmative at some point. Typically, the question needs to be addressed, because under-achieving teams have discipline and committment issues. Players may have grown used to giving less than 100%. Bill Parcells famously began his Cowboys coaching career by catching a player lying about his weight; after asking the player his weight, Parcells put him on the scales and found he was 35 pounds heavier than he claimed. The resulting discussion began with "you sure gained a lot of weight on the walk over to the scales..." but probably became a good deal more pointed real fast...
It seems lthat Petrino tried too hard to be a hard-ass. That approach can work, but it helps immensely if you have a track record of success to back up the tough-guy approach. Bill Parcells, for example, was able to shake up the Dallas Cowboys because (a) they were clearly not succeeding, and (b) he had a track record of success in the NFL. With the Falcons, it is not clear that (a) was necessarily true; the team had expected Michael Vick to be the quarterback, and their plans for 2007 were thrown up in the air by his convictions for dog-fighting. Petrino, with a reputation for developing quarterbacks in college, arrived to find his number one asset gone, with no quality backup available, for the Falcons had traded Matt Schaub to the Houston Texans.
But the biggest issue for Petrino was that he had no NFL track record to buttress his words and deeds. As a result, we witnessed the classic scenario of an inexperienced coach trying too hard to impose his will on the team by being a hard-ass. In this case, Petrino first made an example of DeAngelo Hall, fining him and suspending him after a row, and then he (at the very least) supported the cutting of Grady Jackson, a respected veteran on the team. Jackson is no shrinking violet on the field; I once watched a Green Bay Packers game where Jackson, playing at nose tackle for the Packers, gave as close to an impersonation of an immovable object as I have ever seen in an NFL game. From comments made at the time, the cutting of Jackson was deeply upsetting and demotivating for the other players, and it was never properly explained in any statement I read, which convinces me that it was a power play.
Petrino's disciplinary and player-cutting actions, which might have been tolerated if they came from a Bill Parcells, were in his case almost certainly seen as an abuse of power, and probably convinced his team that he was out of his depth. Certainly on Monday night, the team seemed listless and demotivated in the game against the Saints. Sure, they turned up and played, but they did not play with enough passion and committment.
Much like Bill Parcells towards the end of his last season with the Cowboys, Petrino's body language on Monday night alternated between exasperation and resignation. He probably knew that he had lost the team. Players notably stood around talking among themselves, and there was little interchange with the coach of any sort. In teams where there is a productive relationship between the coach and players, players can be seen talking to the coach, sometimes arguing over tactics and execution - in other words, the passion is there to improve the way the team is playing. I saw none of that interaction last night. Warwick Dunn, a veteran leader in every sense, spent all of his time talking to team-mates, and seemed to be disengaged from events on the field.
In a situation like that, all of the soothing words to Petrino from Falcons management earlier in the day would have fallen on deaf ears. He was emotionally ready to move on. It seems from today's comments that the team agreed. Part of it was due to his preremptory dismissal of the team via a terse departure note, and his equally terse non-communication to his assistants. It seems that Petrino essentially left in a hissy-fit.
The bigger issue for the Falcons going forward is that they need to hire a proven head coach. At this critical time in the history of the franchise, a coach who can talk and lead with authority and experience is essential. A coach of the experience of Bill Cowher or Marty Schottenheimer is required. (Not that I am suggesting that they should be the new coach, but you get the idea). No taking a punt on a co-ordinator or (heaven forbid) another college football heavyweight.
The failure of Bobby Petrino may close the door on college coaches becoming NFL head coaches any time soon. In the past 5 years Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban and Petrino have all tried to jump from college head coaching positions to head coaching positions in the NFL. Only Spurrier lasted more than one season. There are massive differences in the required skill sets, in both directions. The recent sackings of Bill Callahan and Chan Gailey from college head coaching positions show that jumping from the NFL to the college ranks may be equally risky.

Hot on the news of Renault being found guilty of possession of the intellectual property of an other team (McLaren) but escaping punishment (which eerily replicates their 1994 escape from punishment, when, as Benetton, they were found guilty of tampering with their refuelling equipment filters), we have an even more intruiging and potentially explosive development. Back in October, Martin Brundle wrote an article in the Sunday Times where he pointed out (quite correctly in my view) that the FIA's actions against McLaren (they had just been fined $100m and had their Constructor's points removed) could be seen as a witch-hunt against McLaren.
The FIA has now snapped into action. Last week they filed papers in France to sue the Sunday Times for defamation and libel. The intruiging part of the puzzle is the decision to file in France, since the Sunday Times is published in the UK. The reason seems to be that libel and defamation cases in France are heard by judges, not juries, and the burden of proof is lower. The FIA can probably argue that the case can be heard in France, since the Sunday Times can be read over the internet by people living in France. However, it seems to fit with the consensus of lawyers that a libel action by the FIA in the UK would almost certainly fail, on the grounds that Brundle was expressing a good-faith opinion, and the FIA would have to explicitly show why the statements were incorrect and damaging.
The bigger question is why the FIA is now trying to drag the Sunday Times through a foreign court system for remarks that were nowhere near as pointed as they could have been. It is rather amusing and instructive to contrast this litigous approach over a careful expression of opinion by Martin Brundle with the trenchant, juvenile and obnoxious statement by Max Mosely recently, when he called Jackie Stewart "a certified half-wit", and then complained that people seemed to be treating Stewart as if he was "some sort of national treasure". (Hint to Max - perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, while you were acting as Bernie Ecclestone's legal eagle, Jackie was winning 3 World Championships while putting his life on the line).
Grandprix.com has a carefully-worded but wise summary of the current situation here. The extreme effort being expended by the FIA to punish the Sunday Times can only be explained as a desire by the FIA to squash dissent and debate over the recent actions by the FIA as they seek to shut a door that can never fully be closed - the door that allows personnel to take IP data with them if they switch to another F1 team. As Adrian Newey noted recently, this sort of leakage has been occurring for decades, so the FIA's recent attack of zeal over stamping it out rather begs the question of where they have been for all of this time.
Attempts like this by the FIA will backfire. Even if they succeed in punishing the Sunday Times and Martin Brundle, they cannot stop every commentator from pointing out inconsistencies and defects in their processes, not unless they want to expend an enormous amount of money. Libel actions like the one launched against the Sunday Times are simply an abuse of power, and will be seen as such by most observers.
These recent developments are causing me to ask whether I should continue to have any interest in a sport where the governing body appears to be in a bullying mindset. I am seriously debating that issue with myself right now. I have no time for bullies, and right now the FIA seem to be operating in that mode. The result may be that I walk away from any interest in Formula 1.

The verdict on Renault's possession of McLaren intellectual property has been announced - and just I suspected, the FIA has somehow managed to decide that Renault should not be punished.
This is deeply disappointing, but I expected that they would manage to avoid penalizing Renault, since that would almost certainly precipitate Renault's withdrawal from Formula 1.
Here is the short verdict:

An extraordinary meeting of the World Motor Sport Council was held in Monaco on December 6, 2007.
The World Council found Renault F1 to be in breach of article 151c of the International Sporting Code but imposed no penalty.
Detailed reasons for this decision will be issued on December 7, 2007, and a transcript of the proceedings will be published as soon as possible thereafter.

Outcome-wise, this is a repeat of the 1994 hearing where Benetton (later sold to become the Renault team, and also managed by Flavio Briatore) were found guilty of fuel refuelling system modifications, but were not punished.
This verdict convinces me that the FIA governance process has no valid relationship to a consistent, transparent governance system. I have no confidence in their ability to even cross the road without external assistance. I sincerely hope that McLaren and Mercedes sue the FIA in order to get their $100m fine overturned.

As the dust settles on what has been a tempestuous Formula 1 season, one item that I have been pondering is the similarity between the 1986 and 2007 seasons, specifically the way in which a driver from a competing team was able to snatch the drivers' championship at the last race because the dominant team drivers took points off each other.
In 1986, Alain Prost of McLaren won the championship at the last race (in Adelaide) when Nigel Mansell crashed out with tyre failure, and as a result Williams pulled his team-mate Nelson Piquet (who was leading the race at the time) in for a precautionary tyre change. Prost crossed the line first despite his cockpit fuel readout having been stuck on empty for at least 3 laps, and claimed the championship. McLaren had been struggling to keep up with Williams all season; their TAG Turbo V6 was no match for the Honda V6 in either power or fuel consumption.
The Williams team (like McLaren) has always prided itself on providing both drivers with equal equipment, and there has never been a #1 driver at Williams like (say) Michael Schumacher at Benetton and Ferrari, at least not since 1981, when Alan Jones and Carlos Reutemann also took points off each other, allowing a certain Nelson Piquet to win the drivers' championship.
The parallels between the teams and the years are uncanny.
In the Summer of 1985, Williams began to win races with their Honda-powered car, after they had switched to a carbon-composite chassis, and Honda provided an engine that was not an on-off switch. With Keke Rosberg signing at McLaren for 1986 to replace the retiring Niki Lauda, Frank Williams decided to try and sign Nelson Piquet, a two-time world champion (1981 and 1983) who was frustrated by lack of wins at Brabham. He landed Piquet for a reported salary of $3.3m.
The 1986 Williams car soon proved to be the class of winter testing, even though Ayrton Senna would be fast on occasion in the JPS Lotus-Renault.
Piquet would be engineered in 1986 by Frank Dernie, the team's senior race engineer. The original plan was for Nigel Mansell to be engineered by the newly-hired Sergio Rinland. However, Rinland left the team before the start of the season. As a result, Patrick Head himself stepped in to engineer Nigel Mansell's car. Nelson Piquet suddenly found himself competing against a very quick team-mate, who was showing identical qualifying pace, and who was being engineered by the team's technical director, a man of the same nationality. Not surprisingly, Piquet began to become paranoid and the stage was set for nearly 2 years of Piquet complaining about unfair treatment by the team. In 1986, both Williams drivers scored heavily, but took points from each other, and Prost won the title at the final race. It was fortuitous that his team-mate Keke Rosberg had also retired with tyre failure, or Mclaren might have had to impose team orders, since Rosberg had taken the lead early and disappeared into the distance in the race, having at last been given a car that suited his driving style.
Fast forward to 2006, when McLaren signed a two-time world champion (Fernando Alonso) and paired him with a rookie British driver (Lewis Hamilton). Immediately Hamilton was as quick as, if no quicker, than Alonso, and claimed poles and won races, while Ferrari were overshadowed for much of the season. At the end of the season, Hamilton failed to finish high enough in the final race due to gearbox issues, and Alonso was not quick enough in the race to win. The result was a race and championship victory by Kimi Raikkonen. All through the season we witnessed the same sort of complaining by Alonso about unfair treatment and favoritism that I read in 1986 and 1987 from Nelson Piquet.
There are a number of uncanny similarities between the 1986 and 2007 situations. At the end of the day, it seems that Nelson Piquet in 1986 and Fernando Alonso in 2007 both believed that they would be given undisputed #1 status in their teams, and that their team-mates would be compliant number 2 drivers. In both cases, they were dismayed when the team-mates began matching and beating them, and this led to feelings of betrayal and paranoia.

Link: http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns19871.html

..by announcing that McLaren's appeal is inadmissible. Conveniently, it waited to issue the news in order to reduce the media ripples.
This is pretty definitive proof that the FIA's judgement processes bear only a superficial resemblance to any judicial process I have read about. In most legal jurisdictions, if a party to a court action does not have standing, the action cannot go forward. In it's own way, the FIA appears to be saying that McLaren do not have standing to file an appeal. Yet they spent most of a day hearing the whole damn appeal, with dozens of representatives from 4 teams, high-priced lawyers (are there any cheap lawyers in this sort of litigation?) and FIA representatives present. This is absolutely effing bizarre. If McLaren had no standing to file an appeal, the FIA should simply have emailed them and said that. Then this appeal would not have been required.
My conclusion is that the FIA is fast approaching the point where, on matters of enforcement of the Formula 1 regulations, it does not know the difference between its ass and its elbow. This will not impress the investors in the sport. There need to be major changes, and quick.

Link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/16/BUH8TCG24.DTL

If this article is to be believed, people in and around Vacaville CA, an overflow district for the San Francisco Bay area, are reacting to property price recessions the way everybody conditioned to the idea of property as an investment reacts - via a process that begins (and appears, for many people, to be currently stuck in) denial.
These two quotes especially tickled me:

Vacaville, in eastern Solano County, was long an affordable alternative for home buyers who didn't mind a long commute to the inner Bay Area. But that market has changed substantially within months.
Larry St. John, owner of an insurance brokerage, bought a home for more than $900,000 early this year in a new development on the city's northwest side. This weekend, St. John said the builder - DeNova Homes - is planning an auction of more than a dozen similar homes, with starting bids about $300,000 less than what recent buyers paid.
"This is huge, this is our biggest investment," said St. John, 32, who has lived in Solano County his entire life. "I can understand a corporation taking losses to stay in business, but an individual taking a $300,000 hit is not something I have the capacity to do."
As a homeowner in the Bay Area, "every couple of years you have an opportunity to refinance and do some improvements and still have equity," St. John added. "That doesn't happen month to month, but every few years. If you're starting off from a position of negative $300,000, that takes more than a few years to rectify."

Mr. St. John's whole approach seems built on the assumption that a property is like the money tree - a perpetual source of equity extraction. Buy, re-fi, spend, re-fi, spend, re-fi, spend...wash, rinse, repeat. Having been caught in a market slump after he overpaid for a house, he now thinks that it is unfair that the builder of his house is offloading units for $300k less than Larry paid for them.
I am not quite sure what he thinks should happen, but I suspect he would like the builder to be forced to stop selling properties so that he can reduce the size of his loss, or perhaps he thinks he should get some sort of tax credit because his house is now worth less than he paid for it. In other words, like many people who try speculation and get burned, perhaps he wants some sort of bail-out?
Welcome to the wonderful world of speculation and and the concept of accountability, Larry. Remember that small print that most folks ignore, something along the lines of "the value of investments can go down as well as up?". Now remember who signed the papers to buy this house?
I sense nothing more or less than a man trapped by his own overweening sense of entitlement into jumping aboard the house speculation gravy train at the wrong time. To recycle an old saying, he has made his bed, time for him to lie in it.
Here's the final part of the article, which also shows a different sort of denial at work:

Last week, 44 properties were repossessed by lenders in Santa Clara County, according to Richard Calhoun, owner of Creekside Realty in San Jose. If that continues, Calhoun estimates half of all real estate transactions in Santa Clara County could soon be made up foreclosure sales.
"If it gets to that point, lenders are going to start controlling the prices," Calhoun said. "Anyone who says that foreclosures aren't going to impact the Santa Clara housing market is crazy."

Well, Mr. Calhoun got one thing right at the very end...foreclosures will impact the market. However, the first part of his comment shows another classic example of denial. In his world, (or the world he has chosen to explain to others), a shadowy agent is controlling the price of property. In this case, Mr. Calhoun's shadowy agent is "lenders" (who, as everybody knows, are like the baddies in the Christmas pantomime, since they always do bad things, like ask you to repay money that they loaned you...).
The sentence is horseshit. The prices are being controlled by the age-old balance between demand and supply. Because there is no demand, prices have plummeted, and lenders are being stuck with properties that they did not expect to find themselves owning. They are not in the property ownership business, so they are trying to sell the properties...none of this is any mystery to anybody with even a basic grounding in the principles of the capitalist system. No demand, high supply = falling prices. However, because that explanation is abstract, in that it is a systemic issue, and (bad news here) Mr. Calhoun is stuck with being one of the agents in this market forces train-wreck, he has instead chosen to point the finger at a specific group of actors and paint them as the baddies - in this case, the lenders.
All of this hand-wringing and bloviating is highly reminiscent of what I watched unfold in the UK in the late 1960's. At the time the UK was running a balance of payments deficit (we were living beyond our means). This eventually led to a run on the Pound, which forced a devaluation of the currency. The shock was profound...but instead of people saying "aha! Deficit = Pressure on currency = devaluation" the reaction instead was to look for a group to blame. The rationalization that emerged in the political sphere (and which was faithfully transmitted by the media) was that this crisis had been engineered by a shadowy group of financiers named "The Gnomes of Zurich" who were sitting somewhere in smoke-filled rooms gleefully engineering the downfall of the UK. (The term, as explained in this Wikipedia entry, had previously been used at the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956, but was revived for this new crisis).
My tentative conclusion is that none of this verbiage and complaining is at all new. The property market in California is in the process of becoming re-aligned with reality, after a lengthy period where the utilitarian value of a house was overwhelmed by its perceived speculative value, and a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money. They have to find somebody else to blame - it is basic human nature. FOr many of us, when faced with fundamental changes in what we believed to be true, denial is not merely a river in Egypt...

It appears that there is (at best) a mis-communication between Alex Smith, the 49'ers quarterback, and his coach Mike Nolan, and (at worst) some serious violation of the NFL Injury Reporting Guidelines.
Smith has essentially admitted that he is playing hurt. He suffered a separated shoulder earlier in the season, and it is now reported that he has a forearm problem.
I am going to ignore all of the semantic debates about injury reporting. Somebody who Alex Smith will listen to needs to take him to one side, and whisper two words in his ear.
Tim Couch.
Couch, the former number one pick in the draft from 1999, is currently out of football. He left the NFL in 2004 because of multiple issues with his right arm and shoulder. He has had several surgeries on both his shoulder and upper arm, and it is possible that he will never play a down in the NFL again. His arm strength is currently inadequate.
Couch's problems started when he played injured, and his shoulder, rotator cuff and biceps tendon all progessively became degraded and injured.
My fear is that Alex Smith is playing with a non-healed shoulder, which is over-stressing the rest of his arm. If the 49'ers are serious about the long-term health of Alex Smith, they should put him on IR now. They have a backup quarterback named Trent Dilfer who has won a Superbowl. There is nothing to be gained by continuing to play Alex Smith, and if Smith himself does not understand the jeopardy in which he is placing his whole NFL career, somebody else needs to step in and take charge of the situation.

UPDATE - It seems that somebody has taken charge of the situation, since Trent Dilfer will be starting at quarterback on Sunday for the 49'ers, and Alex Smith has publicly admitted that his entire throwing anatomy is nowhere near 100%. If I was the 49'ers management, I would shut him down for the season. There is little to be gained by trying to rush him through a rehab program, and much to be lost. Ask Tim Couch...

UPDATE 2 - Smith has now been placed on injured reserve. The 49'ers finally realized that they should not be expecting him to be back. This was only 4-5 weeks too late.

UDPATE 3 - The 49'ers have hired Mike Martz as the new offensive co-ordinator. This will be interesting...nothing Mike Martz does is boring.

The 2007 Formula 1 drivers' World Championship was decided in dramatic fashion on Sunday in Interlagos, when Kimi Raikkonen won, with Fernando Alonso third and Lewis Hamilton in eighth. The result, improbably, left Raikkonen as the champion.
Or did it?
Less than 2 hours after the race concluded, the stewards found themselves staring at clear evidence that three of the cars finishing in front of Lewis Hamilton (both BMW-Saubers and the Williams of Nico Rosberg) had been refuelled at least once during the race with fuel that was outside of the permitted temperature range (i.e. the fuel was too cold). This is a clear violation of one of the current technical regulations.
The stewards ruled that the cars should not be disqualified. Which is just as well, since that disqualification would have given Lewis Hamilton the drivers' championship and demoted Raikkonen to second place. That change would have torpedoed the waning credibility of the 2007 season. McLaren has appealed the stewards' decision to the FIA, and it seems likely that a special meeting will be convened in Paris to hear the appeal at a later date.
Predictably, the fuel temperature incident has led to yet more vituperation in discussion forums, especially since McLaren have filed an appeal. Ron Dennis has been described in deeply unflattering terms by many commenters, who appear to be of the opinion that McLaren, having been stripped of their Constructors' Championship points and fined a lot of money (exact amount unknown, but it would keep me in Lear Jet flights for the rest of my days), have no basis to complain or appeal. Since McLaren is guilty of industrial espionage, so the commenters argue, they should STFU.
Most of those comments are total horseshit.
Some historical perspective is in order.
In 1994, the Benetton of Jos Verstappen was briefly engulfed in a fire at a refuelling stop during the German Grand Prix in Hockenheim. The cause of the incident was quickly traced to the removal of a filter in the fuelling rig, against the regulations laid down by the FIA. Benetton were summoned to appear in Paris in September. The team's guilt seemed obvious. They had never denied the removal of the filter; instead they changed their story 3 times concerning why it had been removed, and then attempted to undermine the credibility of Intertechnique (the refuelling rig suppliers) by commissioning their own "independent" report which exonerated the team. Under the regulations at the time, Benetton seemed likely to lose all of their points scored in 1994. This would have been rather awkward, since Michael Schumacher of Benetton was in the lead in the championship, and German interest in F1 was booming as a result. A lot of money was poised to flow into F1 from Germany.
Amazingly, Benetton did not lose any points. In one of the great sporting administration finagles of all time, the team was found guilty, but their points were not forfeited. This result amazed most onlookers, since the rules seemed to be clear, Benetton had broken them, and the proper punishment was exclusion from the championship.
The significance of this history lesson is: nothing is quite as it superficially seems whenever the FIA is administering justice and enforcing regulations in F1.
Starting at the beginning; the FIA is not a legal body in the sense that it administers motorsport the same way that a court system operates. It is a sporting body. That gives it a lot more leeway than a court system, which has to be seen to be operating according to prevailing legal rules and precedents.
Secondly; top-flight motorsport is horrendously expensive. The simple rule that all top teams, drivers and other players always adhere to; Follow The Money. Any source of cash is not to be spurned. (This goes some way towards explaining why some of the sources of money in top-flight motorsport had their origins in businesses that could fairly be described as shady, and why some of the leading practitioners in motorsport often give the impression of being ethically unaware).
Thirdly; any time large sums of money are involved, there are power games. The history of Formula 1 is full of examples of power games, notably the FISA-FOCA "war" in the 1979-82 timeframe, which nearly tore the sport apart at the time. Since many of the leading figures in Formula 1, in addition to being staggeringly, unfuckingbelievably rich, also have massive egos, power games are not only inevitable; it is inevitable that they will be elaborate in a way that makes Machiavelli look like an innocent naif, and will continue over years or even decades, since the amounts of money involved result in long decision timeframes and the need for players to stay in the game a long time to recover their investment.
Putting those three realities together, what does the history of FIA administration tell us? Here are some fairly-well established facts:

1. Bernie Ecclestone is THE power-broker in Formula 1, and will be until they nail his coffin lid shut.
2. Max Moseley is a supreme politician in the sense of being able to navigate through competing interests while advancing his own interests and those of the FIA. Since Formula 1 is at the apex of world-wide motorsport, anything that impacts Formula 1 also impacts the FIA, and by extension, impacts Max Moseley.
3. Because of (1) and (2), Max Moseley and Bernie Ecclestone are intertwined in a way that violates all known variants of the phrase "conflict of interest". They were colleagues for decades, have deeply complementary skills (Moseley, the urbane multi-lingual political player, Ecclestone the cunning schemer) and have shared interests in keeping Formula 1 at the pinnacle of world motorsport.
4. All public pronouncements by figures associated with Formula 1 should never be taken at face value (or anything remotely approaching face value). They are usually part of some power or influence game.

Taking those facts into account, it is incredibly naive of any observer of F1 to expect that any FIA action taken to enforce Formula 1 rules will always be consistent, properly formulated, and applied consistently. Most of the rantings on discussion forums and bulletin boards, bluntly, are missing this reality altogether. They are fixated on personalities, often based on national, driver or team allegiances, and assume that everything is black-and-white, and that there is some legal "gold standard" against which all FIA enforcement actions can be positively measured.

Let us look at some of the current realities in Formula 1, and see how they might affect any distribution of "justice" by the FIA:

1. Ferrari is not a major motor car manufacturer (it cannot produce too many Ferraris or it will reduce its brand equity), and has to fund its F1 program via sponsorship income, and other motorsport-related revenues, even though it is owned by Fiat. (Fiat is not in the best of financial health as a car company). As part of this strategy, Ferrari supplies engines to 2 other F1 teams (Spyker and Toro Rosso). It also has just concluded a deal to supply engines and chassis to the GP2 series in the future. All of these activities mean that Ferrari has a very heavy exposure to the health of Formula 1, and that it also has a lot of influence by virtue of its position as an engine supplier.
2. Ron Dennis and Max Moseley do not have a good relationship. By all accounts, they have clashed in the past, and both men see the other as rivals.
3. Williams is currently refusing to accept a re-wording of the Concorde Agreement which would permit customer cars, arguing that the involvement of the FIA is invalid; their argument is that the FIA has no role in writing such rules, which should be the province of the teams. This is preventing new entrants (i.e. ProDrive) from entering F1 starting in 2008, and is also causing pain for the current "customer" teams of Toro Rosso and Super Aguri, since they risk having their proposed 2008 cars declared ineligible. Jackie Stewart is a key figure in the Williams team, since he is associated with RBS, a lead sponsor for Williams.

Put all of these items above together, and the recent events in F1 that have impacted the 2007 Championships no longer seem like aberrations, and instead form part of the complex and ever-unfolding F1 power games.
For example, Max Moseley's outburst where he described Jackie Stewart as "a certified half-wit" was quite possibly not uttered because Moseley and Stewart have an antagonism dating back to the 1970's when Stewart campaigned for better driver safety. The outburst may be Max Moseley's way of undermining Stewart inside the Williams team, in order to make Williams more accomodating of regulation changes to permit customer cars. Moseley knows that he cannot pick on Frank Williams, since picking on a quadriplegic team owner will result in a public firestorm. Instead he is picking on one of the leading team figures. I refuse to believe that Moseley's outburst against Stewart was motivated by old grudges. Moseley is far too smart to do that.
The FIA decision to exclude McLaren from the 2007 Constructor's Championship was motivated partly by the desire to support Ferrari, which has (inevitably) suffered from the retirement of Michael Schumacher. Ferrari is the single most charismatic team in F1; no other team comes close. A Ferrari "gift" of the 2007 Championships will immensely help the finances in Maranello.
McLaren's appeal of the Brazil stewards' decision is part of the power game being played out over it's $100m fine. The fine is netted off against the revenues that McLaren would have earned in the Constructors' Championship this season from prize monies. Finishing higher at Interlagos will increase those notional revenues, thus reducing the size of the cheque that McLaren will have to send to the FIA. It also helps that launching an appeal may force the FIA to have to hold another special hearing, which will once again require Max Moseley to deploy his charm and persuasive abilities, if he wants to avoid upsetting the Ferrari championships.

Those who want to understand how the FIA approaches justice should read this article, which explains in detail how they went about ensuring that a clear breach of the technical regulations by Benetton did not result in the exclusion of that team from the 1994 Championship, because the financial consequences were too horrible for Bernie Ecclestone to contemplate.
Within F1, nothing is as straightforward as it seems.

Link: http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns19856.html

...continues to deepen, with Renault due to appear before the WMSC in December to answer charges that look like a cross between the passing of IP data from Ferrari to Toyota in 2002, and the passing of the now-infamous 780 page design dossier from Ferrari to McLaren's chief designer Mike Coughlan in 2007.
Now it seems that Bernie Ecclestone held a meeting with all of the teams in Formula 1 not impacted by the current investigations (i.e. everybody except for Ferrari, McLaren and Renault). It is not clear what the purpose or outcome of the meeting was, but given the timing and the subject matter, it would have been interesting to have been a fly on the wall...
The FIA is currently caught between a rock and a hard place. If it follows the same punishment model for Renault, it is possible that Renault will withdraw from Formula 1, which would not only impact the Renault team, but also Red Bull Racing, who use Renault engines. If it imposes a lesser punishment on Renault, there will be a firestorm of allegations of inconsistency, and fans, media and sponsors may start to shy away from the sport. Large corporations demand at least the public appearance of fairness and transparency, and fans will not want to watch a sport if they suspect that the results are being influenced via nefarious behind-the-scenes machinations.
This thoughtful article at grandprix.com offers another way out of the mess, via a tactical retreat by the FIA from their original punishment of McLaren.
I agree with the conclusions of the article that the current approach to enforcing the regulations in Formula 1 is neither effective or positive for the sport. The "smoke filled room" approach to governance will not work with the current maturity and funding levels. If the governannce approach is not overhauled, the sport could collapse back to much lower levels of funding and public interest. The current succession of investigations is in danger of converting Formula 1 to a cross between a soap opera and a laughting-stock. The sport is current taking up media bandwidth for all the wrong reasons.