Whoever becomes Labor leader, they will still be beholden to the unions, the factions, the faceless men and the bitter personal divisions that paralysed the previous Parliament.
Some industry people I spoke to off-record insisted there were serious personal divisions, and weirdly the way the boys are arrayed on the couch today happens to correspond to what I've heard.
Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and chairman of the Finance Committee, said the political — and often personal — divisions that now characterize the Senate were epitomized by the empty tables in the senators' private dining room, a place where members of both parties used to break bread.
But in a chapter entitled "A House Divided" he details bitter and personal divisions between the military and the White House over Afghanistan that can hardly be construed as success for a man who was in a position to prevent, or at least ease, them.
Yahoo does not disclose financial statistics of its Personals division, but Match.com has begun to generate positive cash flow.
The online personals business has been dominated for the last two years by Match.com, which is owned by InterActiveCorp, and the Personals division of Yahoo Inc. Lately, MatchNet, a Los Angeles company listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, has been quickly gaining ground.
Yahoo promoted the service heavily on its home page at the end of the year with good results, according to Mark Hull, the director of Yahoo's community services, who heads the personals division.
"The U.K. stores may be growing slightly slower than the others, but Tesco has a personal finance division and international division that the others don't have that are doing very well," said Chris Hogbin, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein in London who has an outperform rating on Tesco's shares and a target price of 4.50 pounds ($7.40).
Lenovo, the Chinese electronics company, successfully acquired I.B.M.'s personal computer division in 2004, in part to help establish itself on the world stage.
Acosta retorted: "I stayed away from (the contract negotiations) with a 10-foot pole". He added that the personal banking division for which he works is separate from the investment division that sought the contract.
