The Chronicle’s Claudia Feldman reports on the logistical challenge of accomodating the overflow of media representatives and spectators during the upcoming trial of former key Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Inasmuch as U.S. District Judge Sim Lake’s courtroom will only accomodate 30 spaces for media, the District Clerk has arranged for a simulcast room at the courthouse that will provide another 120 seats on a first-come basis. The article notes that gibberish from certain of the media has already begun, perhaps best reflected by a BBC reporter’s over-the-top assessment of the case:

“Enron made the ground shake. This was the granddaddy of corporate scandals ó the one that made us doubt what we were being told as investors, the one that made us look at corporations in a whole new light.”

My sense is that the BBC needs to work on its story line a bit. That whole “corporations are evil” thing is so “1980’s/Gordon Gekko,” don’t you think?
Meanwhile, the Chronicle’s Mary Flood reports that the Lay-Skilling defense team are taking an interlocutory appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans of Judge Lake’s most recent order denying the defense’s request for a change of venue for the upcoming trial. Inasmuch as the Fifth Circuit will evaluate the appeal under the extremely difficult-to-meet standard of whether Judge Lake abused his discretion in denying the change-of-venue request, the interlocutory appeal is almost a sure loser.
Finally, the NY Times Kurt Eichenwald — whose Conspiracy of Fools (Broadway 2005) remains the best book written to date about the Enron scandal — weighs in with colleague Alexei Barrionuevo in setting the stage for the trial, which includes the following insight into the Enron Task Force’s ever-shifting theory of the case:

The government’s case is built not so much on showing that Enron was destroyed by fraud, but rather on showing that fraud, including the suspected deceptions by Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling, prevented the marketplace from knowing how badly things were going inside the company.