With great success comes great responsibility and, at least in Google’s case, incredible scrutiny. Governments the world over are licking their chops to take a swipe at the Internet giant (let’s all agree to stop calling them the search giant since they are much more these days) and it creates some very odd situations.

Yesterday a couple of those particular situations surfaced and are worth examination. First, the interesting double life of Senator Al Franken as it relates to Google. Franken (MN –D) is a member of the antitrust committee that is looking into claims of monopolistic blah blah blah against Google. In the recent hearings in fact he gave Google’s CSO (Chief Speaking Officer) Eric Schmidt a dressing down. Made himself look real tough, huh?

There are rumors that Jerry Yang is stepping in to fill the leadership void that exists after Carol Bartz’s ouster from the CEO spot. Granted, that is not a particularly large void to fill since it is the conclusion of most is that the Bartz years weren’t exactly the salad days of Yahoo. But Jerry Yang stepping back in?

Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Look at the picture below which is from July of 2008 and the ensuing caption fun we had with it. The embattled Jerry Yang was seated at a table with two guys (Brin and Page) who were (and still are) 180 degrees in the other direction (in other words, experiencing continued success with their company).