Five days left in the eight year illegal occupation of the White House

Washington D.C.--And so, it's ending, and not with a whimper (except from Georgie boy). President-elect Barack Obama is going to do his darndest not to prosecute these bastards, trying to make us think that Congress can't do likewise. It's all just bait-and-switch, the oldest game there is aside from the shell game.

Demand, demand, demand the appointment of a Special Prosecutor armed with subpoena power and the immense resources that it's going to take to unravel the mess left by yet another criminally-inept Republican presidential administration and era.

This will happen again otherwise--if we're even able to emerge from this man-made economic crisis intact. Indeed, we all own our little part of this mess, but George W. Bush and his administration and a Republican Congress created the lion's share of the corporate crime wave we've been living under since 2000. Truth be known, it's been much longer in duration, stretching-back decades. That's how big this is, it's literally the end of an era and possibly of an order.

My hunch is that Obama and the rest of them in Washington are going to try to do things as they've always done, attempting to save a rotten barrel. When that doesn't work, they're going to keep fighting the reality that market capitalism is really and truly over, waste valuable time they could be finding constructive solutions, and drive us further down into a mess that's going to dwarf the Great Depression. Congress will also lend-a-hand in creating this catastrophe.

But there's a alternative: mount a massive and aggressive prosecution on the soon-to-be former Bush II administration's most obvious offenders. There must also be the formation of prosecution units to take-on Wall Street offenders, and there must be prosecutions, there must be accountability. No accountability means no renewal of faith in the financial and political system, and the evidence criminality will be found where it ran riot in government under the Republicans and in the private sector.

But we have to quit fooling ourselves. It's also going to be found in the ranks of Congress itself, the reason why there's no will to prosecute the outgoing Bush II administration. They were complicit with them, and they compromised themselves.

If President-elect Obama is the political hack that I suspect he is, he's in as much trouble as Alberto Gonzales already, which is saying a lot considering the fact that no law firm in North America will hire the disgraced former Attorney General. We don't need any repeats from the last eight years, America cannot survive it and remain America. Hope is great, but false hope is just cynicism by another name.

O.J. Simpson's memorabilia was his and yet not his...

WWW--This trial has been very interesting to me for a number of reasons. My brother has worked for over a decade in advertising and had the misfortune of meeting a lot of Northern Indiana businessmen over the years (hint: car dealers think "Top Gun" is the "greatest film ever made"--wrong again).

As one might vividly imagine, most of them are antisocial turds with less personality than a houseplant, but a few of them actually wanted to chum it up with "the help," so my brother had to oblige their overinflated egos.

One of these clowns was a very big O.J. fan. He took my brother down into the basement den of his very expensive and poorly-designed-and-built clapboard where there was a wall literally covered with sports memorabilia.

And there it was, it even had its own display-nook: O.J.'s 1968 Heisman trophy.

"He lets me keep it for him, and I give him money every once in a while," he said (I'm paraphrasing now, isn't it thrilling?). This was within the last eight years. Yeah, it's crazy, but these things just have a way of coming to me and not the reverse, a kind of "Jungian" latticework of coincidence that's plagued my life from its inception.

What is there to gather from this? That O.J. has such an enormous ego that in his mind he wasn't "selling" anything, but "allowing" fans to "rent" his memorabilia in return for an audience with him, to be on his "good" side. I won't even go into what it must have been like to have been on his "bad" side, that's now a foregone conclusion after this trial.

In 1999, O.J.'s Heisman was sold to a Philadelphia--that wonderful town Poe loved so much--businessman named Tom Kreissman, except that he went and sold it to the man who O.J. and his co-conspirators attacked in a Vegas hotel, Alfred Beardsley:

Nevertheless, it’s believed that he bought the 1968 Heisman trophy -- the first and maybe only one ever to be auctioned — from the winner of that 1999 sale. The trophy was originally sold to Tom Kreissman of Philadelphia at Butterfield’s auction house on Sunset Boulevard for $230,000. But a source at Butterfield’s says Kreissman returned and sold it a couple of years later. It’s thought that Beardsley was the buyer. ("O.J. Simpson's 'Victim' Part of a Long-Running Feud," Foxnews.com, 09.20.2007)

And why wouldn't Beardsley have "sold" or rented the thing out to raise money for himself and "the Juice"? Why not?

The unintelligent businessman told my brother, "I went to USC when O.J. was playing there, I've known him since then," and "I'm actually borrowing it from another collector." He exhaled on and on, painting a scenario in which all of these successful old school fans of O.J.'s were shuffling these artifacts around to hide them from the Goldman and Brown families who were doing their best to track down all of the assets he was selling off to pay them from the 1996 civil suit ruling ($33 million).

Hey, who says once something's sold that it's really "sold"?

Over time, O.J. had a number of folks around him who felt he "owed" them money, and the trophy changed hands several times before 1999, and likely afterward:

The man Simpson accused of stealing the items from him is Mike Gilbert, another one-time associate. As Simpson's licensing agent in the late 1990s, Gilbert admitted snatching Simpson's Heisman Trophy and other items from his client's Brentwood home as payment for money he said was owed to him. He later turned the items over to authorities, save the trophy's nameplate.

Gilbert swore he'd go to jail before turning the nameplate over to the Goldman family, which was trying to collect on the $33.5 million civil judgment won against Simpson. Gilbert later surrendered it under court order. ("O.J.'s Vegas Accuser Says He Wants Charges Dropped," Foxnews.com, 09.15.2008)

Yeah, real class act folks there. After 1999, the trail appears to grow cold, wikianswers-be-damned, the Wikiuniverse almost never being correct about anything.

I think that the Goldmans had a good idea this kind of shell game (aka "three card monty") was going on with wealthy fans of O.J., a constant shifting of the memorabilia around with a rental fee and lots of broken promises. Egomaniacs like Simpson can convince themselves of almost anything, the same applying to pea-brained American businessmen with penis envy.

My feeling is that these people aren't mere fans, but criminals--all of the players involved in ferring around O.J.'s memorabilia. Beardsley is just a flash point. I hope that this verdict smokes the rest of them out and that they pay the price of aiding a vile murderer simply because they love football too much. To these clowns, the murders don't even matter--only football does. What a pathetic bunch. I wouldn't use that Heisman for a doorstop, although it would make a great lighter/ashtray combination with a few modifications.

None of it matters, the game is over, finally, at long last. But I still have to wonder: where's O.J.'s 1968 Heisman...and why would anyone in their right mind want it? They may as well buy one of those lousy John Wayne Gacy oil-paintings while they're at it.

"O.J. Simpson's 'Victim' Part of a Long-Running Feud," Foxnews.com, 09.20.2007: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297400,00.html

"O.J.'s Vegas Accuser Says He Wants Charges Dropped," Foxnews.com, 09.15.2008: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296934,00.html