"Devastating to the prosecution’s case was Mr. Fuhrman’s turn as a witness — specifically his repeated past use of a racial epithet that he initially denied having uttered."

"That denial was shown to be untrue when the Simpson defense team introduced audiotapes of him using the word dozens of times. Mr. Fuhrman then acknowledged having used such language, but said it was in the context of creating a screenplay that he hoped would become a movie. Other trial witnesses testified that Mr. Fuhrman had indeed used the word in earnest; one of them recalled his having said that if it were up to him, Black people 'would be gathered together and burned.' On the tapes, he was heard saying that there were police officers who 'would just love to take certain people and just take them to the alley and just blow their brains out.'"

From "Mark Fuhrman, Flawed Witness in O.J. Simpson Trial, Dies at 74/A Los Angeles police detective, he was discredited during Mr. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial by defense lawyers who pointed to his past use of racist language" (NYT).

"I think in the barbershops today, Black people are saying, 'he got away with it, but the police got away with killing a lot more of us.' That’s the mentality."

Said politics professor James Lance Taylor, quoted in "What O.J. Simpson meant to Black America" (WaPo).

Taylor... remembers the day that Simpson led police on a car chase and how tens of thousands of people, including many White people, lined the streets and highways yelling, “Go, O.J., Go.”... 

Local police prepared for riots if Simpson was convicted, Taylor said. “But Black people didn’t love O.J. like that. This wasn’t about O.J. the person,” he said. “O.J. was just an extension of the general polarization between Black America and law enforcement.”

“The sympathy for O.J. is not as deep as we think it is” in the Black community, Taylor said.

O.J. Simpson has died.

Here's the NYT obituary, "O.J. Simpson, Athlete Whose Trial Riveted the Nation, Dies at 76/He ran to football fame on the field and made fortunes in movies. Then a trial in which he was charged with killing his former wife and her friend changed everything" (free access link).

They have a comment section opened over there. No comments yet.

What can we talk about here? Maybe: Where were you when the verdict was announced? I was on campus, in a room full of students. Everyone focused on one little TV, and when the verdict came in, many black students leapt out of their chairs and cheered. The rest of the crowd sat in stunned silence. I left the building, and as I was walking down the sidewalk on Bascom Hill, a young man on a bicycle coasted by, chanting "Not guilty! Not guilty! Not guilty!" It was a solo celebration. Or did he fancy himself the town crier?

ADDED: The third-highest-rated comment over at the NYT is: "He now stands before a Judge who can’t be swayed or swindled by a clever defense attorney."

"Well, that game's over! 74 years is enough of that!"

Announces Meade, channeling the mindset of Gallup, after reading "Did Gallup End 'Most Admired' 74-Year Polling Tradition to Avoid Trump Placing First?"

Yes, the admiration of human beings is a dangerous business. Why not back off? I remember when The Ladies Home Journal used to produce lists of the 10 "favorite heroes and heroines" of boys and girls, something I blogged about back in 2005, with a photograph from my copy of the 1977 best-seller "The Book of Lists":

Henry Kissinger! And yet:

The first page of "The Book of Lists" is a set of seven lists of "The Most Hated and Feared Persons in History" for the years 1970-1976. Hitler comes in Number 1 for all the years except 1972 and 1973, when Nixon comes in first! In fact, 1972 was a good year for Hitler, when he made it all the way down to fourth place. Idi Amin and Mao Tse-tung were, along with Nixon, more hated and feared. Satan was in fifth place that year. Amusingly, by 1976, Nixon is off the five-person list altogether, and Jimmy Carter is on, tied for fourth place with Count Dracula.

How could Nixon be worse than Hitler? And yet he was. Things near in time seem more important. How will Trump look as he fades into the distance? But I'm getting ahead of myself, because I don't know if he's in the process of fading right now or the process of bouncing back. He is very bouncy.

Scroll past the first minute to skip the bad new stuff and get to the good old stuff.

"In his later years, however, he spoke and wrote at length not only about his belief in God but also, with more reluctance, about his opposition to abortion."

"('I don’t like saying it because it’s unpopular,' he said on Dennis Miller’s radio program.)... His comedy was remarkably free of malice, and in recent years it was marked by startling displays of mercy and humility.... By the end of his life, Mr. Macdonald seemed to have abandoned even his well-known animus against O.J. Simpson. 'All he’s guilty of to me,' he said on a Comedy Central program in 2019, was of being 'the greatest rusher in the history of the N.F.L. Maybe I was the greatest rusher — to judgment.'... Perhaps the most obviously Christian element of Mr. Macdonald’s legacy was his quiet acceptance of what we now know were nine years of cancer, from which he died without acknowledging his illness in public.... Unlike secular ethical systems — stoicism, for example — Christianity almost uniquely invites its adherents to find value in suffering because it allows us to unite ourselves with Christ in his Crucifixion.... In the early centuries of the church, Christians were mocked by their pagan fellow citizens for a kind of blithe silliness that reminded them of drunkards. Even in his final years of pain, Mr. Macdonald, too, exhibited an almost Falstaffian joie de vivre. 'At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter,' he told his Twitter followers in 2018. 'How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin.'"

From "Norm Macdonald’s Comedy Was Quite Christian" by Matthew Walther (NYT).

"I do not in any way, shape, or form condone any harm done by one human being to another. I have also lived long enough to believe in the power of forgiveness..."

"... second chances, and offering a human being a path to redemption. HOW TO BEAT TRUMP is an important, thoughtful book, and I hope everyone has a chance to read it."

Said Judith Regan, head of the publishing company Regan Arts, quoted in "Accused Serial Sexual Harasser Mark Halperin Signs ‘Trump’ Book Deal" (New York Magazine).

Regan's name is vaguely familiar. From her Wikipedia page:

In 2006, Fox announced that Regan had interviewed O.J. Simpson, during which Simpson "confessed" to the 1994 murders of which he had been acquitted. The so-called confession was to air on the Fox network and Regan was to publish Simpson's written confession as a book entitled If I Did It. After harsh criticism, News Corporation cancelled both the book and the interview with Simpson that was to air on the Fox Network. The book went on to be published and became a #1 bestseller. News Corp. fired Regan and Regan sued and won a reported $10 million.

I... believe in the power of forgiveness, second chances, and... a path to redemption...

A sampling of Twitter responses to the Halperin book announcement:

“The new accusations from the four women include that Halperin masturbated in front of an ABC News employee in his office and that he violently threw another woman against a restaurant window“ https://t.co/Kaie9uZzmJ https://t.co/eNY2AgDCaw

— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) August 18, 2019

1. Having a high-profile position in the media, getting a book deal etc, is a privilege, not a right. Mark Halperin not only sexually harassed women (something he has acknowledged), he has been credibly accused of assaulting multiple women. https://t.co/rJfWSLoGoz

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 18, 2019

Can't a man publish a book? Shouldn't we judge it by its substance? Booted out of his job, he found a way to use his skill and be productive. Now, we will have the rectangular object, and why not say it's worth what it's worth? One answer is: A no-name writer wouldn't have gotten this level of publication and publicity if he wrote an equivalent volume of "How to Beat Trump." Halperin is still able to trade on his reputation and that shouldn't be accepted. But the other answer is, let's see the book. Maybe it's a good read. "If I Did It" was a smash hit. And that makes me think... how would you like Halperin's if-I-did-it book about those terrible things he did? Well, he can't do that. O.J. had his acquittal of the crime. The tort suit was over and done — res judicata. Halperin must look outward and find somebody other than himself to execrate. It's just so uncreative to pick Trump to beat on. So tiresome. "How to Beat Trump." It's like they're hoping people will see the book in the bookstore, pick it up, chuckle, say the title, and comically bop their companion on the head with it.

"'I will find your a** and cut you!'/OJ Simpson is accused of sending threatening messages to parody account @KillerOJSimpson on Twitter after urging operator to delete it."

A Daily Mail article about this:

C'mon man lmao OJ playin...DM number 2. He about to "cut" me. #OJSimpson 🤣 pic.twitter.com/UX6z3PfBny

— O.J. Simpson🔪 (@KillerOJSimpson) June 17, 2019

A true threat? The parody OJ guy does repeatedly indicate that he finds it funny. He also says he only has about 300 followers, and he's got more than 2,500 now. That is, OJ (assuming that's really OJ) is boosting the visibility of the parody account he's trying to get rid of. Another variation on the Streisand effect.

The Twitter account (used in the messaging) is the account that has been in the news and which has video of OJ talking about how he's going to use Twitter:

Thanks to all my new followers. Love learning how to use Twitter. pic.twitter.com/J4JnN59yKl

— O.J. Simpson (@TheRealOJ32) June 16, 2019

He's trying to seem super-cheerful, but nearly everything he says cuts two ways. Cuts. He wants to hold other people accountable...

Sacha Baron Cohen show ended its season without ever using his encounter with Sarah Palin.

The Daily Beast reports:

Despite Showtime’s attempts to tamp down expectations, it seemed inevitable that Baron Cohen would save Palin’s sit-down interview with Dr. Billy Wayne Ruddick, PhD for the seventh and final episode this Sunday. But it was nowhere to be found, perhaps for legal reasons or simply because the comedian just didn’t think it was good enough.

Instead the finale had O.J. Simpson. See if you think was worth doing:

Watch O.J. Simpson high-five @SachaBaronCohen after he makes a joke about murdering his girlfriend on the #WhoIsAmerica finale https://t.co/DfnzmTBKq4 pic.twitter.com/cEoZM2k5C5

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) August 27, 2018

IN THE COMMENTS: Darrell gives Cohen the joke he deserves: "It would have been funny if OJ stabbed HIM seventeen times."

"After it was reported that the suspect who opened fire at YouTube headquarters was a woman, the network's coverage turned to speculation of 'love triangles' and possible relationships."

Hollywood Reporter documents the criticism on Twitter:

"Love the @cnnbrk reporter's conjecture, once he found out the #youtube shooter was female, that the shooting was due to a #lovetriangle. Yes, and she was probably having her period too."

"CNN tees up a theory out of nowhere that the shooting must be a love triangle because the shooter was a woman. turning on Cartoon Network."

"I'm not sure why but hearing someone on @CNN say a female shooter might have to do with a 'love triangle' really pisses me off. Cuz she can't just be batshit like other fucking shooters?"

"@CNN Why did the analyst jump to the #lovetriangle motive? Because shooter was woman? Seems like a sexist jump. Never heard of that motive for other mass shootings."

"Of course since the YouTube shooter is a woman, terms like "crime of passion" & "love triangle" are already being used. Stop spinning webs."

Etc. etc.

Is there some corresponding thing on Fox News where when the name of the shooter came out — Nasim Aghdam — they were talking about Islamic terrorism? If not, Fox wins in the ongoing struggle to back off from the "fake news."

The now-dead lady seems to have been an animal-rights/PETA-type person who got mad at YouTube for affecting the income stream from her channel, which looked like this:



ADDED: I had the "murder" tag on this post, but the only person who died (so far, at least) is Aghdam. So the right tag is "suicide."

ALSO: I don't normally watch the news on TV, and this is why. I happened to sit through a couple hours of the YouTube story yesterday, because Meade turned it on, and I was in a nearby chair, reading on my iPad. I could have gone somewhere else to read, but I chose not to. The real news that was available during that time period was readable in less than one minute, so what was all that time on TV for? Well, I know what it's for for them. They have to fill their time, and they want to rope us in with the feeling that we're watching something happening live. It's O.J. Simpson in the white Ford Bronco, driving down the freeway forever. Oh! Maybe something's about to happen! Maybe O.J. will jump out of the car and blow his brains out on live TV! Don't want to miss that like I missed Jack Ruby darting in from the right-hand corner of the screen and blasting Lee Harvey Oswald in the stomach. Must monitor the dead time because it might suddenly spring to life... with death!!!

When Courtney Love was asked, in 2005, "Do you have any advice for a young girl moving to Hollywood?"

She said "I’ll get libeled if I say it. If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party in the Four Seasons, don’t go."



Via TMZ.

(By "I’ll get libeled if I say it," she meant "I'll get sued for libel if I say it," and really, "libel" is the wrong word. It should be "slander" or "defamation.")

ADDED: Also at TMZ:

Our Weinstein sources say he knows he's "momentarily toxic" but thinks with a little time, writers and actors will seek him out again because of his track record. He believes -- and probably rightly so -- that TWC exists because of him. He believes he can go back and produce movies, or he can just as easily do it somewhere else.

"Momentarily toxic." What a phrase! But O.J. Simpson has been seen chatting up women in a Las Vegas bar, so maybe cleansing toxins is a thing that happens in America.

ALSO: I wonder what calculations went through Ms. Love's head as paused. She began with a long "Umm" (an umm that I hear as knowing and sarcastic, not as slow-thinking or hesitant). She makes a show of looking over at a companion or adviser (which I see as performance). It's meant to focus the listener's attention, as is the next line: "I’ll get libeled if I say it." We're really ready to hear it now. Then, very quick, conveying the sense of urgency, danger, and being let in on a secret, she says: "If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party in the Four Seasons, don’t go."

Now, what if Love had been sued for libel? First, why would Weinstein sue? He'd be opening the door to discovery about his modus operandi, which had been going on for over a decade at that point. The shit would have hit the fan 12 years before it did. And he would have lost the case for sure. Courtney's line doesn't state a fact about him. She's just advising actresses on what to do IF there's an invitation, and she doesn't say why the actress should not go. Plus, Harvey Weinstein was a public figure and would have had a high burden of proof.

So I wish Weinstein had sued Love because — and maybe at the time Love realized this at the time — the lawsuit would have advanced an important cause. Love has $100+ million and could afford great lawyers. And she'd have been a big feminist hero.

IN THE COMMENTS:Virgil Hilts said:

As a lawyer who dislikes almost all lawyers (the profession where the 98% who are bad apples make the other 2% look bad) I'm upset more lawyers are not being crucified in connection with this. If Weinstein enterprise was like a mafia whose goal was not so much to make $ as to allow HW to assault hundreds of women with impunity, then the attorneys here were the hit men. Its one thing to defend a client who screws up once or twice (say, like OJ!). It's another thing to become the legal oppression grease that makes a young-woman rape machine continue to run like a well-oiled machine over 20-30 years. Any attorneys who helped HW more than twice were complicit IMHO and shouldn't be getting a pass. But they have.

O.J. Simpson and his lawyer caught on a hot microphone talking about how O.J. is like Trump.

They're talking about the author of the book "Guarding the Juice: How O.J. Simpson Became My Prison BFF," who's said things like "O.J. Simpson is not suffering in prison. He's eating well. He's exercising well. He's got a flat screen TV." O.J.'s lawyer compares that to news reports about Trump that say things like "he gets two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, instead of the single scoop for everyone else."

O.J.: "That guy [the author of the book, (Jeffrey Felix)], he's shameless."

O.J.'s lawyer (Malcolm Lavergne): "Kind of like President Trump. Trump gets two scoops. Everyone else gets one."

O.J.: "Oh, I heard that. I heard that."

"Are you humbled by this incarceration?"/"Oh, yes, sure. I wish this would have never happened."

Said O.J. Simpson, winning parole.

He also said: "I’m in no danger to pull a gun on anybody. I’ve never been accused of it. Nobody has ever accused me of pulling any weapon on them."

Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson never accused him. They were dead. But O.J. — chattering away and seemingly under the impression that he is well-loved — didn't seem to see any need to avoid statements that would make us think of those old murders.

Still, he was acquitted of those murders, and they had no role in the parole board's decision (or so they said). He'd served 9 years for armed robbery, and he met the standard and deserved parole. But why didn't he act humbled and remorseful and keep his statements short?

That would have worked better in the effort to obtain parole. It must be that he believes he can be popular. That might seem delusional, as I heard Jeffrey Toobin on CNN call him. But it might not be wrong. From Page 6: “Everyone in town is shopping him a reality show.”

A South Koren court rules that a South Korean temple can keep a statue of Buddha that is known to have been stolen from a Japanese temple.

The statue was stolen by South Koreans in 2012...

But a South Korean temple, Buseoksa, which says the Buddha statue was made there in the 14th century, won a court injunction in 2013 preventing its return until it could be determined whether it had originally been brought to Tsushima legitimately.

The statue, of the Buddha in the lotus position, has been in the government’s custody since then, and on Thursday a district court in Daejeon, a city south of Seoul, ruled that it should be given to Buseoksa...

The temple’s chief monk, the Venerable Wonwoo, hailed the ruling as a milestone that should inspire South Koreans to try to bring home what he claimed were 70,000 ancient Korean artifacts that had been looted and brought to Japan.

So... steal things now, bring them back to their place of origin, and the fact of the known recent theft is overridden by the possibility that they were stolen long ago?

It's not quite that easy. There was some evidence that it was stolen — a document inside the statue showed its time and place of origin but not a record of transferring ownership, Japanese pirates were active at the relevant time and place, and there's some burn damage on the statue, possibly caused by pirates. The South Korean judge said that was good enough to rule that the statue belongs to the South Korean temple.

But what happens now? Venerable Wonwoo seems to be openly encouraging South Koreans to swipe their artifacts back from Japan. He's saying there are 70,000 of them. And yet the modern-day thieves still face criminal charges for theft. Buseoksa got to keep this statue. That doesn't mean the men who lifted it from Japan didn't face criminal charges.

I'm sorry, I just got distracted looking back at the story of why O.J. Simpson is in prison. But that happened in Nevada. I have no idea how a South Korean court would analyze such matters, nor do I have a good grasp of the current political sensibilities in South Korea about Japan.

It was 20 years ago today...

... that we watched a 90-minute TV show that consisted of a white SUV driving on an LA freeway. It was experienced as very exciting because the SUV contained a famous person and we were told that he was pointing a .357 Magnum at his head and maybe we'd get to see it live — a celebrity blowing his head off.

When the lawyer testifies against his client...

... and the client is O.J. Simpson.

[Yale] Galanter hesitated and spoke only after he paused, breathed deeply and was reminded that Simpson had waived attorney-client privilege.

"I'm very uncomfortable doing this," Galanter said.

Via TalkLeft, who says "Things aren't looking good for O.J., even though other lawyers involved in the case have supported O.J.'s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel...").

Obama makes an O.J. Simpson joke and he can't get the name of the SUV right.

"Elmo has been seen in a white Suburban!"

He turned the Ford into a Chevy. Maybe that was intentional, since he saved General Motors and not Ford.

Or did he pick Suburban because he hates suburbia? Stanley Kurtz has written a whole book on that subject, which he summarizes here. Excerpt:

The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.

But jokes about "Sesame Street" characters are so much more fun to play around with right now... la la la... as we run up to the election.

Obama’s former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to the recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning commissions. That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of regional-planning grants into a lever for sweeping social change.

Big Bird... tee hee... Elmo... ha ha... woman with a slashed throat... blood everywhere....

"Having made the greatest legal blunder of the 20th century, he’s trying to blame it on a dead man."

A pithy pushback, from Alan Dershowitz to Christopher Darden, the erstwhile prosecutor who thought it was a good idea to ask O.J. Simpson to put on that glove.

The dead man is Johnnie Cochran:

"You return force with force when somebody assaults you. George was out of breath, he was barely conscious."

"There would have been George dead if he had not acted decisively and instantaneously in that moment when he was being disarmed."

Zimmerman's brother speaks:



Quoted in the linked article, at CNN.com, is Marcia Clark, the prosecutor who failed to convince a jury that O.J. Simpson was guilty. She's talking about the photographs of George Zimmerman, which people on the web are saying prove he didn't have a broken nose.

Suddenly, everyone's a doctor, the kind of doctor that does diagnoses through blurry web videos. Flashback: Remember when Senator Bill Frist — a Harvard-trained doctor — questioned the diagnosis of Terri Schiavo "based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office"? He got slammed for that.

But here's Marcia Clark: "Anyone who's seen a broken nose is aware of the fact that the blood spurts. That leads to a lot of bleeding. You would have expected to see blood on the front of George Zimmerman's shirt collar. Blood — you know, in many more places."

Anyone knows. Of course, a broken nose is a veritable geyser. So says the expert on blood evidence. I know she's seen a lot of blood. Blood does gush from slashed throats. But a broken nose? I'm going to Google that. Here's a list of symptoms, according the Mayo Clinic website (boldface added):

Signs and symptoms of a broken nose may appear immediately or may take up to three days to develop. Signs and symptoms may include:

Pain or tenderness, especially when touching your nose
Swelling of your nose and surrounding areas
Bleeding from your nose
Bruising around your nose or eyes
Crooked or misshapen nose
Difficulty breathing through your nose
Discharge of mucus from your nose (rhinorrhea)
Feeling that one or both of your nasal passages are blocked

I am trying to fathom the depths of mendacity around the Trayvon Martin case. Why aren't people afraid of uttering statements that are so easily devastated?

For a prosecutor to make extreme and overconfident statements about evidence, when the statements are not even remotely accurate and the inaccuracy is detected through 5 seconds of Googling? I understand why people want to lie and deceive, but to throw away your credibility so carelessly?

"Casey Anthony's 'Not Guilty' Verdict..."

"...  summons O.J. Memories."