SHOCKING TRUTH: IT'S ALL ABOUT OIL

And it aint Iraq...

It's Michael Jackson's trial.

We can't make this stuff up, people.

From Radar online:

The Michael Jackson trial now in jury deliberations isn't really about child molestation -- it's about oil. At least that's the story Jackson defense attorney Gary Dunlap is peddling. According to Dunlap, Santa Barbara DA Tom Sneddon's sole motive for pursuing the child molestation case is to get his hands on Jackson's Neverland estate. "Neverland is a valuable asset—not only the land itself, but the mineral rights," Dunlap tells Radar. There have been surveys of the area, and many around here are convinced Neverland may be sitting on some prime oil wells.

Full story here: Neverland's Crude Secret


In other Jackson news...

Court TV's just-the-facts newsy MJ trial blog is worth a read. You get bizarre developments outside the courtroom told with an almost entirely straight face.

Excerpt:

9:21 a.m.


Word on the street is that a busload of 100 fans is en route now to the courthouse. A Santa Maria police officer tells me he was in his "jammies, eating cereal" this morning when he was called up to come in and help out with crowd control. Welcome to the freak show. A rotund man in a Hawaiian shirt just arrived with a bushel of loofahs that he's selling for ten bucks. A man in a red-and-white clown wig and a British flag draped across his rear is blowing a kazoo and hopping up and down as the fans chant, "Michael!"

For more inside info from outside the courtroom, check out the very informative, entertaining (and yet perhaps oddly named) dispatches from the jury room blog.

Photo cred: Rootsweb