The citizens of Valentine, Nebraska can resume their normal lives now that the notorious Butt Bandit has been captured.

Beginning in spring of 2007, a mystery vandal visited businesses at night, pressing his naked behind — sometimes his groin, sometimes both — on windows. The marks were made with lotion or petroleum jelly ...

The Butt Bandit (who really isn't much of a bandit despite the entertaining alliteration) terrorized the good people of Valentine with his cheek imprints during the last two summers. He took a break during the winter, presumably due to the discomfort of dropping trou in frigid weather. Despite concern that copycat criminals might leave their own moon imprints on Valentine's windows, Cherry County Attorney Eric Scott said:

"This isn't normal behavior for Valentine"

That's reassuring. (Note: Rumors that the Bandit's actual name is Seymour Butts turn out to be unfounded.)

Jamison Foser writes a good piece on how the Media now hates "experience" when they hated "change" in 1993. Foser links to Eric Boehlert's piece that explains it:

That's the point we've been making for the last week as we've watched MoDo and Chris Matthews and David Broder and the rest of the Village elders raise a stink about Clinton joining the Obama administration. And our point is this: The press represents nobody but the press on this topic. Meaning, the press has no political cover on this story because there's no partisan angle to the SoS story, which means their long-running Clinton hatred is just sort of out there, exposed for all to see.

Think about. It's been virtually impossible to find any senior members of Congress--Republican or Democrat--who publicly oppose Clinton as the SoS, which in and of itself is rather astonishing. . . . So, if you're keeping score at home, that means the Obama White House is in favor of Clinton, Republicans in Congress are in favor, Democrats in Congress are in favor, and liberal activists are, essentially, in favor. (And so are most Americans.) So we go back to our original point. Who was [Joe] Scarborough talking about when he kept referring to these detractors who Hitchens represented. Who were these SoS "critics"? Answer: Scarborough was talking about the Beltway press corps. And if the Beltway press corps thinks Clinton should not be SOS, then that's big news.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Today is Saturday, which means college football for all patriotic, red blooded Americans . . .

The Mighty Gators have a virtual bye against the Citadel this afternoon. The big action will be in Norman, Oklahoma tonight, where the Sooners host the Red Raiders of Texas Tech.

It should be a barnburner.

In any event, Go Gators!

This is an Open Thread

Speaking for me only

President-Elect Barack Obama is still 2 months from being inaugurated and some NYTimes op ed writers can not leave him alone. At least wait till he actually does something. Geezus Christ on a cracker! Look at Bryan Curtis:

Obama’s First Fumble

BARACK OBAMA went on “60 Minutes” this week and unveiled his first policy proposal as president-elect — a college football playoff. After detailing his preferred system, in which eight teams would meet in a three-week-long tournament at the end of the season, Mr. Obama said, “I don’t know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this.” Well, here’s one. To borrow Mr. Obama’s infelicitous phrase, I cling to college football in its current form.

All joking aside, I disagree with Mr. Curtis, as I will explain on the flip.

On Thursday, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the murder conviction of an Arizona man who confessed his guilt to the police when he was 17 after being interrogated for twelve hours in the absence of an attorney or parent. Considering the coercive nature of the persistent questioning and the boy's age, the court decided (pdf) the confession was involuntary and should not have been used as evidence. The decision represents a victory for the Constitution as well as his appellate lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.

The principle that the police cannot induce a confession by using coercive tactics to overcome a suspect's free will is particularly significant when the suspect is a juvenile. Children are easily influenced and therefore need greater protection to assure they make a voluntary choice to respond to police questioning. What, then, were the police in Apache County, Arizona thinking when they interrogated an 8 year old about the shooting of his father without arranging the presence of an attorney or adult relative to protect the child's rights?

That blunder may explain a prosecutor's decision to dismiss one of the murder charges he had filed against the 8 year old. A second charge is still pending. [more ...]

You know, I have to say that I have been pretty pleased with the Change President-elect Obama has been delivering so far. Indeed, since dropping the Post Partisan Unity Schtick since the Democratic Convention, I have had virtually nothing to complain about. Except one thing - John Brennan. But I am quite pleased to see that the Left blogs have refound their voice and have universally expressed their concerns about Brennan.

[Let me add good for my friend David Sirota for expressing his unhappiness that he is NOT getting the CHANGE he wants.]

It would be asking too much of me to not note that I was "the moron" who was one of the first to voice concerns about Brennan.

This is an Open Thread.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Hillary says yes to State. Geithner to be tapped for Treasury. Richardson to get Commerce.

Gators rule! Just sayin'

One last thing, I can't help but laugh at the teeth gnashing in some quarters on the fact that Barack Obama is - it turns out, a mainstream Democrat. In March, I wrote:

The trumpeted 2004-05 "reforms" of New York's notoriously harsh Rockefeller drug laws did little to help the state's inmates who had been unfairly sentenced. Anthony Williams, for instance, is 17 years into a 25-to-life sentence. He can't get relief because his offense was too insignificant.

Ironically, he was too small a fish in the ocean of the illicit drug trade to benefit from what have since proven to be anemic legislative charades. Most of the drug offenders who were re-sentenced and released under those incremental "reforms" had convictions for the possession or the sale of large quantities of illegal narcotics. But treacherous, counterintuitive twists in the "reform legislation" actually made it impossible for many low-level offenders to get retroactive relief.

Low level offenders serving potential life sentences are exactly the population that sentencing reform measures should target. It's time for real reform, not window dressing. [more ...]

Here's a half truth:

An irrelevant Republican Party does no one any good.

Assuming "irrelevant" in this context means powerless, here's the other half: An irrelevant Republican Party does no one any harm. It's not as if a "relevant" Republican Party did any good for the nation as a whole.

The Republican Party is viewed favorably by 34 percent of Americans, while the Democratic Party is viewed favorably by 55 percent. It seems that lying about war, mismanaging the economy, letting New Orleans drown, bullying voters with endless threats about terrorist villains, and covering up scandals involving corruption or bad behavior have set the public against the GOP. Should that surprise us?

If Republicans want to become relevant again, the formula is simple. Learn to govern. Learn to behave. Learn to tell the truth. After the GOP does those things, it can consider another attempt to be relevant to the nation's future.

The prosecution of five alleged terrorists charged with conspiring to attack Fort Dix is plodding along. Thirteen days of testimony by paid government informant Mahmoud Omar revealed how the defendants trained for their mission: they played paintball. If you don't have any real guns to train with, paintball seems like a sound alternative. Besides, it's fun.

Omar has been a less than impressive witness, but that's what you'd expect from a criminal who was being paid $1,500 a week to act as an informant (reaping a total of $240,000), not to mention the free pass he received for his own crimes. To keep the paychecks coming, Omar had to give the government a plot, even if he had to make it up as he went along.

Omar's testimony against the five alleged conspirators veered off course when he acknowledged that two of the five didn't know anything about the plan to attack Fort Dix. [more ...]

And here I thought that the atomic bomb had definitively proven e=mc2. Turns out to be not the case, at least for mathematicians/physicists. Now, apparently, it has been proven:

It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

. . . According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons. The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent? The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

High school readability? Take that, blog analyzer.

In all the talk about Hillary at State, I have been remiss in giving President-Elect Obama real credit for performing an incredibly important task for the Democratic Party - his rebuke of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Via Digby (whose post is also a must read), Eric Boehlert wrote a great piece on the matter: