The thief who used Craigslist to hire decoys and escape a bank truck robbery has been caught. He has evaded police since last September.

The suspect wore a blue, long-sleeved shirt with a yellow safety vest, safety glasses and a mask. What initially confused police was a group of people at the scene dressed in similar attire. They had responded to an online classified ad posted three days before the robbery that offered paid landscaping work and specified exactly how the workers should dress.

Police cracked the case with a DNA match from evidence left behind at the Brink’s robbery site, and by reviewing a police report filed three weeks before the robbery about unusual items found behind a trash bin near the bank.

In the earlier incident, a person noticed the items, including a safety vest, a two-way radio, a wig and large can of Mace and watched as a man drove up and took them.

The witness jotted down the license plate and gave it to a city worker. Police traced the license plate to the suspect’s wife, police said.

Fortunately the police remembered the earlier report and were able to correlate the two.

The suspect has a history of minor crimes such as prescription forgery, but nothing this “significant,” Willis said.

Police think the suspect used a laptop and hacked into someone else’s wireless signal to post the Craigslist ad, which he thought would help conceal his identity, [Monroe police spokeswoman Debbie] Willis said.

That comment suggests that review of the Craigslist logs did not help the investigation. It certainly did not help as much as a suspicious activity report at the bank and a license plate number. Just some good old detective work, despite technology, saves the day.

The Danger Room says Dear Mr. President: You’re Screwed

It’s bad enough that the new President is going to have to deal with a financial crisis, an energy crisis, a health care crisis, and a pair of wars. But on top of all that, the incoming administration is going to inherit a Pentagon that’s a downright mess, Winslow Wheeler argues in the current Defense News.

Adam asks after the election, “So what’s on your mind?”

What’s on my mind is the amount of hateful and negative comments I see from “Christian Conservatives” who say America is lost now that Obama was elected President by a clear majority. They point to the war, to the economy, etc. and say “see, look how bad things are because of the liberals; in four years Mitt will be back”.

The lack of reason or sense in these people is shocking. Today I was called a “poor insider” simply because I refused to agree that fixing polls and lying to voters would have been a good way to get McCain elected. I thought my position was reasonable. Now I am an insider? Apparently the word has achieved a new and very confusing meaning, as though to be an insider of any kind is an insult on its own.

I also was accused of being a liberal. This was because I live in California. I also have been saddened to find people advocating in online comments that there should be a “return” to Natural Law or even Biblical Law as a “progressive” way to govern America. The irony seems lost to them.

Remember how embarrassing Kansas was to America when the School Board banned teaching evolution? The best response to them, aside from voting them all out of public office, was the Venganza movement.

It is important to put the lack of enlightened thinking into a global context. Last week’s shocking news from Somalia was that a 13 year old girl was accused of adultery when she reported to police that she had been raped. The girl, already a victim of a heinous crime, was then sentenced to be stoned to death in a stadium full of onlookers. Stoned to death. The story is disgusting.

Yet, this is exactly the sort of thing I worry about when I look in the eyes and writings of the apparently bloodthirsty Americans who speak of using government to legislate sins and who want everyone to honor some weird interpretation of Biblical law.

Ahmanson’s most controversial episode related to his funding of the religious empire of Rousas John Rushdoony, a radical evangelical theologian who advocated placing the United States under the control of a Christian theocracy that would mandate the stoning to death of homosexuals.

Who is Ahmanson? He is a reclusive and rich son of the man who founded Washington Mutual and just one of the most powerful US-based religious extremists (#2 on Time’s 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America). He poured nearly a million dollars into the Proposition 8 debate in California, on the side that generated extreme lies and bogus campaign material. Their argument was basically if you vote against Proposition 8, you personally will suffer an awful fate.

In fact, their argument seems to be that everyone will suffer an awful fate no matter what they do…and yet, the vituperative comments and dishonesty only fooled some of the people. Although the latest news is that Proposition 8 passed, it was a very slim margin.

Many millions of voters resisted the insurgents’ bait and instead helped create a deep shade of purple for California. A similar marriage ban in California was passed by a margin of 61 to 39 percent in 2000, whereas this time the vote is split 50/50. It is heartening to see that many dismissed evangelical scare tactics and put their vote towards enlightenment and the preservation of individual liberty.

P.S. I also just want to point out that I resisted the urge to make puns about people being stoned to death in California. In times like this what would the FSM do?

What better place to read about a controversy surrounding a degree from Oxford than in the BBC Middle East Report?

For years, Iran’s Interior Minister Ali Kordan has claimed to hold a doctorate from Oxford University and taken increased pay as a result.

But in recent months, it emerged that the document was a crude forgery, containing several misspellings.

As for the minister, he did not even seem to know the name of the institution, which he continued to describe as the “London Oxford University”.

In fact, it turned out he did not have a degree from any university, despite having worked as a university lecturer.

Things were not made better when a President’s assistant tried to bribe away the impeachment motion for Kordan. They were made worse again as the President himself suggested the degree was worth nothing more than its parchment anyway:

As for President Ahmadinejad, he angered academics and Iran’s many hard-working students by arguing that degrees did not matter as they were only “pieces of paper.”

The story makes this out to be a major stumbling moment for the President, among “growing discontent”, but somehow I think it is just a symptom of greater discontent. America certainly has seen its own share of trouble with ongoing investigations into the Bush Administration through two terms, but it was the economic conditions and clear lack of leadership qualities, rather than corruption and graft, that led to the dramatic shift in popular opinion.