That’s right, you’re looking at Yoenis Cristo Banos, who was arrested and jailed for a felony theft charge in Broward County, Florida. On the left? The silly gas-sucking system that got him there.

There are some criminal plans that are deceptively simple, and others that are just plain simple. Barnos’s was the latter. From what we gather, it was formulated something like this:

Step one: Roll up to gas station in suspicious-looking van outfitted with giant plastic tanks, generator.
Step two: Park suspicious-looking van directly over the underground vaults that hold gas station’s supply of gas.
Step three: Connect hoses to vaults, siphon gas into giant plastic tanks until police arrive.
Step four: Get arrested.

So, A+ for execution, Yoenis! He’d managed to slurp up 255 gallons—a value of about $1,020 on the thriving gasoline black market—before the gas station’s managers started to wonder why a suspicious-looking van with hoses coming out the side was parked in their lot.

Courtesy of BRIAN BARRETT

Arizona Sheriff (and notorious douchebag) Joe Arpaio, who was rebuked in December by the Justice Department for alleged civil rights violations, said on Tuesday that he will release his findings on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate on March 1.

Arpaio further implied that the president should be thanking him for looking into whether his Hawaii birth certificate is a fake.

“When I took this mission on, I took it on to possibly be able to clear the president,” Apraio said during a speech in Maricopa County, where he serves as sheriff. “I was doing him a favor. We’ll see what happens.”

He didn’t give any hints as to what his birther “Cold Case posse” had found, but insisted his press conference was not driven by a desire to gain media attention. “I don’t have press conferences just to get my name on television,” he said. (Granted, he gets his name on TV plenty as it is, particularly for mishandling immigration enforcement authority until his office was banned from a federal partnership program.)

Arpaio insisted that he is investigating the racially-charged “birther” claims, which have been thoroughly debunked, because of demand from Tea Partiers. Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011, but that was not enough for Arpaio, who said in November 2011 that he wants to see the microfiche of that document.

Arpaio met with ”birther queen” Orly Taitz in October 2011 to discuss the investigation, again declining to give findings to the press.

“What should I do, throw it in the waste basket and forget about it, like everyone else is this country has done?” Arpaio said on Tuesday. “But once again, I take my elected sheriff’s status very serious, and when the people ask me to do something I try to do it regardless of the repercussions, the politics and the media.”

Arpaio spoke after an appearance by presidential candidate and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, with whom Arpaio said he met for about 20 minutes. But Arpaio did not issue an endorsement, although he was for Texas Gov. Rick Perry before he dropped out of the race.

More than talking about candidates, Arpaio touted his immigration enforcement methods, which he said are merely part of his job description as an Arizona sheriff. He said he is glad that the state’s lawmakers passed SB 1070 and that his job is now to enforce it — though in July 2010 a federal judge blocked parts of the controversial immigration law, ruling it unconstitutional.

Arpaio said Obama should thank him for his efforts to drive out undocumented immigrants, too, insisting he is creating jobs through raids on employers.

“Every time we raid a place we remove illegal aliens, that makes another opening for U.S. citizens,” Arpaio said. “How come the president doesn’t thank me for doing what I can for the economy? I never get any thanks.”

Courtesy of Elise Foley of the Huffington Post

In years past, American liberals have had to settle for intellectual and moral leadership from the likes of John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr. But now, a grander beacon has appeared on the mountaintop, and from sea to shining sea, tens of thousands have joined in the adulation.

So it is worth taking a moment to study the metaphysics of Michael Moore. For Moore is not only a filmmaker; he is a man of ideas, and his work is based on an actual worldview.

Like Hemingway, Moore does his boldest thinking while abroad. For example, it was during an interview with the British paper The Mirror that Moore unfurled what is perhaps the central insight of his oeuvre, that Americans are kind of crappy.

”They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet … in thrall to conniving, thieving smug [pieces of the human anatomy],” Moore intoned. ”We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don’t know about anything that’s happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing.”

It transpires that Europeans are quite excited to hear this supple description of the American mind. And Moore has been kind enough to crisscross the continent, speaking to packed lecture halls, explicating the general vapidity and crassness of his countrymen. ”That’s why we’re smiling all the time,” he told a rapturous throng in Munich. ”You can see us coming down the street. You know, ‘Hey! Hi! How’s it going?’ We’ve got that big [expletive] grin on our face all the time because our brains aren’t loaded down.”

Naturally, the people from the continent that brought us Descartes, Kant and Goethe are fascinated by these insights. Moore’s books have sold faster there than at home. No American intellectual is taken so seriously in Europe, save perhaps the great Chomsky.

Before a delighted Cambridge crowd, Moore reflected on the tragedy of human existence: ”You’re stuck with being connected to this country of mine, which is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe.” In Liverpool, he paused to contemplate the epicenters of evil in the modern world: ”It’s all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton.”

In the days after Sept. 11, while others were disoriented, Moore was able to see clearly: ”We, the United States of America, are culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants.”

This leads to Michael Moore’s global plan of action. ”Don’t be like us,” he told a crowd in Berlin. ”You’ve got to stand up, right? You’ve got to be brave.”

In an open letter to the German people in Die Zeit, Moore asked, ”Should such an ignorant people lead the world?” Then he began to reflect on things economic. His central insight here is that the American economy, like its people, is pretty crappy, too: ”Don’t go the American way when it comes to economics, jobs and services for the poor and immigrants. It is the wrong way.”

In an interview with a Japanese newspaper, Moore helped citizens of that country understand why the United States went to war in Iraq: ”The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich.”

But venality doesn’t come up when he writes about those who are killing Americans in Iraq: ”The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.” Until then, few social observers had made the connection between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Paul Revere.

So we have our Sartre. And the liberal grandees Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorenson, Tom Harkin and Barbara Boxer flock to his openings. In Washington, a Senate vote was delayed because so many Democrats wanted to see his movie.

The standards of socially acceptable liberal opinion have shifted. We’re a long way from John Dewey.

Perhaps inspired by Moore, I got a fact wrong in my previous column. Bill Clinton did not win the evangelical vote in 1992 and 1996. I had relied on a report that was later corrected.

By DAVID BROOKS

Daniel Craig is a very private man, on screen and off. On film, he plays a journalist doing important investigative work, as well as the world’s most famous spy; in real life, he does things like get married in super secret ceremonies. And as he tells British GQ, he’s got good reason for all the secrecy; once you go Kardashian, you never go back.

“I think there’s a lot to be said for keeping your own counsel,” Craig tells the magazine. “You can’t buy it back. You can’t buy your privacy back. ‘Ooh, I want to be alone. ‘F*ck you. We’ve been in your living room. We were at your birth. You filmed it for us and showed us the placenta, and now you want some privacy?’”

In case he wasn’t clear enough that he was talking about the Kardashians — hey, reality shows blend together — he then emphasized his target.

“It’s a career. What can I tell you?” he continues. “It is a career; I’m not being cynical. And why wouldn’t you? Look at the Kardashians, they’re worth millions. Millions! I don’t think they were that badly off to begin with, but now look at them. You see that and you think, ‘What, you mean all I have to do is behave like a f*cking idiot on television and then you’ll pay me millions?’”