A Weasel gets bagged

We have a follow-up on a recent Weasel of the Week award to pass along.

Andrew David Truelove, from Virginia, was arrested Friday and charged with the theft of memorial signs dedicated to victims of the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Truelove, according to the New York Daily News and other media outlets, reportedly has a history of mental illness.

Let me stop for a second. That part doesn't surprise me at all. Truelove's lawyers want to use mental illness to explain away the fact that he traveled far from his home to steal two memorial signs and take them back to his home in Virginia. No, mental illness has nothing to do with it. The guy's an idiot, and so are the other "Truthers" who think that the massacre wasn't real. These goofs have an axe to grind with the government, and are using a real-life tragedy to push their agenda by attempting to deconstruct the facts.

In fact, there are truther sites that should be watched carefully. The way they see it, Truelove is the 2nd man, at least, to have been arrested. There was another, who was posting his warped viewpoints on YouTube, and he, too, was arrested, likely because he was nosing around where he didn't belong.

As I understand it from reading online (the print edition of today's Daily News didn't have enough space for the story), Truelove was already in jail in Virginia on an unrelated probation violation, having been arrested on Monday, nearly 3 weeks after the theft in Stonington, and he's likely going to be extradited back to not only Connecticut, but New Jersey, where the other theft occurred. In short, he's going to be going away for a long time to come, because the prosecution will shoot down any claims of mental illness. He had to be in his right mind to do what he did, plain & simple.

In other, unrelated news, it wouldn't be fair to give ousted Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling a set of Weasel ears, but we have to.

Sterling, 80, gave the go-ahead to his estranged wife, Shelly, to sell the team ahead of an NBA owners meeting to force the issue. Former Microsoft executive Mark Ballmer has agreed in principle to buy the team for $2 billion, and ESPN claims he had plans to move the team to Seattle, which has been without a franchise since the SuperSonics moved south and morphed into the Oklahoma City Thunder a few years ago. However, Sterling, proving that his advanced age has eroded his mental skills, has filed a lawsuit for half the amount that Ballmer is shelling out. Ballmer's agreement with Mrs. Sterling, though, would protect the team and the league from any sort of mindless litigation such as this. There are reports that Sterling has Alzheimer's disease, which would explain away his erratic behavior of late, but only a hypocritical Weasel would do two directly opposite things, almost at the same time. That being said, if Shelly Sterling had an inkling that her husband was falling ill any sooner than this, maybe the team should've already been sold, and we wouldn't have this kind of drama.