Headline : Three Yale Students Arrested for Burning an American Flag

Political scandal? Excuse for various presidential hopefuls to weigh in with the most opinion poll-tested response to such an incident? Front page news for several days? The subject of continuing coverage on MSCNNOX News?

Not this time. You see, the flag they burned happened to be attached to a house when they burned it:

[Police officers] saw that a flag hanging off of 512 Chapel St. was engulfed in flames, [a spokeswoman] said. While one officer removed the burning flag, the other officer stopped the students, who were further down the street.

According to court reports, the charges against the students initially included two counts of reckless burning, which were later changed to two counts of second degree arson at yesterday's arraignment.

So this one is too much of a slam-dunk even for the story-starved mainstream media. It doesn't even help that one of the students was born in Pakistan, the son of a former Afghan governor, and once worked as a translator for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

At least, I should say, it hasn't helped yet. There's always tomorrow's paper...