Jury deliberates in case of Idaho attorney accused of plotting death of wife, mother-in-law
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on May 5th, 2011 4:35 am by HL
Jury deliberates in case of Idaho attorney accused of plotting death of wife, mother-in-law
BOISE, Idaho — An Idaho jury is trying to decide if an attorney who has gained attention representing unpopular clients is guilty of hiring a hit man to kill his wife and his mother-in-law or if he’s the victim of a frame-up.
The panel began its deliberations Wednesday in the case against Edgar J. Steele, meeting late into the night before breaking until Thursday morning.
Steele, best known for defending clients like the Aryan Nations, was arrested last June and charged with four federal felonies: Victim tampering, using interstate facilities in the commission of a murder for hire, using explosive material to commit a felony and possessing a destructive device in relation to a violent crime.
Department of Corrections: Ryan’s budget has one individual mandate-like policy, not two
In a post yesterday, I summarized and expanded on Simon Lazarus’s argument that Paul Ryan’s budget has not one, but two, individual mandates. That post was wrong.
Lazarus’s article mentioned that the Ryan budget replaced the tax break that employers get for health-care insurance with a refundable tax credit that was “little noticed by pundits or politicians.” This was in Ryan’s Roadmap, and so I figured it got snuck into the final legislative language and Lazarus had simply been eagle-eyed enough to noticed it. But that policy isn’t in the budget. Lazarus was assuming that the budget’s vague portion on tax reform had something like the specific tax policies from the Roadmap in mind. I don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption to make, and given that I hadn’t noticed the health-care tax credit in the budget before, I should’ve checked it out for myself. That leaves Ryan’s budget with one individual mandate-like policy, not two. Mea culpa.
How to run against Obama, post-Osama
Obama completed the 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden and is rightfully credited with making a series of tough calls. This doesn’t, however, mean that the underlying dynamics of the 2012 race have changed.
On this I agree with pollster Charlie Cook, who explained:
Initial polling doesn’t suggest a huge jump in Obama’s approval, and that may be, as Cook argues, because fundamentals of our domestic and international challenges, unlike in 2001, have not changed:
