The most important rebuttal against a defendant’s accusation of entrapment, especially when government agents have, over time and through multiple meetings, provided the means and methods of the charged crime, is the first conversation with the accused. As long as the defendant willfully expresses in his first conversation with government agents his clear intent to commit the crime that is later developed with their assistance, the agents are usually secure in their statements that they did not entrapment an otherwise innocent person with no intent to commit the eventual crime.

The situation in Ivory Coast has reached something of a nervous stalemate as well. Laurent Gbagbo is holed up in the presidential bunker (in Ivory Coast, I guess they need things like a presidential bunker). He has less than 1,000 troops loyal to him.

I was doing my regular surfing of news sites, after once again not finding any jobs in my daily job search when I came across this story from Reuters on the pay that JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon received for 2010. The thing that caught my eye most of all however was not the $20.8M in total compensation. Nor was it the $5M cash bonus on top of the $1M cash salary for the year. No, the items that caught my eye were at the bottom of the article on the “perks” Dimon received.

Welcome Lee Papa, and Host, Watertiger. [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev] The Rude Pundit’s Almanack Watertiger, Host: On September 29, 2003, several months after the launch of the Idiot King’s Great Debacle, a fresh, loud and rather impudent [...]

Is this all the advice OLC gave the President? Did OLC authorize further activities? Did Obama’s description of why bombing Libya was in the national interest before March 19 match what appears in this memo, written after the fact?

You would think that a sentient President of the United States would be embarrassed, ashamed, and contrite after one of the more mindless and destructive governmental performances in years.

Nope.

Since November 2009, there has been an eight-point increase in the number who view the war as a mistake. Yet in the same time period, there has been a huge surge in how well the American people think the US is doing in Afghanistan.

After watching the news last night, I couldn’t help but think of Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson. When it comes to hardball negotiations with entrenched interests, they sure could give the Obama Team a few lessons.

In the end, the deal to a avert a government shutdown and keep funding going for the rest of the fiscal year amounted to a $38.5 billion cut in appropriations from the 2010 baseline. There was a time last December, with the McCaskill-Sessions compromise, promoted by the very conservative Republican ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, when Republicans agreed to a 2011 budget appropriation $20 billion ABOVE the 2010 baseline. If mixed in with the tax cut deal, that level could have been put in place. Therefore, this deal inked late last night cut $58.5 billion from the level of McCaskill-Sessions. This equals all of the tax advantages that didn’t extend current law, outside of the business expensing provisions, in the December 2010 tax cut deal. The entire stimulus is gone.

One of the clearest voices in the call for the most basic civil rights for all Bahrainis has been a young woman who writes on Twitter as @angryarabiya. She has been keeping the world informed of the shootings and beatings by the US supported government and about the overnight raids during which crowds of hooded “security” forces storm the homes of human rights workers and bloggers, breaking down doors, threatening their families and dragging away these peaceful activists to detention or worse.

We’ve learned that her father, husband and brother-in-law have been taken.