In brief: Palin attends Wisconsin rally

MADISON, Wis. – Sarah Palin defended Wisconsin’s governor at a tea party tax day rally Saturday, telling hundreds of supporters that his polarizing union rights law is designed to save jobs.

Braving snow and a frigid wind outside the Capitol building, Palin told tea partiers she’s glad to stand with Gov. Scott Walker. Labor supporters surrounded the rally, trying to drown Palin out.

Walker, a Republican, signed a bill into law last month that calls for almost all public workers to contribute more to their pensions and health care coverage. The plan also strips them of their right to collectively bargain on anything except wages.

Capitol Police estimated about 6,500 people converged on the building Saturday, but said it was impossible to tell how many were tea partiers and how many were labor supporters.

Clinton dedicates childhood home

HOPE, Ark. – Former President Bill Clinton dedicated his boyhood home in Hope on Saturday as part of the National Park Service, and he used the occasion to say that the country is having hard times because people are too focused on money and not enough on each other.

Clinton lived in the white, two-story home with his mother, Virginia, and her parents, Eldridge and Edith Cassidy, though the home remained the focus of Clinton’s family life for years afterward.

Clinton said the “aspirations of ordinary” people are being overlooked as the nation tries to work through its budget woes.

Farmer kills wife, 3 children, self

OAK HARBOR, Ohio – A part-time farmer told a 911 dispatcher that he killed his wife and three young children and was “getting ready to kill myself” inside their farmhouse on land tended by his family for at least four generations.

His grandmother, who lives just steps away, watched through her blinds as deputies swarmed around the house. She desperately tried to reach 31-year-old Alan Atwater by phone just after midnight on Saturday after hearing on a police scanner that her grandson had shot everyone inside.

Deputies in northern Ohio said the bodies of Atwater and the rest of the family were found together with gunshot wounds in an upstairs bedroom.

The only hint of trouble came recently when Atwater said that he and his wife were having marital problems.