Rand Paul returns surplus operating budget

In a related story, a flight of pigs was spotted at 15,000 feet over Massachusetts.

Daily Caller  "Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul says he will send a $600,000 check to the U.S. Treasury, returning the part of his operating budget as a senator that was not spent.
"Paul made the announcement at press conference in Kentucky on Wednesday. According to a press release from Paul’s office, the sum is over 20 percent of the total operating budget." More...

Hagel Declined to Sign Schumer Letter in 2007 Asking Arab Allies to Recognize Israel

Big Peace  "Former Sen. Chuck Hagel declined to sign a letter circulated by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in 2007 calling upon then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to press Arab allies of the U.S. to recognize Israel’s right to exist “and not use such recognition as a bargaining chip for future Israeli concessions.” Seventy-nine Senators eventually signed the letter, which was sponsored by Schumer and by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Via Weasel Zippers

 

 

Sequester: the ObaMonster

Frankenquester

From Legal Insurrection; Sequester — already the biggest lie of 2013. "Rush says it this way, For the First Time in My Life, I Am Ashamed of My Country:"....

 

Marco Rubio is still drinking water

http://www.newsday.com/opinion/walt-handelsman-1.812005

Ethel C. Fenig at American Thinker  "Liberals will curse the day they decided to mock Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) for his now (in)famous drink of water during the Republican response to President Barack Hussein Obama's (D) State of the Union address.  Apparently Rubio has cleverly decided to exploit that public water gulp to his advantage by following a few of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals."  Read more:

SNL = Sad Naive Liberals

American Glob  "I never watch Saturday Night Live anymore.
"Not only is it no longer funny, it has become a hyper-partisan political outlet which promotes liberals and denigrates conservatives at every turn.
"Christian Americans are continually insulted by entertainment on television. So when I saw this SNL clip on Big Hollywood, I felt compelled to post the video.
"The folks at SNL think they’re being “edgy” here. They’re not. They’re taking a cheap shot at Christians because they know there won’t be any backlash.
"I look forward to SNL’s send-up of Islam and the parade of outraged Democrats falling all over themselves on the news to blame the ensuing riots on an offensive video." 

Hispanicked GOP Elite: They'll Respect Us In the Morning

"Putting 12 million to 20 million of them on a "path to citizenship" won't make them like Republicans; it will make Republicans lose."

Ann Coulter  "Don't anyone tell Marco Rubio, John McCain or Jeff Flake that nearly 80 percent of Hindus voted for Obama, or who knows what they'll come up with. 
"I understand the interest of business lobbies in getting cheap, unskilled labor through amnesty, but why do Republican officeholders want to create up to 20 million more Democratic voters....?
"Without citing any evidence, the Rubio Republicans simply assert that granting 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens amnesty will make Hispanics warm to the GOP. Yes, that's worked like a charm since Reagan signed an amnesty bill in 1986!"

John Boehner: The President Is Raging Against a Budget Crisis He Created

JOHN BOEHNER ; "Obama invented the 'sequester' in the summer of 2011 to avoid facing up to America's spending problem."

"A week from now, a dramatic new federal policy is set to go into effect that threatens U.S. national security, thousands of jobs and more. In a bit of irony, President Obama stood Tuesday with first responders who could lose their jobs if the policy goes into effect. Most Americans are just hearing about this Washington creation for the first time: the sequester. What they might not realize from Mr. Obama's statements is that it is a product of the president's own failed leadership."
....
"The president got his higher taxes—$600 billion from higher earners, with no spending cuts—at the end of 2012. He also got higher taxes via ObamaCare. Meanwhile, no one should be talking about raising taxes when the government is still paying people to play videogames, giving folks free cellphones, and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines."

 

Feminine Mystique at 50

"Betty Friedan hailed the advent of women’s studies. She should have looked more closely."

Lauren Noble  "The feminists in higher education today in fact have betrayed Friedan’s ideals. In the process, they have damaged the reputation of scholarship and hurt women who have invested in useless degrees. This cannot continue.
"In dealing with women, universities should focus on empowering and encouraging them to study the great books, politics, economics, and other disciplines that were once denied to them. The preoccupation with sexuality and popular culture is neither intellectual nor practical. Insultingly, women’s studies as currently constituted presumes that women are interested only in women’s issues. Women deserve better. And while Friedan was wrong about many things, today’s feminists seem to have overlooked some of her most important lessons."
Lauren Noble is the founder and executive director of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale and a former writer for the Romney campaign. The views expressed here are her own.

What if One Day We Get a Bad President? The consequences of being saddled with a non-progressive, dumb chief executive are too horrible to imagine.

PJ Media  "So the only option left is to consider curtailing a bit of the power we’re allowing Obama, because someday we might have a president who is completely detached from average Americans, doesn’t care about our problems, and ruins everything he touches — someone completely unlike Obama. I mean, just imagine all that power Obama has in the hands of someone who completely sucks at being president. The economy would be ruined, we’d have disastrous situations abroad, and our liberties would be threatened. It would be a lot like now, but instead of it being Bush’s fault, it would be the fault of the current president. So to keep that from happening, we’ll have to do the hard thing and put more limitations on Obama’s power. I’m sure he’ll understand and not drone-strike us."

 

 

Audience Cheers and Applauds When Leno Says Obama 'Doesn't Understand Economics'

Leno is the non-Letterman.
Newsbusters  "It appears not everyone in America is as enthralled with Barack Obama's economic policies as his fans in the media.
"When NBC Tonight Show host Jay Leno made a joke about the president not understanding economics, the studio audience cheered, applauded, and whistled (video follows with transcript and commentary):"  Read more:  

The state of journalism; let me count the ways

Via Lucianne:
The Truth Be Dimmed   "Maybe Sarah Palin could see Russia from her house -- but on my front porch, every morning, a view of Pravda-style reporting rolled up in the form of my local paper awaits me.  In Kentucky, many conservatives jokingly call Louisville's paper, The Courier-Journal, the "The Communist Journal." "  

Times Square Billboards: ‘It’s Time the Liberal Media Stop Censoring the News!’
"The five billboards are clustered together in Times Square and face in different directions, covering 3,800 square feet. Two of the signs read, “It’s Time the Liberal Media Stop Censoring the News!” and two others read, “Start Telling the Truth!” above an image of three monkeys, labeled ABC, CBS, and NBC, who are depicted as the  three mystic apes that see no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil."

CNN and NBC News: Is journalistic integrity dead?  "A recent article on the popular progressive website Politico refers to Obama as a “puppet master”, calling him “a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.” While this states the obvious, they go wrong in their claim that the media is powerless to do anything except parrot White House press releases and accept them as cold hard facts.
"Whatever happened to questioning the “facts”? Whatever happened to the power the media used to exercise, but apparently has forgotten still exists?"

Broadcast Networks Largely Ignore Jesse Jackson, Jr. Indictment  "On Friday, NBC's Nightly News gave the story short attention. By Saturday, Good Morning America gave the story a whole 18 seconds. Worse, even when the network news shows did report the story on Saturday evening, Jackson's party affiliation was never mentioned."

Reading list for Wednesday, Feb 20 (Soledad O'Brien update)

Breitbart:
Debate Commission Co-Chair: Yeah, Candy Crowley Was a 'Mistake'  "Crowley stirred controversy by intervening in the town hall-style debate to support Obama's contention that he had referred to the Sep. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi as a terrorist attack the day after it had occurred. In fact, as Crowley herself later admitted, Obama had not done so, referring only to "acts of terror" in general."

Report: Soledad O'Brien Out at CNN  "O'Brien's tenure hosting "American Morning" has been nothing short of a disaster for CNN. The ratings are embarrassingly low and the left-wing anchor has repeatedly made a fool of herself pretending to be an unbiased, objective journalist."

UPDATE: Apparently O'Brien tends to not have original thoughts, getting her talking points from other liberal sources:

She said that Critical Race Theory had nothing to do with white supremacy. Joel challenged her to come up with her own definition. After an awkward pause, in which she looked briefly like a squirrel on a highway with a tractor-trailer bearing down on her....

Republicans Push to Remind Americans Obama Owns Sequester  "The GOP is confident they can win the public to their side: it was Obama who originally proposed the sequester, declared during his reelection campaign that it would never happen, and then later signed it into law."

Pro wrestling's latest Bad Guy: a TEA-Partier  "Appearing on Monday Night Raw last week, [Jack] Swagger and [Zeb] Colter were booed by the crowd as they overzealously talked about the Constitution, the scourge of illegal immigration, and “true patriotism.” Other promotional videos of the two show them talking about freeloading immigrants and welfare recipients in front of the Gadsden flag, which has become symbolic of the Tea Party movement."  MRC video:

Conservatives wish for someone to articulate our ideas, but what good would it do when their voices are drowned out by the media, academia and Hollywood?

"Atlas Shrugs" on the "MYJIHAD" PR campaign