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1.) What Paul Ryan giveth the Senate killeth — Paul Ryan continues to put out budgets. The Senate continues to kill them. TheDC’s Alexis Levinson:
“The Senate defeated the House Republican budget Thursday evening, with five Republican senators joining Democrats in voting against it. The budget, authored by House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan, would balance the budget in 10 years through a combination of cuts to entitlement programs and non-defense discretionary spending. It passed in the House earlier on Thursday. The Ryan budget was proposed as an amendment by a Democrat, Senate budget committee chair Patty Murray. The goal was to force Republicans to take a stance on a budget that Democrats see as unpopular and politically problematic. No Republican proposed the Ryan budget as an amendment.”
It’s a story just a little older than the dawn of time — also known as President Obama’s inauguration.
2.) The moral foundations of cutting popular courses — The moral foundations of capitalism were shaken at Stanford. The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Robby Soave reports:
“Stanford University administrators axed a popular course titled ‘Moral Foundations of Capitalism’ that portrayed free markets in a positive light. John McCaskey, a philosophy professor at Stanford, conceived the course after the 2008 financial crash, and began teaching it in 2009. At first, most of his students were conservatives eager to hear a professor say something positive about capitalism’s contributions to modern society. But the ideological composition of course enrollees became more diverse in subsequent years. Both the course and McCaskey’s teaching style earned rave reviews from students of all political stripes.”
Who knows if the decision to kill the course was political. We ought to give Stanford the benefit of the doubt, however, because its philosophy department is surely politically diverse. Like most university philosophy departments, the faculty’s ideology likely ranges from Dennis Kucinich to Ho Chi Minh.
3.) Go green, no matter how much green it costs — The Pentagon may be suffering the effects of sequestration, but under no circumstances should that endanger a certain Defense Department green energy program, according to Senate Democrats. The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Michael Bastasch:
“The Senate defeated a proposed amendment that would have transferred money from the Navy’s biofuels program to increase the Defense Department’s operations and maintenance funding. …The Senate rejected the amendment in a 40-59 vote which would have redirected $60 million from military biofuels testing. …’Given tightening budgets, it makes little sense to waste money on inefficient, overpriced energy sources when we could use those same funds to help support critical maintenance services for the warfighter,’ [Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat] Toomey added. The biofuels used in a Navy demonstration last year ran at about $27 per gallon, compared to about $3.50 per gallon for conventional fuels used by the military, reports the New York Times.”
This makes as much sense as Ed Schultz’s TV show and Robert Mugabe’s economic policies (which, admittedly, have some overlap).
4.) Getting dirty — The GOP opposition researchers cometh. TheDC’s Alex Pappas reports:
“Former Mitt Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades and several other prominent Republican operatives are quietly working behind the scenes to develop a massive new organization to improve the GOP’s opposition research efforts on Democrats, The Daily Caller has learned. The new outfit, which is being referred to as ‘America Rising,; hopes to fill a void on the right and serve as a hub for various GOP groups to have access to ‘oppo’ on Democrats.”
5.) Tweet of Yesterday — Blake Hounshell: “And so I say to you, bar mitzvah, l’chaim, dreidel, mazeltov.” #ObamaInIsrael
6.) Today in North Korean News — BREAKING: “Exhibition Encourages Consumer Goods Production”
VIDEO: Jimmy Kimmel says Leno wasn’t living up to capabilities