LOUISIANA

“John C. Reilly reigned as Bacchus as the super krewe wound its massive floats down St. Charles Avenue Sunday, February 15, 2015.” – Baton Rouge Advocate

“The krewes of Proteus and Orpheus will roll early Monday night (Feb. 16) in hopes of beating the rain that is heading for New Orleans. The routes also have been slightly shortened.” – NOLA.com

“Seven months after the Legislature overhauled the way special education students can earn a traditional high school diploma state leaders are still grappling with how to do so.” – Baton Rouge Advocate

“As they look for solutions to next year’s budget problems, lawmakers are finding themselves boxed in by Gov. Bobby Jindal’s rhetoric and trying to find loopholes.” – Lake Charles American Press

“But neither Scalise nor his staff are saying much about the meetings or the controversy. Requests for comments after Scalise met with Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans, and Henderson, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, didn’t generate an answer from Scalise’s usually very responsive press team.” – NOLA.com

“Texas Brine Co. is asking the Louisiana Office of Conservation to allow it to stop $875 evacuation assistance checks the company pays weekly to a few remaining residents and property owners in Bayou Corne.” – Houma Courier

“New Orleans is at a crucial junction with the pending adoption of new zoning rules — the first since the 1970s — that could allow condominiums and commercial properties to be built along the iconic Mississippi River.” – Shreveport Times

“Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans, announced Friday that he won’t attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled March 3 address to a joint session of Congress.” – NOLA.com

“Louisiana State Police are making their presence known this Carnival season with over 115 arrests in the New Orleans area.” – Fox 8 Live

“When LSU went searching for a wide receivers coach to replace Adam Henry, Les Miles didn’t take long to reel in the next assistant on his staff.” – Geaux 247

NATIONAL

“Egypt launched airstrikes against Islamic State targets in neighboring Libya on Monday, hours after militants there released a video purporting to show the mass beheading of Egyptian Christian hostages.” – USA Today

“Oregon governor John Kitzhaber may have announced that he will resign, but a sweeping FBI investigation of him and his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes, is only getting started. While the story involves personal failings, the green-energy lobbying scandal that brought them down has national lessons and implications. If oil companies and pharmaceutical concerns shouldn’t exercise undue influence in government, the same is true for green energy — which can’t yet survive in the marketplace without giant subsidies or special tax favors.” – John Fund/National Review“Heads bowed in terror the orange-clad Kurdish fighters are paraded through streets filled with jeering militants in the latest horrifying video release from Islamic State. In a grim echo of the terrible fate which befell Jordanian pilot Lieutenant Muath al-Kaseasbeh the captives, reportedly Peshmerga fighters, are dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackled in cages.  Just as Lt. al-Kaseasbeh was burned alive on camera, IS are planning to do the same with their latest prisoners, according to posts on social media.” – UK Daily Mail

“Top advisers to the billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer helped run a green group, financed in part by Steyer himself, that is at the center of a corruption scandal that could force the Democratic governor of Oregon to resign.” – Washington Free Beacon

“There are newspaper corrections that sincerely intend to repair the record … and then there are New York Times ‘corrections’ to columns that should never have run in the first place. On Friday, the Paper of Record published a Gail Collins essay blaming Scott Walker’s cuts to education funding in Wisconsin for teacher layoffs that took place in 2010. There were only two problems with the column: Scott Walker didn’t take office until 2011, and his public-employee union reforms actually prevented cuts that would have resulted in even more K-12 layoffs. Either of those could have been easily checked, but would have been obvious to anyone who paid the least bit of attention to the controversy in Wisconsin over the last four years.” – Hot Air

“History tells us that there is no high correlation between graduating from college and being a good president. The Wikipedia page ‘Lists of United States Presidents by education’ tells us that 11 of our 43 presidents (Grover Cleveland, who served non-consecutive terms, is counted as the 22nd and 24th, which is why President Obama is counted as the 44th though only 43 have served) did not graduate from college and that 32 did. Of those 32, 11 graduated from Ivy League colleges, three from military academies, two from state flagship universities and 18 from other colleges.” – Michael Barone/Washington Examiner

“Lane Hall, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, took the microphone and told the restless, angry crowd that democracy cannot work as it currently stands. Lane went on to say there are other systems that America should use, even if history has an extremely negative view of them, prompting rowdy cheers from most in the crowd.” – College Fix

“Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to give a Little League championship ring to each member of the beleaguered Jackie Robinson West All Stars baseball team.” – Chicago Sun-Times

“The official sign-up season for President Barack Obama’s health care law may be over, but leading congressional Democrats say millions of Americans facing new tax penalties deserve a second chance. Three senior House members told The Associated Press that they plan to strongly urge the administration to grant a special sign-up opportunity for uninsured taxpayers who will be facing fines under the law for the first time this year.” – AP

“‘Energy romanticism’ is perhaps the single greatest intellectual failing of environmentalists—the dreamy view that we can generate 95 quads of energy with puppy dog treadmills, unicorn flopsweat, and of course their beloved wind and solar. (Of course, most enviros say “What’s a ‘quad’?” when I ask for even a cursory inventory of energy sources that would supply America’s annual energy use.)” – Steven Hayward/Power Line