1. CBS Hails ‘True Compromise’ on Budget; Hypes Opposition from ‘Some Conservatives’ Nancy Cordes heralded the proposed budget deal from Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray as a “true compromise” on Wednesday’s CBS This Morning, and asserted that “the reason it’s so important is that it could bring an end to this terrible cycle, where Congress can’t agree on a yearly budget.” Cordes also returned to her slanted language about sequestration, stating that the proposal “partially rolls back those deep, across-the-board spending cuts.” The correspondent also played up how “the agreement won’t win support from some conservatives,” and that “there are bound to be some conservatives who don’t like it.” She didn’t use such ideological labeling in reference to opposition from liberals. Instead, Cordes merely noted that “many Senate Democrats…don’t think the deal’s perfect, but they can live with it.”

2. MSNBC’s Fineman: Sounding ‘Nuts’ with ‘Outrageous Statements’ is a Plus in Tea Party
On Tuesday’s All In show on MSNBC, during a discussion of Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman’s primary challenge to Senator John Cornyn, MSNBC political analyst Howard Fineman asserted that, “if you don’t make outrageous statements,” the Tea Party movement will not consider you to be “serious.” Referring to some of Stockman’s more controversial statements, Fineman reacted: “For the Tea Party people, their whole ethos is, if you don’t make outrageous statements, you aren’t serious. And it sounds nuts to a lot of the rest of the people in the country, but that’s the world they live in. That’s what turns them on. That’s how they raise their money. That’s how they turn out their vote.”

3. MSNBC’s Hayes Pushes Hiring More Govt Workers, Jokes ‘Let’s Just Have Another Census’
On Tuesday’s All In on MSNBC, during a discussion of the federal budget and spending on poverty programs, host Chris Hayes suggesting reducing unemployment by having the government hire workers as he jokingly suggested having another census because unemployment dropped the last time census workers were hired. After guest Tom Colocchio of Food Policy Action called for more “job training programs so they can actually get back to work,” Hayes jumped in: “How about we just, you know, one of my favorite, we don’t have this graph because I didn’t think to prepare this for the show, but thre’s this graph of the recovery, and there’s this little part of the graph, okay, where the recovery, the jobs recovery ticks up very dramatically, and it’s the census hiring, and then it goes back down after it. And I’m like, let’s just have another census, like for the love of God, people.”

4. NBC: Obama’s Handshake With Castro ‘A True Mandela Moment’
After Brian Williams touted President Obama’s handshake with Cuban dictator Raul Castro as “one of the better moments” at Tuesday’s memorial service for Nelson Mandela, correspondent Lester Holt went further on Wednesday’s NBC Today, hailing the encounter as “a true Mandela moment.” A soundbite followed of Democratic Congressman John Lewis gushing: “It’s the power of Nelson Mandela to bring President Barack Obama together and Raul Castro together here in South Africa.” Prior to Williams on Tuesday, Holt had similarly declared that “the measure of Mandela [was] so great” that “America’s presidents shared a stage” with Castro.