AdamSmith

Our local reviewer liked it. Looks promising! ‘I’m So Excited’ a raunchy, hilarious mile-high ride Genre: Comedy Running Time: 89 min MPAA rating: R Release Date: 2013-06-28 By "Lewis Beale" Triangle.com An outrageous gay-centric sex farce, “I’m So Excited” features loads of raunchy sex talk and is probably the filthiest film you’ll see all year. It’s also one of the funniest. Definitely not for mainstream tastes, director Pedro Almodovar’s latest is a drug- and alcohol-fueled fantasy, in which gender-bending is normal, and there is so much in-flight sex, it seems the entire cast is flying the (very) friendly skies. Set on a plane ride from Madrid to Mexico City, the movie’s plot describes what happens after the pilots discover their landing gear isn’t working properly, and they have to circle for hours until Spanish authorities prepare an airstrip for an emergency touchdown. In order not to create a panic, the crew decides to drug the entire economy class, effectively knocking them out during the crisis. At the same time, a trio of gay flight attendants in business class – one of whom is having an affair with the plane’s bisexual captain – keeps the drinks coming, mixing some of them with whatever drug they can find onboard (a cocktail of champagne, orange juice and mescaline proves particularly popular). And in the film’s most hysterical scene, these cabaret-loving guys decide to pep up things by lip-synching a choreographed routine to the classic Pointer Sisters title song. But wait. There’s more. The co-pilot, who has had drunken sex with the pilot, is trying to figure out if he’s gay or not; one of the passengers is a Mexican hit man who winds up sleeping with his seatmate, a famous dominatrix; a man has honeymoon sex with his wife in their seats while she is totally wigged out on dope; and a virgin who claims to have psychic powers loses her virginity in a most unusual way. Detractors might say this film is another example of the ongoing decline of Western civilization. It’s unashamedly amoral, filled with ridiculously foul-mouthed characters, absolutely pro-drugs, and makes fun of everything from religion to air tragedies. It is also, thanks to a sequence in the middle set in Madrid, not always consistent in tone. And if you’re not a fan of gaudy Crayola colors – the kind that look as if they were shot for a Judy Garland musical – then this is not the film for you. But if you are the kind of person who loves blue humor at the service of camp sensibility, if you think that a trio of bitchy queens is pure entertainment and if you find numerous comments about male body parts (especially, well, you know which one) hysterical, then you are the kind of gloriously depraved person this movie was made for. So go ahead and enjoy it. Films like this one, made for your very particular demographic, don’t come around very often. http://events.triangle.com/reviews/show/14498803-im-so-excited-a-raunchy-hilarious-mile-high-ride

How disillusioning! Hardly even worth the trouble of talking back to your TV or YouTube then.

I think I would prefer poltergeists to some heavy-footed and loudmouthed upstairs neighbors I have endured.

Both links work for me.

Thanks for that. Good to see the real story.

Her own article seems clear enough: ...I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now. And in these times, when things like the Boston bombing happen, you spend a lot of time on the internet reading about it and, if you are my exceedingly curious news junkie of a twenty-year-old son, you click a lot of links when you read the myriad of stories. You might just read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet and you will in all probability, if you are that kid, click the link provided. Which might not raise any red flags. Because who wasn’t reading those stories? Who wasn’t clicking those links? But my son’s reading habits combined with my search for a pressure cooker and my husband’s search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters... https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724

I love it when you talk dirty.

Blatantly stolen from edjames who posted this on the other site: On the morning that Daylight Savings Time ended, I stopped in to visit my aging friend. He was busy covering his penis with black shoe polish. So I say to the man: "Sean, you're supposed to turn your clock back."

From the White House tapes, Nixon complaining that 'All in the Family' glorifies homosexuality, and ranting about how homosexuality drags down nations: http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/07/24/our-nixon-homosexuality.cnn.html

Uruguay votes to create world's first national legal marijuana marketProposals likely to become law, leading to innovative policies at odds with the 'war on drugs' philosophy Associated Press in Montevideo theguardian.com, Thursday 1 August 2013 00.07 EDT Uruguayan MPs vote through the bill legalising a marijuana market. Photograph: AFP Uruguay's unprecedented plan to create a legal marijuana market has taken its critical first step in the lower house of Congress. All 50 members of the ruling Broad Front coalition approved the proposal just before midnight on Wednesday in a party line vote, keeping a narrow majority of the 96 MPs present after more than 13 hours of passionate debate. The measure now goes to the Senate, where passage is expected to make Uruguay the first country in the world to license and enforce rules for the production, distribution and sale of marijuana for adult consumers. Legislators in the ruling coalition said putting the government at the centre of a legal marijuana industry is worth trying because the global war on drugs had been a costly and bloody failure, and displacing illegal dealers through licensed marijuana sales could save money and lives. They also hope to eliminate a legal contradiction in Uruguay, where it has been legal to use marijuana but against the law to sell it, buy it, produce it or possess even one plant. "Uruguay appears poised, in the weeks ahead, to become the first nation in modern times to create a legal, regulated framework for marijuana," said John Walsh, a drug policy expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. "In doing so, Uruguay will be bravely taking a leading role in establishing and testing a compelling alternative to the prohibitionist paradigm." Opponents of the proposal warned that marijuana use led to harder drugs and said fostering the bad habits of users was playing with fire. President José Mujica had postponed voting for six months to give supporters more time to rally public opinion. However, recent polls said two-thirds of Uruguayans remained opposed despite a "responsible regulation" campaign for the bill. National Party deputy Gerardo Amarilla said the government was underestimating the risk of marijuana, which he called a "gateway drug" for other chemical addictions that foster violent crimes. "Ninety-eight percent of those who are today destroying themselves with base cocaine began with marijuana," Amarilla said. "I believe that we're risking too much. I have the sensation that we're playing with fire." Dozens of pro-marijuana activists followed the debate from balconies overlooking the house floor, while others outside held signs and danced to reggae music. "This law consecrates a reality that already exists: The marijuana sales market has existed for a long time, but illegally, buying it from traffickers, and in having plants in your house for which you can be thrown in jail," said Camilo Collazo, a 25-year-old anthropology student. "We want to put an end to this, to clean up and normalise the situation." Mujica said he never consumed marijuana, but that the regulations were necessary because many other people did. "Never in my life did I try it, nor do I have any idea what it is," he told the local radio station Carve. The secretary-general of the Organisation of American States, José Miguel Inzulza, told Mujica last week his members had no objections. But Pope Francis said during his visit to Brazil that the "liberalisation of drugs, which is being discussed in several Latin American countries, is not what will reduce the spread of chemical substances". Under the legislation, Uruguay's government would license growers, sellers and consumers, and update a confidential registry to keep people from buying more than 40g a month. Carrying, growing or selling marijuana without a licence could bring prison terms, but licensed consumers could grow up to six plants at a time at home. Growing clubs with up to 45 members each would be encouraged, fostering enough marijuana production to drive out unlicensed dealers and draw a line between marijuana smokers and users of harder drugs. The latest proposal "has some adjustments, aimed at strengthening the educational issue and prohibiting driving under the effects of cannabis", ruling coalition deputy Sebastian Sabini said. "There will be self-growing clubs, and it will also be possible to buy marijuana in pharmacies" that is mass-produced by private companies. An Institute for Regulation and Control of Cannabis would be created, with the power to grant licences for all aspects of a legal industry to produce marijuana for recreational, medicinal or industrial use. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/aug/01/uruguay-first-legal-marijuana-market

Obstructionist Republicans in Congress are a big part of Obama's problem, to be sure. But another part of it seems to be that he just does not enjoy arm-wrestling with Congress. Whereas Clinton loved it. I read that he (Bill) would spend many evenings from like 6pm to 9pm on the phone with House members and senators, working them and horse-trading and so on to get legislation through that he wanted. The health care bill is, to my thinking, better than nothing. But if LBJ had wanted a public option in such a bill, you can bet he would have gotten it. Congressmen coming out of a meeting with LBJ would be met with a standing joke: "Well, did he get you in a half-Johnson or a full-Johnson?"

The unraveling of Anthony Weiner Critics say the question at this point is just how delusional Weiner will get. | AP Photo By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE and MAGGIE HABERMAN | 7/30/13 5:13 PM EDT Updated: 7/31/13 1:49 PM EDT politico.com Anthony Weiner has lost his mind. At least, that’s the conclusion most Democrats have come to. There’s really no other way they can explain how he’s handled the revelations of his post-resignation sexts and his combative encounters with voters over the weekend looking for him to quit the mayor’s race. But Monday night’s needlessly dismissive brush off of the Clintons — the first family of Democratic politics who consider his wife a second daughter — surprised even people who thought they couldn’t be surprised anymore by his political self-destructiveness. And all for a campaign that’s plummeting in the polls and heading, with every passing hour, toward a seemingly more inevitable fiery end. The question at this point isn’t whether he’ll win or be able to use his 2013 campaign to purge memories of his 2011 humiliation. It’s just how defiant and, his critics argue, delusional, Weiner will get. He recently suggested, for example, that the latest sexting revelations, and whatever else may be coming, will actually benefit him in the race and once he gets to City Hall. “I’m going to be a successful mayor because of it,” he told the Staten Island Advance, “because it’s going to give me a level of independence.” Somewhat amazingly, he tried for sympathy about being betrayed by his online liaisons — people, Weiner told the Daily News, “who I thought were friends, people I trusted when I communicated with them.” But the topper may have been Monday night, when he made another unforced and flagrant foul. Responding to reports that associates of Bill and Hillary Clinton believe they want him out of the race, Weiner said the opinions of the man who gave Huma Abedin away to him at their wedding and his wife’s long-time boss — who also happen to be a former Democratic president and potentially future one — don’t matter to him because they live in Westchester. “I am not terribly interested in what people who are not voters in the city of New York have to say,” Weiner said, even as Abedin was in Washington staffing Hillary Clinton for her visits with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. “He looks a guy who’s at the deep end of the pool and he really doesn’t know how to swim. For a guy whose whole reputation was how smart a political guy he was, how good he was on camera, how quick witted he was, this is part of the process of unraveling,” said Bill Cunningham, a former communications director for Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Weiner’s got two options, Cunningham said: Keep taking questions that prompt more incredible answers or refuse to speak about the scandal and get accused of going into hiding. “Either way,” Cunningham said, “he’s caught in this spiral.” Several Democrats who knew him when he was in Congress believe the recent display is who Weiner actually is — an unvarnished version, perhaps, stripped of the protection of a government office and membership to the Washington club, but the real Weiner nonetheless. “Remember, this is someone who thought he was unfairly pushed from office,” said one source, referring to the initial days of scandal in 2011, when he admitted to sending messages he’d initially claimed were the work of hackers. In private conversations with Democratic leadership at the time, Weiner defiantly insisted he shouldn’t have to quit, since he had broken no laws and his mistakes were personal failings, multiple sources said. His mantra then was “let the voters decide.” The mayoral campaign, and this last week in particular, have taken that to an extreme degree. “I think this is the real Anthony. … He saw himself as a contender,” said one veteran operative who knows Weiner. The problem now, the operative said, is not so much Weiner’s behavior as his “truthfulness” in describing it publicly. More than anything, even people who thought Weiner had a real shot at making a mayoral runoff have expressed surprise that he didn’t get everything out in the open in a New York Times magazine profile that effectively kicked off his campaign. Weiner’s every event now has a carnival-like quality. On Tuesday, his beleaguered press aide, Barbara Morgan, told reporters ahead of a candidates’ forum that he would speak to them after the event, which proved untrue when the spindly Weiner walked briskly down the stairs and away from the throng giving chase. A CNN reporter yelled a question at him about whether he’d fired off any recent sexts, after he gave a fuzzy answer to the Daily News. A debate ensued between the reporter and Morgan as to whether Weiner actually answered the question. “He said no,” Morgan said repeatedly. Even in an age of resurrections — Eliot Spitzer is running ahead for city comptroller, and Andrew Dice Clay got himself a starring role in the new Woody Allen movie — Weiner is pushing the limits. Instead of using 2013 to wipe 2011 clean from people’s minds and give him a fresh start for the next run, he’s brought the scandal back into the present and created more bad blood than there ever was when he resigned in tears. New Yorkers appear to have gotten tired of the performance. A Quinnipiac poll out Monday showed not just that he’d tumbled to fourth place, but that 53 percent of New Yorkers want him out of the race. The reservoir of good will and second chances appears to be heading quickly down the drain, and Weiner is at the dangerous point for a politician where many people would be ready to believe just about anything about him and doubt every word that comes out of his mouth. Weiner’s response has been defiance, still appearing to try to outsmart questions and refusing direct answers. He told a woman over the weekend who asked how he could run after behavior that would have gotten her fired that he was moving on to other voters he might be able to win. If there is any a strategy left, Weiner’s hope seems to be that the rest of the field remains weak enough and that New Yorkers remain susceptible enough to his street bruiser politicking charm that he’ll be able to recover ahead of the Sept. 10 primary. He’ll try to tap into the same New Yorker spirit that responded to Ed Koch — a coalition of had-it-up-to-here and outer-borough voters who responded to the former mayor’s puckishness and middle-class pitch that put him over the top in the equally crowded 1977 Democratic primary. Weiner has made the Koch comparison himself explicitly before. He even made it to Koch directly before the former mayor died, looking for an endorsement by arguing “I’m trying to be just like you,” recalled Koch’s former press secretary and confidant, George Arzt. Koch said no. “There’s something about Weiner that just irritated Koch,” Arzt, now a New York-based Democratic consultant, said. Weiner is proving every day just how unlike Koch he is, Arzt argued, and how deep in trouble he’s gotten. “He’s a guy who’s run amok. He’s in desperate shape, and he’s just trying to find a way to salvage a public career — not only a political career,” he said. “He looks like a punch-drunk guy trying to survive the fight, and he’s just wobbling around the ring, and getting hit with every punch from all directions.” As Weiner tells the story, he’s Rocky (circa Rocky II). “I think in an odd way, this is a great test for the kind of mayor I will be,” he said in the Daily News interview. “I will not quit on my stool.” But Cunningham said New York is past the point of caring whether or not Weiner wants to give up. “Once you become a punch line, once you become a running joke and once you start to show flashes of temper and annoyance at questions about a situation he himself created,” he said, “I think you’ve kicked out all the legs of the three-legged stool.” Clarification: Due to an error made by the New York Daily News in transcription, POLITICO has removed a quote from that paper’s interview with Weiner because it was out of context. Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/anthony-weiner-unraveling-94940.html#ixzz2ajlkfnci

Hillary Clinton's 2008 slaps still sting President Obama Obama’s aides say he was never as clueless as Clinton portrayed him. | AP Photo By GLENN THRUSH | 8/1/13 5:01 AM EDT Updated: 8/1/13 8:17 AM EDT politico.com “Friendship” was the main course during Hillary Clinton’s lunch with President Barack Obama this week, according to an Obama spokesman, but no one could have blamed Clinton for ordering a small side of I-told-you-so. Much of the bombastic campaign rhetoric from 2008 — think “3 a.m. call” — proved as ephemeral as the thousands of half-melted “Hillary” candy bars Clinton’s staff handed out on Super Tuesday five years ago. But some of Clinton’s most memorable ‘08 shots at Obama have had resonance far beyond the short shelf life of the standard campaign hit parade: her mockery of his vow to transform Washington in his own image, her cry of “elitism” and her skepticism about his managerial chops echo today in the form of GOP attacks and the lingering doubts of some in his own party. Clinton’s campaign attacks on Obama may have been an exaggerated version of reality, but in retrospect they were illuminating, in the way a hand grenade provides a flash of light before going boom. Former Clinton staffers didn’t want to be within a mile of this story. (“I’m hanging up now,” said one top ’08 campaign aide cheerfully before the line went dead.) But several more intrepid ex-aides pointed to one quote in particular: a Clinton broadside delivered in Toledo, Ohio, on Feb. 24, 2008, that represented her most stinging attack on Obama’s core hope-and-change message. “I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified,” Clinton said, voice dripping with contempt long since discarded. “The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect,” Clinton added. “Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this will be. You are not going to wave a magic wand…” It was caricature — but a little prescient too. In 2012, Obama downplayed his soaring change-Washington mantra, replacing it with a very Hillary ’08 focus on the economy, competence and rationality – the stuff of incumbents and battle-scarred DC veterans. Exactly what Clinton had been four years earlier. Longtime Clinton adviser James Carville, who was in close touch with the Clinton family during the rocky ’08 primaries, says Obama has come to recognize what Hillary Clinton had already learned during her eight tough years in the White House: Transcendental politics works on a campaign, but not so much when it comes to governing. “His message was “I can transcend Washington’ — her message was ‘I can bend it, I can cut through it.’ Guess which one turned out to be right?” Carville said. “I got nothing against the president and his people. Hell, when [bill] Clinton came to Washington, he believed that stuff too. … But the system in Washington devours everything. It always wins. The power of it is awesome to watch. Hillary understood that [in 2008], and he gets it now.” Obama’s aides say he was never as clueless as Clinton — or any of his subsequent critics — portrayed him. Voters need inspiration, not just perspiration, and he was hoping his message would spur the GOP to compromise, they say. “You don’t go out in a campaign and sell a B-plus, you go out and give people an ideal,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman who was a mainstay of Obama’s 2008 campaign press operation. “I think that was — and is — a key part of what made the president so successful. … And he didn’t know that the GOP leadership would make derailing progress their one and only priority.” Many of Clinton’s claims have turned out to be total duds — especially on foreign policy, where Obama has proven to be less the doe-eyed naif than the cautious caretaker who signed off on Afghanistan troop withdrawals only after approving one final military surge. But comments about his overall approach to governing have been more durable, and frequently re-purposed by Republicans. “There’s a big difference between us — speeches versus solutions, talk versus action,” Clinton said, also in the make-or-break month of February 2008. “Speeches don’t put food on the table. Speeches don’t fill up your tank, or fill your prescription, or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night.” A more pointed, and more controversial, statement came in late January 2008, when Clinton questioned Obama’s ability to control Congress — with a comparison of Martin Luther King and President Johnson, which many Obama backers took to be a veiled racial swipe. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Clinton told Fox News on the eve of Obama’s blowout win in the African-American-dominated South Carolina primary. “It took a president to get it done,” she added. In the short term, Clinton’s quip was a classic rhetorical boomerang, cleverly stoked by Obama’s staff and surrogates who did little to discourage the implication that it revealed the candidate’s hidden feelings on race. But the negative comparisons to LBJ have intensified over the years, much to the chagrin of Obama’s staff. Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/barack-obama-hillary-clinton-2008-campaign-95035.html#ixzz2ajiwqMVO

Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Feds Philip Bump 10:09 AM ET The Atlantic Wire Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling? Catalano (who is a professional writer) describes the tension of that visit. [T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. ... Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did. The men identified themselves as members of the "joint terrorism task force." The composition of such task forces depend on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, include a variety of federal agencies. Among them: the FBI and Homeland Security. Ever since details of the NSA's surveillance infrastructure were leaked by Edward Snowden, the agency has been insistent on the boundaries of the information it collects. It is not, by law, allowed to spy on Americans — although there are exceptions of which it takes advantage. Its PRISM program, under which it collects internet content, does not include information from Americans unless those Americans are connected to terror suspects by no more than two other people. It collects metadata on phone calls made by Americans, but reportedly stopped collecting metadata on Americans' internet use in 2011. So how, then, would the government know what Catalano and her husband were searching for? It's possible that one of the two of them is tangentially linked to a foreign terror suspect, allowing the government to review their internet activity. After all, that "no more than two other people" ends up covering millions of people. Or perhaps the NSA, as part of its routine collection of as much internet traffic as it can, automatically flags things like Google searches for "pressure cooker" and "backpack" and passes on anything it finds to the FBI. Or maybe it was something else. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on XKeyscore, a program eerily similar to Facebook search that could clearly allow an analyst to run a search that picked out people who'd done searches for those items from the same location. How those searches got into the government's database is a question worth asking; how the information got back out seems apparent. It is also possible that there were other factors that prompted the government's interest in Catalano and her husband. He travels to Asia, she notes in her article. Who knows. Which is largely Catalano's point. They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1% of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to. One hundred times a week, groups of six armed men drive to houses in three black SUVs, conducting consented-if-casual searches of the property perhaps in part because of things people looked up online. But the NSA doesn't collect data on Americans, so this certainly won't happen to you. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/67864/

For a Split GOP, 2016 Can't Come Soon Enough Philip Bump 9:26 AM ET The Atlantic Wire The irony of the Republican Party's success in blocking the Democratic Senate and Democratic president is that the party itself is being blocked in the same way: a committed, uncompromising minority stands in its way. But it's not always the same minority. The Republican Party is in an increasingly obvious struggle over its identity — one with its roots in the voters that comprise it. The most public split was the very public tiff between New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. If you missed it, last week Christie bashed those in his party who critique the NSA's surveillance, suggesting that concerns over the program were "esoteric" ones that wouldn't hold up in the face of those who'd lost loved ones on 9/11. Paul responded by calling Christie the "king of bacon" for his push for relief following Hurricane Sandy. Then Paul asked Christie to get a beer with him, and Christie declined, and so on. Perhaps a bit further down in its article than was warranted, Politico summarized the real problem: In some respects, the Christie-Paul blowup is a case study in the Republican Party’s internal divisions: The two men hail from such different wings of the GOP, and both are so nationally ambitious, that there is little short-term risk in escalating their rivalry. The "different wings" part of that is key. Christie's (relative) social moderation and support for the (limited) power of government represents the old wing of the Republican party. Paul's (relative) social conservatism and nouveau libertarianism is the new breed, an evolution of his Tea Party roots for the national stage. This is the sort of thing that often gets worked out in a presidential primary. In 2012, however, the party focused on getting rid of Barack Obama in lieu of identifying its own direction. Mitt Romney, from the Christie strain of Republicanism, tried on the Paul strain during the primaries. The mess that resulted needs no further explanation. But it meant that the party didn't try to bridge that gap, pushing off the debate until 2016. Which is why Christie and Paul have already taken it up. And it means that it's not really their fault. In a poll conducted by Pew Research released on Wednesday, that split is immediately apparent. Pew asked Republican voters about how the party is faring and how it might need to change. Three sets of responses are worth pulling out. Graphics here: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/08/split-gop-2016-cant-come-soon-enough/67861/ In order, the charts show that: More than two-thirds of Republican voters think the party needs major change, Sixty percent of voters think that change needs to be a new set of positions, and Fifty-four percent think those positions should be more conservative while 40 percent think they should be more moderate. See the problem? And it gets worse — respondents disagreed widely on even bedrock positions of the Republican Party. They were split on whether or not the party's positions on abortion, gay marriage, and guns were too conservative. Only on government was there broad agreement. By a four-to-one margin, Republicans thought the party needed to be more conservative on government spending. Even on that, though, Capitol Hill Republicans are fighting. A weird procedural hiccup yesterday forced leadership in the House — the Republican-led chamber were the party's rifts are most commonly apparent — to shift its approach to key votes on a budget measure. It was largely insider stuff, but for observers like Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler, it was revelatory. In short, the party couldn't figure out how to cobble together votes that would maintain Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin's budget proposals. t raises much bigger, existential questions for the Republicans as a national party. If they can’t execute key elements of their governing agenda, even just to establish their negotiating positions opposite the Democrats, what can they do, and what argument can they possibly make for controlling more (or all) of Washington? In March, we made a map of GOP infighting. This week, we made a new version — which is far more complex. Until the Republican party re-coalesces, those charts probably aren't going to be getting much simpler. In other words, for the GOP, the 2016 primaries can't come fast enough. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/08/split-gop-2016-cant-come-soon-enough/67861/

The Time Hillary Was Right About Obama in 2008 Elspeth Reeve 11:01 AM ET The Atlantic Wire Some people wondered why Hillary Clinton failed to inspired voters in the 2008 presidential campaign with an explicitly cynical message. Mocking then-Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton said, "I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified… The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect." Get real, she said. She'd lived through the 90s. "Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this will be. You are not going to wave a magic wand…" She did not win the Democratic nomination. But, Politico's Glenn Thrush points out, history has proved her right. Even Obama admits his speeches don't work like magic on House Republicans. Obama himself has explicitly endorsed the no-magic-wands view. "I wish I had a magic wand and could make this all happen on my own," Obama said of congressional inaction on the DREAM Act in 2011. Earlier this year, he complained, "Even though most people agree that I'm being reasonable; that most people agree I'm presenting a fair deal; the fact they don't take it means I should somehow do a Jedi mind meld with these folks and convince them to do what's right." I told you so, Clinton adviser James Carville says. "His message was 'I can transcend Washington' — her message was 'I can bend it, I can cut through it,'" Carville told Politico. "Guess which one turned out to be right?" Many commentators have urged Obama to show leadership by somehow transcending partisan politics. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd, for example, has pointed to the leadership shown in the movie The American President. But she's also suggested Obama could learn from the Clintons' experience in the '90s. "The Clintons have emerged stronger on the back end of their scandals," Dowd said. "America’s ultimate survivors are now truly potent or dangerous, depending on how you look at it, because Americans love them Bridget Jones-style, just the way they are, warts and all." In fact, Clinton learned so much as first lady that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid thinks she'd be able to top Bill Clinton's performance. "I think that they’re a pretty good team, but she’ll handle things probably even better than he did," Reid told PBS. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/08/time-hillary-was-right-about-obama-2008/67862/

Crossfire: Nixon with no expletives deleted Posted by CNN's Joe Von Kanel Video here: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/31/nixon-with-no-expletives-deleted/?hpt=hp_t5 Nixon with no expletives deleted (CNN) - In preparing for the re-launch of Crossfire, we discovered this interview in the CNN archives. In November of 1982, Crossfire host Pat Buchanan sat down with his former boss, ex-President Richard Nixon. Their conversation touched on many of the famous people Nixon had known, including Dwight Eisenhower, the Kennedy brothers and Lyndon Johnson. Nixon also reminisced about being Vice President and disclosed what he looks for in any president. His picks for the three best politicians of the 20th century probably will surprise you. If all you know of Nixon is “Watergate” –or if you still want to impeach him for it- take a moment to watch these clips: Nixon’s insights are fascinating – both about people he knew and about problems that are still current in 2013. Finally, a WARNING: We mean it when we say we aren’t deleting expletives! Wait until you hear his comments –on camera but during a commercial break- about the then-new first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. Watch OUR NIXON, a CNN FILMS documentary, airing Thursday 9 p.m. ET and PT on CNN. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/31/nixon-with-no-expletives-deleted/?hpt=hp_t5