It’s the sort of overblown abuse of power we like to laugh at in other countries, confident it could never happen here.

A multibillionaire, dissatisfied with being just a business tycoon, starts a media division, brands it with his name and starts to gobble up competition and talent. Then he decides to run for office, knowing his opposition will do the good-citizen thing and stay within the established public-finance law, considered a national model of good government. He plays by his own rules, changing parties not because his politics have changed but because otherwise he’d have no chance of winning, and outspends his competition by tens of millions of dollars. He vows if elected to put aside control of his business to avoid any conflict of interest.

He wins and it’s never clear how much he separated himself from the businesses that bear his name. When it comes time for him to step down after two terms as required by law, he decides, no, he’d prefer a third term, thank you very much, and claims a “crisis” requires his personal leadership. After meeting mogul to mogul with the owners of the city’s three leading newspapers, all three editorial boards have changes of heart and declare that what’s good for the billionaire is good for the citizens. Once running, he starts touting how well things are going, thanks to him. When a City Hall reporter asks him if he still needs to run if the crisis has passed, he’s offended and scolds the reporter: “You’re a disgrace.” He spends another fortune and bullies his way into a third term.  

The most powerful woman in the world is about to get the Hollywood treatment.

Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state—who is maybe running for president in 2016—is the subject of a new feature film about her youth. Rodham focuses on 1974, when the 26-year-old was a determined—and relatively humorless—lawyer working as a member of the House impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C. When she wasn’t helping impeach Nixon, Rodham was struggling to maintain a long-distance relationship with a suave Arkansas law professor by the name of Bill Clinton, who was himself busy running for the House of Representatives in his home state.

Rodham was written by Young Il Kim, a relatively unknown South Korean. Though casting and filming haven’t begun, the movie is set to be produced by Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen of Temple Hill Entertainment (The Twilight Saga) and directed by James Ponsoldt, whose coming-of-age drama The Spectacular Now was a standout at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The screenplay for Rodham was a hot commodity in Hollywood, earning a place on the 2012 Black List—an annual compendium of the best unproduced screenplays floating around Tinseltown. And according to The Wrap, “industry executives who have read the script claim it offers a potentially award-worthy role for one lucky ingenue.” Kim, meanwhile, has received the Sundance Institute’s Alfred P. Sloan Commissioning Grant to develop his next project—an original, untitled script based on the life of Stephen Hawking.

In recent weeks, the biggest debate in American foreign policy has been: should we intervene in Syria? Good question. Let me add two of my own: should we intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Yes, “intervene.” Present—not past—tense. You see, both countries appear headed for civil war. Last December, Iraq’s Shia Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (remember him?) tried to arrest his own finance minister, a Sunni. That sparked massive Sunni protests, which Shia troops put down ruthlessly. Now the Sunni militiamen that helped the United States fight al Qaeda during George W. Bush’s famous “surge” are turning their guns on Maliki’s Shia-dominated regime. In April, sectarian clashes killed more than 700 people, the worst monthly toll since 2008. Iraq, notes the International Crisis Group, “has begun a perilous, downward slide toward confrontation.” If all this wasn’t on the tip of your tongue, don’t feel bad. Iraq hasn’t made the front page of The New York Times in over a month.

Then there’s Afghanistan, from which the United States is supposed to withdraw by the end of next year. To fight the Taliban, the U.S. has spent the last few years arming local militias, many of which barely feign loyalty to the Afghan military. When America pulls out next year, many Afghans believe that even the pretense of a unified, pan-tribal army will crumble. (As Dexter Filkins pointed out in a brilliant New Yorker investigation last year, maintaining Afghanistan’s national army and police at their current size costs $8 billion a year, which is twice the Afghan government’s entire budget.) When that happens, Afghanistan could well slide back into the Hobbesian hell it lived through in the 1990s, except with better weapons. “Mark my words,” one pro-Western Afghan told Filkins, “the moment the Americans leave, the civil war will begin. The country will be divided into twenty-five or thirty fiefdoms, each with its own government.” If you’ve missed this too, don’t blame yourself. Despite laudable exceptions like Filkins’s New Yorker story, Afghanistan hasn’t gotten much more press coverage than Iraq. Over the past month, it’s made the Times’s front page twice. Syria, by contrast, has been there nine times.

Less than five months after Barack Obama began his second term, the 2016 presidential campaign kicked off this weekend with a Benghazi-themed attack ad that takes direct aim at Hillary Clinton.

The 90-second web ad, called “Benghazi”, was issued by the Karl Rove–founded American Crossroads, which spent more than $21 million in the last election cycle. It is the freshest evidence that hyperpartisan super-PAC slush funds are now a core part of the permanent campaign.

This American Crossroads ad matters because of its unsubtle purpose: a preemptive strike against a potential Clinton presidential campaign in 2016. Remember that through 2008, Clinton was widely considered the most polarizing figure in American politics. The days of Hillary as Republicans’ favorite member of the Obama cabinet are over. This dynamic was unlikely to the point of absurdity—a case of political amnesia brought on by a combination of her voting record in the Senate and the ’08 campaign-era conviction that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Two Republican heavy hitters are bringing manly back to their machismo-starved party.

In terms of public image, it’s hard to think of two Republican pols less alike than Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. Since his Beltway arrival this winter, the Texas senator—laboring tirelessly to cast himself as the party’s loudest, proudest, most uncompromising ideologue—has rocketed past more senior colleagues to become the GOPer that non-right-wingers love to bash. A couple hundred miles north, meanwhile, the equally in-your-face New Jersey governor reigns as the Republican non-wingers love to praise: a bellicose poster boy for pragmatic governance.

Still, Cruz and Christie possess a key similarity: an abundance of old-school manliness. Sure, one is a twangy Texan with that shit-kicking, boot-wearing thing going on (despite being a double-ivied, cosmopolitan kind of guy). The other is a Jersey bruiser, with a (much-discussed) physique reminiscent of Tony Soprano after a doughnut bender. But both are delivering a booster shot of testosterone to the GOP in a way few have managed to pull off of late.

Minnesota: 9-11 Pray Day

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann really wants a September 11 “National Day of Prayer and Fasting,” not only to commemorate the lives lost on that fateful date in 2001 and 2012, but to reflect on the things we, as Americans, have done to cause God such disappointment that he would choose to punish our country twice on the same date. “Our nation has seen judgement not once but twice on September 11 and that’s why we’re going to have ‘9-11 Pray’ on that day,” she said at a Capitol Hill event this week. “Is there anything better that we can do on that day rather than to humble ourselves and pray to an almighty God?” Bachmann has joined forces with World Net Daily editor Joseph Farah to promote the event. 9-11 Pray Day is necessary, Farah said, because the U.S. is experiencing a “slide from moral malaise to cultural hedonism” – pointing to support for gay marriage and equal rights as examples.

Texas: The Birther Ballot Bill

Nearly five years after he was first elected President of the United States, the Texas state legislature is considering a bill that would determine once and for all whether Barack Obama is actually qualified to hold the highest office in the land. The so-called Birther Bill would mandate that the Texas Secretary of State run a citizenship check on any presidential candidate to determine whether they’re qualified to be included on a Texas ballot. Ironically, one of the politicians potentially harmed by the GOP-backed legislation is Republican darling Ted Cruz, should he ever make a bid for the White House. Though his mother’s American citizenship was technically passed to him at birth, the fact that Cruz was born in Canada should--if the bill were to pass--complicate his path to the ballot box.

The Heritage Foundation was supposed to be where Jim DeMint expanded his influence. Drawing on the lessons of his term-and-change in the United States Senate representing South Carolina – DeMint stunned Washington by resigning on January 1 to take the helm of the influential, nonprofit think tank – he would use the new post to shape the national debate on a whole host of issues, and bring his brand of right-wing conservatism to bear on the Republican Party.

If moving from the Senate to a think tank seems like a step down, consider the frustrations of working in a legislature. You need to build compromise with other lawmakers, defer to party leaders, make disclosures on what you raise and what you spend, and satisfy constituent problems. It takes a lot to do this for six years, much less twelve. And given the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen’s United—which shifted money and power from elected officials to independent groups—it’s no surprise that DeMint decided to step up from the Senate to Heritage.

But less than a week after the disastrous rollout of the Heritage case against immigration reform – effectively his big debut in his new role – it seems that DeMint may have made a big miscalculation.

They are a congressional odd couple, dos amigos with a powerful third working in the wings. Both are Puerto Rican. One represents an urban district in Chicago, the other the Panhandle of Idaho.

One is a liberal Democrat. The other a conservative Republican.  Both serve on the Judiciary Committee. They schmooze over neighboring lockers in the House gym, sleep on almost identical leather sofa beds in their respective offices, and describe each other with the same word—“awesome.” And they might just be the best hope of getting comprehensive immigration reform through the House.

Meet Congressman Raúl Labrador: a low-key, second-term, Tea Party-backed 45-year-old from rural Eagle outside Boise. And Rep. Luis Gutierrez, aged 60, is an exuberant and savvy 20-year Hill vet: a Chicago insider and the first Hispanic elected to the House from the Midwest.

President Obama’s pincer movement on the middle class continues.  To the rich, Obama has bequeathed billionaire Penny Pritzker as Commerce Secretary, and to the poor he bestows North Carolina Congressman Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Administration. As for the middle class, Obama sticks them with a Social Security tax hike. So let’s consider each pincer, top and bottom.

First, from the billionaire top, Ms. Pritzker, aptly described in The Atlantic as “Obama’s Mitt Romney.”  In fact, she is far richer than Romney – and has even more money stashed offshore.

Pritzker makes Treasury Secretary Jack Lew look like an amateur.  As Forbes explained, “Lew only had $56,000 invested in the offshore venture fund.  By contrast, offshore tax avoiding trusts seems to have played a substantial role in the growth of the Pritzker fortune” that give Penny a net worth of $1.85 billion.

CIA officers at the Benghazi mission’s annex had responsibility for vetting the Libyan militia that they counted on, but failed to arrive, as one of the first responders on the night of the 9-11 anniversary attacks last September, according to U.S. intelligence officers and U.S. diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Yet the CIA has managed to avoid much Congressional scrutiny as House Republicans turn attention to the dramatic testimony of two new State Department whistleblowers this week that testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The CIA has been singled out for praise because of the heroic rescue performed by its security contractors at the Benghazi annex. On that evening, two former SEALs—Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods—helped lead a team that rescued all but two of the U.S. personnel at the Benghazi mission that evening. U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and Sean Smith, a communications specialist, died of smoke inhalation after the attackers set the U.S. compound ablaze with cans of kerosene the raiding party found after breaching its gates. Doherty and Woods were killed at around five the next morning by mortar fire.

Forget slow-news Friday. The IRS admission today that it singled out for scrutiny political action committees with the words “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names rocketed around the Internet, fueling conservatives’ feeling of persecution. 

The actions were apparently taken in isolation by workers at a local Cincinnati, Ohio, branch and announced with a public apology by Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups. 

This imposition of political impulses into IRS inquiries is completely out of line —and given the Nixon administration’s record of using audits for political purposes, the feeling of persecution has some roots in reality.  But the inevitable rhetorical rush to the ramparts—that this was part of a concerted effort by the Obama administration to investigate its political enemies—is not rooted in fact, to date. Beyond the fact that the White House and the IRS now keep each other at arm’s length because of past abuses, the larger slumber scandal at the IRS is actually a reluctance to aggressively investigate the systemic abuse of tax-exempt status by nonprofit groups in the wake of the Citizens United decision. 

First came the GOP filibuster of Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Defense secretary in February, then the slow-walk of John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director in March. In April, Republicans put a hold on Ernest Moniz’s nomination as Energy secretary, and Wednesday brought an anonymous delay of a committee vote on Thomas Perez to become secretary of Labor.

On Thursday, the brewing battle over President Obama’s political appointees blew up into a full-fledged war after Republicans boycotted a committee vote on Gina McCarthy, Obama’s nominee for Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was once an environmental adviser to Mitt Romney.

“If Republicans think we’re going to be quiet about this, they have another thing coming,” said the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. Barbara Boxer, who learned of the GOP boycott 45 minutes before she planned to hold the vote.

Conservative activists are furious with Marco Rubio. Almost every day, Breitbart and The Daily Caller slam the immigration legislation he helped draft. A week ago, National Review put Rubio’s face on its cover above the word “Folly.” The Tea Party Patriots recently staged an “intervention” targeting Rubio’s legislation. And the man Rubio has called his mentor, former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, just unveiled a Heritage Foundation report alleging that Rubio’s bill will cost over $6 trillion.

Rubio should thank them all for boosting his chances of winning the presidency in 2016.

Earlier this week, Daily Beast contributor Stuart Stevens argued that Rubio’s work on immigration reform “offers almost no foreseeable political gains with his party’s base.” But the Republican base isn’t Rubio’s problem. Yes, Rubio’s immigration push will hurt him among his party’s most hard-core ideologues. But the candidates they support rarely win. Of the last five Republican presidential nominees—Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush—none were the most conservative major candidates in the GOP primary. But each won because they were conservative enough and because the party establishment rallied behind them. As Ramesh Ponnuru has pointed out, “the Republican establishment always wins presidential-nomination contests, and conservative insurgents almost never do.”

Rand Paul makes his maiden 2016 journey into Iowa on Friday to introduce himself to a Republican Party that has been largely overtaken by his father’s top allies.

And that unique dynamic could prove critical to his chances in the first-in-the-nation caucus state as he prepares for a likely White House run.

Iowa Republican Party chairman A.J. Spiker says the senator’s rollicking 13-hour March filibuster against the president’s drone policy was the impetus behind the decision to extend the invitation to the Kentucky freshman to headline Friday’s Lincoln Day dinner in Cedar Rapids.

Say this for Glenn Beck: the guy really knows how to make an entrance.

Just as it was announced last week that the cable distributor Cablevision has picked up the conservative shock-jock’s fledgling Internet channel, The Blaze, Beck has again found himself fending off a series of controversies of his own making.

First, there was his keynote address at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in which he appeared to compare Mike Bloomberg to Hitler—only to later say that in fact, he was only comparing the New York City mayor to Lenin. A few days prior, on his radio show, he said that God “has got to destroy us” because “We are denying his existence. We are denying his power. We are slapping him in the face.”  And the week before, he had alleged a coverup by the federal government in the Boston Marathon bombings.