DELETED SCENE & BLOOPERS: bit.ly Ian is annoyed with how obsessed Anthony is with Siri, so he throws it at a wall. Siri begins to feel different. ———————————— Hey it’s our very own website: smosh.com Oh and our Facebook page facebook.com Want to know when we’re filming and/or pooping? Now you can: twitter.com

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WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama promised to change Washington’s ways. Yet he’s as caught up in them as ever. As the week began, Obama kicked off his re-election bid with a sunny video of people talking about their hopes and needs, the very image of life outside Washington politics. By week’s end, Obama was mired in budget negotiations, canceling trips and scrambling to stave off a government shutdown that could only undermine the public’s faith in his leadership. It was the messy business of governing, and how it’s going to be in this long campaign for incumbent Obama. Beyond the vision for economic competitiveness he wants to talk about, Obama is chasing a second term while trying to make a deeply divided government work. He got bogged down in legislative tactics in his first two years, even when he won fights on health care and other issues. The goal now is to avoid all that. He can’t. In this test of leadership, the White House says Obama wrangled the budget compromise he wanted, spending cuts he supported without shelving his priorities or accepting unacceptable policy changes. His administration portrayed it as an example of bipartisan cooperation of the highest stakes. Yet the government was on the brink of closing, and many people were wondering how that could happen, or why. This is change? The showdown was a reminder that for all a president’s powers, there’s much beyond control. Think Libya, Egypt, Japan’s earthquake, not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan. In this case, the new House Republican majority, led by Speaker John Boehner, seized on a must-pass budget bill to give voice to frustrated voters and tea party conservatives who demanded spending cuts. It was brinksmanship mode again in the capital, where nothing gets done until the deadline. Sometimes not even then. In public, Obama tried to keep it at arm’s length. “I shouldn’t have to oversee a process in which Congress deals with last year’s budget,” Obama said as the time got short this week. In fact, he was up to his neck in it. Obama used a veto threat to make clear he would not accept the scope of GOP spending cuts. He said he would accept no more temporary extensions to keep the government running for a few weeks at a time unless there was a broader deal in hand. He kept saying leaders had to act like grown-ups. The White House said his strategy was to stay behind the scenes, work the phones and let his senior aides do the negotiating. That type of role provided an opening for Republicans to question his leadership. It also led to rumblings from frustrated lawmakers in his own party who wanted the president to openly attack the cuts Republicans wanted. The White House figured it would take those hits. It did. A Gallup poll in late March found declining numbers of people who said Obama was a strong and decisive leader: a little more than half of those polled, compared with 60 percent one year ago and 73 percent two years ago. The White House believed that a better result would come if Obama didn’t try to overheat the issue. Officials believed that people were worried about gas prices, not a spending squabble and that voters didn’t hire Obama to be a legislator. Obama would go public when it meant the most. That was Tuesday. The president suddenly got vocal. He said Americans didn’t want games but results. The pragmatic approach is what White House strategists believe will bring back the election-turning independents to Obama. “There are some things we can’t control,” he said. “We can’t control earthquakes; we can’t control tsunamis; we can’t control uprisings on the other side of the world. What we can control is our capacity to have a reasoned, fair conversation between the parties and get the business of the American people done.” But it wasn’t getting done, and his voice was not the only one setting the tone. “The president isn’t leading,” Boehner said Wednesday. “He didn’t lead on last year’s budget, and he clearly is not leading on this year’s budget.” Obama met with Boehner and Reid four times in the White House during the week. He still went to the Philadelphia area Wednesday to talk about energy. He looked comfortable, almost carefree, as he laughed with workers at a wind-turbine company about their families and their cars. But Washington had sucked him back in. By Friday, he canceled a trip to Indianapolis, scrapping the attention he wanted to give to clean energy. He scrapped a weekend getaway with his family to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. While working to avoid a shutdown, Obama’s team thought the White House would come out OK in the public’s mind if it came to that. The thinking was that the president had presented a reasonable case of agreeing to spending cuts without going too far, and that people would be angry with Republicans if the government closed up partially over a policy disagreement about abortion. Only when the standoff grew most dire did it end. But the budget mess showed how government isn’t supposed to operate. No matter who’s to blame, all will be, including a president running for election this time from inside Washington’s ways. ___ EDITOR’S NOTE — White House Correspondent Ben Feller has covered the Bush and Obama presidencies for The Associated Press. Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter , become a fan on Facebook

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TOKYO – The government set its first radiation safety standards for fish Tuesday after Japan’s tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant reported radioactive contamination in nearby seawater measuring at several million times the legal limit. The plant operator insisted that the radiation will rapidly disperse and that it poses no immediate danger, but an expert said exposure to the highly concentrated levels near the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant could cause immediate injury and that the leaks could result in residual contamination of the sea in the area. The new levels coupled with reports that radiation was building up in fish led the government to create an acceptable radiation standard for fish for the first time. Some fish caught Friday off Japan’s coastal waters would have exceeded the new provisional limit. “Even if the government says the fish is safe, people won’t want to buy seafood from Fukushima,” said Ichiro Yamagata, a fisherman who used to live within sight of the nuclear plant and has since fled to a shelter in Tokyo. “We probably can’t fish there for several years,” he said. Radiation has been leaking into Pacific near the plant on the northeastern Japanese coast since a 9.0-magnitude earthquake spawned a massive tsunami that inundated the complex. Over the weekend, workers there discovered a crack where highly contaminated water was spilling directly into the ocean. The tsunami pulverized about 250 miles (400 kilometers) of the northeastern coast, flattening whole towns and cities and killing up to 25,000 people. Tens of thousands more lost their homes in the crush of water, and several thousand were forced from the area near the plant because of radiation concerns. Many of those “radiation refugees” have grown frustrated with the mandatory 12-mile (20-kilometer) no-go zone, and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. — whose stock value has plunged to the lowest level in its 60-year history — said Tuesday it would give affected towns 20 million yen ($240,000) each. That would be on top of any legally required compensation. Also Tuesday, TEPCO announced that samples taken from seawater near one of the reactors contained 7.5 million times the legal limit for radioactive iodine on April 2. Two days later, that figure dropped to 5 million. The company said in a statement that even those large amounts would have “no immediate impact” on the environment but added that it was working to stop the leak as soon as possible. The readings released Tuesday were taken closer to the plant than before — apparently because new measuring points were added after the crack was discovered — and did not necessarily reflect a worsening of the contamination. Other measurements several hundred yards (meters) away from the plant have declined to levels about 1,000 times the legal limit — down from more than four times that last week. Experts agree that radiation dissipates quickly in the vast Pacific, but direct exposure to the most contaminated water measured would lead to “immediate injury,” said Yoichi Enokida, a professor of materials science at Nagoya University’s graduate school of engineering. He added that seawater may be diluting the iodine, which decays quickly, but the leak also contains long-lasting cesium-137. Both can build up in fish, though iodine’s short half-life means it does not stay there for very long. The long-term effects of cesium, however, will need to be studied, he said. “It is extremely important to implement a plan to reduce the outflow of contaminated water as soon as possible,” he said. Although the Fukushima prefecture surrounding the plant is not a major fishing region, fishermen there are growing alarmed. No fishing is allowed in the direct vicinity of the plant, but they fret that demand will collapse for catches elsewhere in the region — whether or not they are contaminated. “Our prefecture’s fisherman have lost their lives, fishing boats, piers and buildings” in the earthquake and tsunami and now must suffer the added effects of radioactive runoff from the plant, local fishermen’s federation head Tetsu Nozaki said in a letter faxed to the company. Some government assurances of safety have done little to quell panic. In Tokyo, for instance, there were runs on bottled water after officials said radiation in tap water there was above the level considered safe for infants, though insisted it was still OK for adults. On Tuesday, officials decided to apply the maximum allowable radiation limit for vegetables to fish, according to Edano. “We will conduct strict monitoring and move forward after we understand the complete situation,” he said. The move came after the health ministry reported that fish caught off Ibaraki prefecture — which is about halfway between the plant and Tokyo — contained levels of radioactive iodine that would have exceeded the new provisional limit. Cesium also was found, at just below the limit. The fish were caught Friday, before the new provisional safety limits were announced. Such limits are usually very conservative. After spinach and milk tested at levels far exceeding the safety standard, health experts said you would have to eat enormous quantities of tainted produce or dairy before getting even the amount of radiation contained in a CT scan. Radioactivity is pouring into the ocean, in part, because workers at the plant have been forced to use a makeshift method of bringing down temperatures and pressure by pumping water into the reactors and allowing it to gush out wherever it can. It is a messy process, but it is preventing a full meltdown of the fuel rods that would release even more radioactivity into the environment. The government on Monday gave the go-ahead to pump more than 3 million gallons of less-contaminated water into the sea — in addition to what is leaking — to make room at a plant storage facility to contain more highly radioactive water. TEPCO’s reputation has taken a serious hit in the crisis. On Tuesday, its stock dropped 80 yen — the maximum daily limit, or 18 percent — to just 362 yen ($4.3), falling below its previous all-time closing low of 393 yen from December 1951. Since the quake, TEPCO’s share price has nose-dived a staggering 80 percent. The stress of announcing all the bad news also appears to be taking a toll. One official teared up and his voice began shaking as he gave details at a news conference near the plant this week. In what could be an effort to counter the bad publicity, Takashi Fujimoto, TEPCO’s vice president, said it was offering 20 million yen ($240,000) to each town or city affected by a mandatory evacuation zone. He called the cash “apology money” and noted that one town had refused it because it disagreed with the approach. He did not give further details. ___ Associated Press writers Malcolm Foster, Ryan Nakashima, Shino Yuasa and Noriko Kitano in Tokyo contributed to this report. Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter , become a fan on Facebook

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