Obama Seeking \'Political Conquest\' of G.O.P., Ryan Says

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the former vice-presidential candidate, said Sunday that President Obama was ignoring the nation’s problems, choosing instead to focus on the “political conquest” of the Republican Party.

“When you saw his speech, say, at the inauguration, it leads us to conclude that he’s not looking to moderate, that he’s not looking to move to the middle,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” “He’s looking to go farther to the left, and he wants to fight us every step of the way politically.”

Mr. Ryan, in his first major interview since the November election, also warned that more partisan gridlock was in store as lawmakers prepared to renew debate over balancing the budget and raising the country’s debt limit.

His remarks echoed those of other Republican leaders including John A. Boehner, the House speaker, who last week said Mr. Obama was seeking to “annihilate” the Republican Party.

Repulicans were put on the defensive after Mr. Obama’s inauguration speech, in which he laid out a starkly liberal vision for his second term, declaring his support for gay marriage and gun restrictions and for changes in immigration laws.

With his stature increased within the party, Mr. Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee, will increasingly be expected to set the tone for Republicans, particularly on fiscal issues.

In a speech at a National Review Institute conference on Saturday, Mr. Ryan urged his Republican colleagues to “stick together and carefully pick our fights with President Barack Obama.”

“We can’t get rattled,” he said. “We won’t play the villain in his morality plays.”

On Sunday, in a stinging rebuke to Mr. Obama, he said that had Hillary Rodham Clinton beat him to win the Democratic nomination in 2008 and gone on to win the presidency, “we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now.”

“I don’t think that the president thinks that ! we actually have a fiscal crisis,” he said. “He’s been reportedly saying to our leaders that we don’t have a spending problem, we have a health care problem. That just leads me to conclude that he actually thinks we just need more government-run health care.”

But he acknowledged that the Republican Party needed to reach out to a broader cross section of Americans, and he signaled a willingness to compromise on some issues.

“We obviously have to expand our appeal,” he said. “We have to show how our ideas are better at fighting poverty, how our ideas are better at solving health care, how our ideas are better at solving the problems that arise in people’s daily lives.”

On immigration, he said he was hopeful that some kind of legislation could be passed this year, if Mr. Obama did not “play politics.”
“Immigration is a good thing,” he said. “But we need to make sure it works.”

He also said he supported background checks to keep guns out of the handsof criminals, but called for an approach that did not simply ban certain kind of weapons.

Asked what he thinks about a presidential run in 2016, he said, “I don’t.”

“I’ll decide later about that.”

App Smart Extra: On the Slopes

Apps that add a technological edge to your skiing or snowboarding vacation were the subject of a recent App Smart column. But the column could barely make a dent in discussing all the apps available to help winter sports enthusiasts. Here are some more suggestions.

One class of app that can be both helpful and fun is those apps that link you to the different Web cams that many resorts now have on the mountainsides. The Ski Webcams app, free on iTunes or $1.59 on Android, is one of the best of these. It can link you to resort Web cams either near your location or from a very extensive list or, just for fun, to random cams from around the world. It’s a very no-frills app. But it does tell you when each image was collected so you can see how up-to-date the picture is. And you can zoom into the images, which is useful for high-res video feeds.

For adifferent type of ski app experience, you may love the free iOS app SloPro. It’s a video editing app that offers a rather cool trick: the ability to slow a movie clip down to super slow motion, like the effects you get in sports videos shown on TV. These effects happen through image processing inside the app, so they’re not as eye-catching as using a slow-motion camera to film a skier making a jump, for example. But the effects are impressive, once you’ve mastered the app’s slightly tricky interface. And if you’re on a snow vacation with some friends, then you may be able to achieve some amazingly dramatic film clips.

There are also many apps available that are resort-specific, but since these come from different app developers their quality varies. For example the Val d’Isère Ski Guide app for Android, for the very popular French ski resort, has a pretty basic and uninspiring interface but offers detailed information on up-to-the-minute events, weather and facilities in the town. ! The $1 iOS app Live North Lake Tahoe is more graphically clever, and thus a little easier to navigate. It also offers a few niceties like a piste map and road cameras so you can plan your journey around traffic or difficult weather. But it does cost soemthing, and offers you services you could get for free by downloading one or two other free apps.

It’s definitely worth spending some time checking out what’s available for your chosen resort before you head off on a ski trip.

Quick call

Delta Airlines has released a free iPad app that has many typical services like destination maps and social networking tools. But it also has a “Glass Bottom Jet” option in-flight that shows an image of the ground underneath your aircraft’s flight path, assuming you’re hooked up to the airline’s in-plane Wi-Fi network.