| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty August 28, 2014 Another Day, Another White House Effort to Ignore the Constitution How many Democrats are beginning to realize what they've done, and what kind of man they've put in the Oval Office? Both political parties are in a state of high anxiety about the possibility that President Obama will allow millions of illegal immigrants to remain in the country, fearing that White House action on the issue could change the course of November's midterm elections. In the past few days, Democratic candidates in nearly every closely fought Senate race have criticized the idea of aggressive action by Obama. Some strategists say privately that it would signal that he has written off the Democrats' prospects for retaining control of the chamber, deciding to focus on securing his legacy instead. Keep in mind that, by assuming that he alone has the power to legalize millions of people who entered the country illegally, Obama's taking another hatchet to the concept of checks and balances in the Constitution. Just yesterday we learned this White House asserts it can join international treaties that the U.S. Senate will not ratify. Don't take it from me; take it from the New York Times staff: A New York Times reporter who has been fighting off a US government demand that he reveal a confidential source has described the Obama administration as "the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation." James Risen, who has been ordered to testify in the criminal trial of a former CIA official Jeffrey Sterling, was speaking at a New York conference, "Sources and secrets". He argued that he administration wants to "narrow the field of national security reporting," and that its prosecutions have created "a de facto Official Secrets Act." Or all nine justices of the Supreme Court: "The Supreme Court has ruled in Noel Canning v. NLRB, No. 12-1115, and found that President Obama had indeed violated the constitution in his recess appointment. The decision was unanimous." In fact, some of these coming changes come in policy areas where the administration has already lost, 9-0, at the Supreme Court. Let Ted Cruz explain: The defeats include cases such: as Judalang v. Holder, when the court faulted the Obama team for making an "arbitrary and capricious" attempt to rewrite the rules governing who is eligible for relief from deportation; Henderson ex rel. Henderson v. Shinseki , in which Obama's lawyers argued wrongly "that the Department of Veterans Affairs can wholly ignore a veteran's appeal of a VA regional office's benefits ruling when the appeal was not filed within the 120-day deadline"; and Bond v. United States, in which the "DOJ argued that an international treaty gave Congress the power to create federal criminal law for wholly local conduct." "If the Department of Justice had won these cases, the federal government would be able to electronically track all of our movements, fine us without a fair hearing, dictate who churches choose as ministers, displace state laws based on the president's whims, bring debilitating lawsuits against individuals based on events that occurred years ago, and destroy a person's private property without just compensation," Cruz explained. "When President Obama's own Supreme Court nominees join their colleagues in unanimously rejecting the administration's call for broader federal power nine times in 18 months, the inescapable conclusion is that the Obama administration's view of federal power knows virtually no bounds," he concluded. That Story Saying Tony Soprano Didn't Die? Yeah, It Was All Voxed Up. Wednesday morning Ezra Klein's site Vox.com offered the world an article delightfully different from its usual work, "explanatory journalism" asserting that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are connected by a bridge, declaring that national rates of gun ownership and gun violence are identical, mangling deportation statistics and mixing up the national debt and the public debt. Instead, film critic and professor Martha P. Nochimson revealed that David Chase, creator of HBO's popular series The Sopranos, told her that his protagonist Tony Soprano did not die in the series' final scene. She wrote a long, detailed, and fascinating profile of Chase, his influences, and his creative process. Except the big headline — Tony's not dead! — was . . . apparently not accurate. Whoops. "Sopranos" creator David Chase has responded to the Vox story that went viral on Wednesday as it claims Chase finally revealed that Tony Soprano had lived at the end of the HBO drama, saying that the author of the story "misconstrued" his answer. "A journalist for Vox misconstrued what David Chase said in their interview," reads a statement issued by Chase's rep, Leslee Dart. "To simply quote David as saying, 'Tony Soprano is not dead,' is inaccurate. There is a much larger context for that statement and as such, it is not true. As David Chase has said numerous times on the record, 'Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point.' To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of 'The Sopranos' raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer." The author of the lengthy Vox story writes that Chase lashed out after being asked whether or not famous mob boss was dead, but gave him a straight-forward answer. (Don't ask me why Variety thinks the author is a "he.") Brian Faughnan: "Why would you write a definitive piece on something as huge as TONY ISN'T DEAD without first getting all your ducks in a row? I mean, you KNOW there will be lots of talk about it. You KNOW people will check with Chase about it. Why risk being wrong?" Because they're Vox, Brian. They're convinced they're smarter than the rest of all of us, and they're convinced everyone else has limitless patience for them getting a story like this completely wrong. But this one is going to leave a mark. Vox's political offerings come with the usual errors more or less priced in. But a lot of apolitical Sopranos fans, who don't know or care who Ezra Klein is, devoured that piece today. And then they learned that it was wrong. H2 offers: 
Amazing What Happens in These Ongoing Crises When They Drop Out of the News Cycle Hey, remember Ukraine? A leader of pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine reportedly has admitted that thousands of Russians have been fighting alongside his troops. Alexander Zakharchenko told Russian television that he estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 Russians had joined the ranks, and claimed that they were either former Russian service members or current military personnel on leave, according to the BBC. However, he also insisted that any Russians who went to flight did so voluntarily and not on orders from superiors in Moscow. U.S. officials tell Fox News that they believe that Russian special forces are fighting in Ukraine, with one saying "if you look at a Russian separatist, it is basically a Russian soldier." A senior U.S. defense official also told Fox News that the Pentagon has seen evidence that Russia has fired artillery inside Ukrainian territory at Ukraine military positions in recent days. "This is not the first time," the official said. However, U.S. officials are not ready to declare that Russia has begun invading Ukraine. Meanwhile, back in Washington: Referring to a "Russian-directed counteroffensive," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Wednesday, "Clearly, that is of deep concern to us, but we're also concerned by the Russian government's unwillingness to tell the truth, even as its soldiers are found 30 miles inside Ukraine." How many troops are required to cross the border, and how far, before our government calls it an invasion? ADDENDA: Off to Dallas for the Defending the Dream Summit! If you're attending, you can find me on the panel on runaway government regulations and bureaucracy and the panel on keeping it short and sweet in social media. I am told the conference bookstore should have a supply of copies of The Weed Agency, and logistics permitting, I should have a few extra copies on hand, just in case. I'd be happy to sign a copy or just chat. . . . A fun project is coming down the pike. Stay tuned . . . . . . Tomorrow's Jolt, barring any breaking news, will feature another in-depth examination of a groundbreaking television cult hit from my younger years.
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