StupidiNews!

• As the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt announces their candidate has won the presidential election, Egypt's ruling military council has now stripped the office of almost all power.
• The end of the 50,000 strong "silent march" protest of the NYPD's controversial "stop and frisk" policy Sunday night was disrupted by police breaking up protestors.
• As UN observers flee the war zone in Syria, rebel forces are pushing troops loyal to the al-Assad regime out of the city of Homs and the surrounding area.
• EU leaders are indicating that Greece will be allowed to renegotiate austerity terms as long as the country can "swiftly" form a new government in the wake of Sunday's elections.
• The US has retaken the "World's Fastest Supercomputer" lead with "Sequoia", a new 1.6 million CPU monster at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Last Call

Did anyone actually think cowardly Mitt Romney would take a stand on President Obama's new immigration directive?  You're a fool if you did.

Mitt Romney refuses to say whether he’d repeal the Obama administration’s decision to stop deporting certain undocumented immigrants.

In an interview with Bob Schieffer aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee five different times declined to answer whether he would conduct the same policy President Barack Obama on Friday announced his Department of Homeland Security will now pursue.

Instead of answering the question posed, Romney called for a permanent solution.

“With regards to these kids who were brought in by their parents through no fault of their own, there needs to be a long-term solution so they know what their status is,” Romney said. “This is something Congress has been working on, and I thought we were about to see some proposals brought forward by Sen. Marco Rubio and by Democrat senators, but the president jumped in and said I'm going to take this action, he called it a stop-gap measure. I don't know why he feels stop-gap measures are the right way to go.”

After Schieffer asked, directly, four additional times if Romney would repeal the policy without receiving an answer, Romney called the move political.

“I think the timing is pretty clear, if he really wanted to make a solution that dealt with these kids or with illegal immigration in America, than this is something he would have taken up in his first three and a half years, not in his last few months,” he said.

Except for the fact that a permanent solution, the DREAM Act, was offered, Mitt.  And your side killed it because they don't want a permanent solution.  He knows the second he stakes out a choice here, it's over and he's done.  If he decides he has to reverse the policy, he's done with Latino voters.  If he doesn't reverse it, his base will turn on him.  Either way he takes the least damage by not taking a stand.

What a hero making the tough calls.  How can this spineless twit be President?

A Life Of Conflict

Los Angeles police officials confirm Rodney King is dead at the age of 47.

Rodney King, whose beating by Los Angeles police in 1991 was caught on camera and sparked riots after the acquittal of the four officers involved, was found dead in his swimming pool Sunday, authorities and his fiancee said. He was 47.

Police in Rialto, California, received a 911 call from King's fiancee, Cynthia Kelly, about 5:25 a.m., said Capt. Randy DeAnda. Responding officers found King at the bottom of the pool, removed him and attempted to revive him. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital, DeAnda said.

There were no preliminary signs of foul play, he said, and no obvious injuries on King's body. Police are conducting a drowning investigation, DeAnda said, and King's body would be autopsied.

"His fiancee heard him in the rear yard," he said, and found King in the pool when she went outside.

And I remember exactly where I was when the verdict came down and the LA riots began.  I was a high school senior in Durham, NC at the time.  The verdict sparked much soul-searching among my classmates and the faculty, and eventually an all-school assembly where we openly talked about race and differences between us...and the similarities.

Rodney King had a life of conflict and pain, ups and downs.  Maybe now he'll finally find the peace that long eluded him.

The Tomb Raider Reboot

Emma Gray writes about the latest Tomb Raider "Crossroads" reboot.  She glosses through some details, and focuses on an attempted rape scene that offended her highly.

And according to Schreier, the way the producers plan to make gamers harness these protective instincts is to make Croft suffer through her friend getting kidnapped, being taken prisoner by "island scavengers" ... and an attempted rape. (The studio has since issued a statement saying that the scene in question has been "incorrectly referred to" as attempted sexual assault, but I agree with Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams that "there's an unmistakable sense of sexual menace in the scene." Click here to view the clip.) Some human suffering is par for the course when it comes to heroes' "how they became how they are" narratives (one classic example is Spider-Man losing his Uncle Ben). However, do kickass female characters really need to endure attempted sexual violence to be sympathetic?

As it turns out, it's not awful.  It's from 2:15 to 2:30, if you want to skip ahead.  For those who don't want to see the whole trailer, a man turns around and caresses her arm, then her hip.  Lara promptly knees him in the balls savagely.  He kisses her, and terrified she ends up with the gun.  Gray isn't wrong so much as overselling the scene and its drama / impact.  It was a completely unsuccessful attack and something unbelievably dramatic had to provoke her to kill.  This was a girl who apologized to a deer she had to kill for food.  This reeks of a slow news week trying to turn a molehill into a mountain.  The official Tomb Raider site says they have shown all there is to see, there is no lurking rape scene to stumble across.  Based on what I saw, it wasn't pleasant but it wasn't graphic, either.

It looks like a hell of an origin story.  For those old farts out there (like me) you probably remember the last time Lara appeared as a little girl.  She was cocky, obnoxious and hadn't earned her dues.  It was really cool to find "the" backpack, but even dedicated fans were a bit turned off by the snoot she was.  This gritty beginning is more realistic for a woman who travels the world and fights mummies for sport.  A person like that is forged, not born. Her story has to be gritty, and it has to be harsh.  She's a survivor, a lifetime of knitting and charity work would not have made sense.

Any woman who travels the world knows the real dangers that are out there.  Most from personal experience.  The rest read headlines where women are sold as property and given virginity checks by crowds of men.  This touch of reality is horror all right, but kept to a very basic minimum.  There is far more graphic violence out there, this pales in comparison to even a second of shoot 'em ups or military adventures.  Or even when compared to real headlines.

I hadn't heard about this yet, so my joy at the upcoming chapter is not ruined by what I saw.  Diminished a little, maybe, but as a storyteller I see the need they faced, and think they justified her behavior well.  It's a drop in a bucket of the overall story, told in fifteen seconds of real time.  

I just think the article on HuffPo tries to make it into something it's not.

 

Why Bon May Never Sleep Again: The Hairy-Legged Sequel

Victoria Jean Harrah sat down around noon Wednesday to eat a freshly grilled ham and cheese sandwich with her fiance when she decided to warm up a plate of her favorite canned ravioli.

But instead of saucy goodness, the 48-year-old Mims, Fla., woman said she got a crunchy mouthful of what she described as a hairy-legged spider tucked into a pocket of pasta.

"I spit it up…I screamed, rinsed my mouth out and I must have brushed my teeth till my teeth hurt," said Harrah, who claims to have found the surprise in a can of Chef Boyardee Mini Ravioli.

By the end you want to tell her that she's overreacting.  At least, I did.  "I'm so afraid," she says.  However horrifying, surely one must grasp that this is so rare it would surely never happen again.

But I'm terrified of spiders.  I know what she means when she says she couldn't sleep after being bitten by a brown recluse.  I wasn't bitten, but I can easily freak myself out thinking about spiders, and knowing it was in my mouth would drive me to the very edge of sanity.

And now you have a story to gross out Dad with at the dinner table.  You're welcome.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!

The Mask Slips Again

...and Mitt Romney accidentally tells the truth.

Mitt Romney plunged into Obama country Friday as he began a six-state bus tour telling voters that if he becomes president, “the era of big government will really be over.” 

What Mitt means by that is the end of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as we know it, and new programs to replace them won't cover much of anything at all.

“Why Romney? Because we don’t like Obama,” said Paul Fidler, a truck driver, after Romney spoke in Stratham. “We’re petrified about what’s going on,” said Suzanne Rufiange, a bookkeeper, as she ate vanilla ice cream in Milford. “There’s too much control by a small amount of people.”

And Mitt Romney will certainly listen to you, of course.  And then he'll tell you that he knows what's best for America, and what that will mean is the retirement age is going up to 70 and you'll need to cover most of your Medicare, and like a good patriot you'll need to skip that vacation and instead save up for your own retirement, because we're sick of taking care of you cradle to grave.

And all this will of course mean more tax cuts for guys like Mitt.  You don't begrudge Mitt his quarter of a billion dollars, do you?  He's a man of the people, you know.  Sure you haven't gotten a raise since 2008 and your benefits just got cut again and the company discontinued the 401(k) program, but really you should be lucky you have a job, so you frankly have no right to complain.

Maybe if you work hard enough, you'll be rich like Mitt too.  You might even be able to afford health care for a while until your insurance company cancels your policy for the pre-existing condition of you broke your arm when you were 12, but that's better than the government being involved, right?

Why, Mitt and his Republican friends will create jobs just like they did in 2001-2009.  Only more of that whole "austerity" thing.

Won't it be fun?

Last Call

The Griftzilla From Wasilla is low on fundage again, so it's time to insult President Obama.

"That cocaine snorting, and what he ate - Fido? Rufus? I think it's funny that the cocktail circuit gives me a hard time for eating elk and moose. Anybody here have a pet moose? There's a difference."

HAHAHA HE ATE DOG BUT I'M THE SAVAGE!  Thank you folks, Sarah will be at the RightOnline Conference all week.

Crying into her Miller Lite.

At this point, she is her own punchline.

Nemesis Is Clearly Off Getting A Mani/Pedi

Of the list of people who are not allowed to complain about President Obama’s “executive overreach” in yesterday’s directive involving undocumented students being allowed to apply to work permits, the absolute top of that list consists of two, maybe three people.  One of them is former Dubya legal “ace” John “Of Course We Can Waterboard” Yoo, who promptly calls down the wrath of Nemesis herself upon his doomed soul with this observation over at NRO.

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

This is pretty much the equivalent of the Mouth of Sauron proclaiming that Gondor is violating Middle Earth’s OSHA laws by having all those dangerous, pointy swords everywhere, and won’t somebody please think of the children.  I’m hoping dark Nemesis has some pretty sturdy Doc Martens, because certain asses are in dire need of having boots inserted in them and rotation will probably be necessary.  Yoo’s own theories on the plenary executive are phenomenally daft, but claiming that the President has the authority to declare unending bloody war on tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan citizens but doesn’t have the authority to direct enforcement procedures of executive branch agencies is so absolutely douchetronic that Yoo probably needs to waterboard himself for a while just to balance the scales of the universe.

And yet, Nemesis is off getting an all-day mani/pedi or something because Yoo continues on without several million Olympian arrows magically appearing in his chest.

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

The funny part is everyone at NRO who read this sentence said “Shut!  The Front!  Door!   That’s a brilliant idea!  We’ll just refuse to enforce the crap we don’t like!  John Yoo, you’re a genius!”  Because that’s exactly what President Romney would do, simply stop enforcing things.  Hell, it’s what Bush did with Wall Street.  It’s not like the Bush-era Securities and Exchange Commission or the Food and Drug Administration or practically any other government regulatory body in the executive branch actually enforced laws.  They decided their job was not in fact regulation but to help the industries they were supposed to be checks upon get around regulation.  Yoo had no problem with that, or the whole “Hey, Congress Schmongress!” thing with Afghanistan, Iraq, and detainees getting fake drowned and all that jazz either.  Using the executive’s enforcement directives to not deport kids?  That’s worth putting POTUS in the dock, yo.

Yoo’s big finish:

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive — not to mention the Framers — cannot support.

How his hands were able to type that sentence without automatically wrapping themselves around his own throat only proves that I need more psionic training.

And then Alberto Gonzales chimes in proving that after getting her nails done, Nemesis is getting sloshed on Caramel Appletinis at Chili's rather than making with the whole justice thing.

“To half through executive order the deportation of some undocumented immigrants looks like a political calculation to win Hispanic votes,” Gonzales told the crowd at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C. Saturday, “and subjects him to criticism that he is violating his oath of office by selectively failing to enforce the law.”

These guys are trolling.  Period.

This Week In Village Idiocy

It was Eleanor Clift, in the Daily Beast, with the candlestick.  She's standing over the beaten corpse of political journalism with a really confused look on her face, too, like she's not quite sure if she was moving her arms to cave in the skull, or the candlestick moved on its own accord.  She stands surrounded by a focus group of independent voters.

Listening to these voters for over two hours, it was clear that their assessment of the economy is not as bleak as one would suppose, given their disaffection from Obama. They generally agree that the economy is improving, but Obama doesn’t get credit for a recovery that, while slow, is moving in the right direction—the core of his message for a second term. A few cited what they called “little things” Obama has done for the economy, like reining in credit-card companies, but no one could cite major accomplishments that would measure up to the expectations aroused by Obama as a candidate who promised to bring about transformative change.

This Denver group was sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hart’s findings add to a growing chorus of concern among Democrats not directly aligned with the Obama campaign that the president is not connecting with the voters he needs to win. Asked if he was feeling the heat from his allies in the Obama camp, Hart told The Daily Beast, “They know who I am, and that I’m a straight-shooter, and I’m totally in their corner. Sometimes being in their corner means telling them the truth.”

Whether it’s a failure of policy or of communications is debatable, but the sense of disillusionment with Obama’s performance is real. “He set up expectations that began 46 months ago, and they only grew over time,” says Hart. He singled out Jeffrey, a 31-year-old Web designer and home remodeler, as the voter Obama most needs and might not get. Jeffrey voted for Obama last time.

“The whole platform was hope—I don’t feel any more hope today,” he said. Pressed by Hart as to which candidate he was leaning toward, Jeffrey said the tenor of the campaign turned him off, that he felt like he was in the middle of a weird argument between a husband and wife, and all he wanted to do was leave the room. “I don’t even know if I’m going to vote this time,” he said glumly.

And the bolded clues there are for Eleanor's benefit.  There's something that they all have in common, demonstrated most aptly by a woman with a weekly political op-ed column seemingly baffled by why voters apparently know nothing about Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital.  All they know is that OBAMA FAILED THEM and that they don't really know anything about the other guy.

If only there were a group of Americans whose job it was to disseminate information and report on political developments with the intent of having a robust, informed electorate.  Sadly, I can't think of anyone like that and if such a group of "reporters" did exist, Eleanor Clift wouldn't know one from a 26-pound wheel of Gorgonzola cheese.

It's possible she may have cacked one of these "reporters", but the independent voters apparently saw nothing, so they don't feel any particular need to engage right now in the whole political process anyway.

It remains a total mystery as to why, of course.

Oops! Hitchhiker Shot Himself

On Monday, Ray Dolin of West Virginia grabbed national headlines when he claimed that he was hiking on Highway 2 in Montana — gathering stories for a memoir about how nice people are — when a man in a pickup truck pulled over and then shot him in the arm. What a story! Police even arrested a 52-year-old man under suspicion of assault, but he was cleared after a search of his truck turned up zero evidence. Under more interrogation, Dolin admitted to police on Thursday that he made the story up and he actually shot himself in the arm. Whether he lied to cover for his own foolishness or simply to grab attention we still don't know, but we do know that America is slightly less kind when people try to get other people in trouble for fake shootings. Police say the case in still under investigation, though there may be charges for Dolin in the work

Sorry, guys.  I manage to dodge most of these, but it seemed just ironic enough to be true.  I think he'll be plenty sorry that he tried to pull off this stunt.   I also hope the poor man who was arrested wasn't too rattled.  How terrifying that must have been when you're innocent.

Octogenarian Shocked By Police Treatment

St. George Police Chief Anthony L. Britt said that an officer who tased a nude 80-year-old woman was justified  because the woman could have hurt police officers and EMS crews with her metal walking cane which she was swinging at officers.

"We just felt that was the best way to apprehend her and not let her hurt anybody or herself," Britt said on Friday. "There was no other way to get her to come down from where she was at that point."

On May 21, a lieutenant with the St. George Police Department contacted emergency dispatch regarding noises he heard near his home. A police officer responded and said he found a nude elderly woman in front of a home on Gavin Street banging her walking cane on the rail of the steps.

"Officers made contact with her. She was non responsive and quoting scriptures from the Bible," Britt said.

Britt says he and another officer arrived shortly after and attempted to talk to the woman. Some time later, a lieutenant with the police department and EMS crews arrived.

According to Britt, police and EMS personnel attempted to talk to the woman with negative results. Police say they attempted to get the cane away from the woman which almost got officers injured.

"She swung the cane several times at different officers as they were trying to approach her," Britt said. "One of the officers that came from behind almost got hit in the head with the cane. At that point, I just told the officers,'She's in a safe position, just go ahead and tase her so we can prevent anybody from getting hurt.'"

"Almost" getting injured by an old woman who feels threatened is not an excuse to use a taser on an elderly person.  She was clearly confused and unable to make decisions.  However, she deserved compassion and kindness instead of the treatment she received.  I have to say, maybe her assessment of the officers was spot on.

Too Long, Didn't Listen

For months now the Village has pushed the idea that President Obama is in over his head, that he needs more substance, that he needs to lay out his differences with Mitt Romney, that he needs to do more to reach the American people.  In short, he needs to follow the advice of the pundits who know better than he does.  Just yesterday morning Chuck Todd at the crew at MSNBC had this advice:

After he conducted a focus group of swing voters in Colorado, pollster Peter Hart -- the Democratic half of the NBC/WSJ poll -- had this advice for Team Obama in an interview with NBC News: “Our focus groups show that voters see a lot of glamour and glitz from the Obama administration; they're wondering where the vision, where the valor is going to be.” More from Hart: “[Obama] is missing the mark on the middle class. He needs to get down there. It is not just rallies; he needs to be out there feeling what they are feeling, a lot of pain, a lot of hurt, a lot of uncertainty.” And: “[The public] need a sense of a vision, they need a sense of hope, they need to be able to see that it’s not just the old Obama giving them the charisma and the cool. They need to see substance over style.” We know there are many folks in Obamaland who semi-dismiss the criticism coming from Greenberg/Carville. But the ex-Clinton folks apparently are not alone.

And what did the Village make of the President's major speech in Cleveland where he did just that?  We don't know, since apparently the speech was too long and had too much substance for our pundit class to be able to handle.

Prior to President Barack Obama’s marathon 54 minute speech in Ohio today, the Obama campaign sent our several statements promising the speech would be a major address framing the campaign going forward. Despite the hype, the speech was mainly a rehash of themes and ideas from the president’s recent stump speeches and his remarks were widely panned as overly long by the political press corps.

The President was hit from the left, center, and right by the Village for a speech that was "too long", "dull", "boring", a "lecture" and had "nothing new" in its 54 minutes.  NewsBeast's Jonathan Alter was particularly brutal.

"I thought this honestly was one of the least successful speeches I've seen Barack Obama give," Jonathan Alter, the Bloomberg View columnist who is close to the White House, said on MSNBC. He suggested the speech lacked memorable lines and "lost the audience by the end."

Perhaps Obama has only himself to blame. He's dug out of quite a few holes with masterful speeches in the past -- most notably when he was forced to explain the heated rhetoric of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, in April 2008 -- and so now has an extremely high bar to live up to.

But this one probably won't go down in the history books, even if the campaign made clear it considered this a key moment, distributing praise for the speech and the president's approach to the economy from a litany of elected officials across the country.

Remember, this is the same Alter who complained last week that the President needed to have a long and serious talk with the electorate about jobs and the economy.

In an economy headed in the wrong direction, comparison campaigning is necessary but not sufficient. It might not matter much to frustrated voters that we’ve tried the Republican recipe for growth (tax cuts and deregulation) in the 2000s and it failed, or that Romney was 47th out of 50 governors when it came to job creation in his state. The tie -- two failed job creators -- goes to the challenger.

That means Obama must match his focus on the choice with more work on the referendum side -- more affirmative reasons to vote for him. He has begun reminding voters of the American Jobs Act he pushed last fall that would help small business and create a million new jobs, his 2012 State of the Union “Built to Last” long-term investment agenda, and last month’s congressional “To- Do List.” The problem is, they all blur together.

So he does that, and of course now he's too cerebral, too nerdy, too substantive to the point of being lecturing, boring, and dull.  But remember, our "liberal media" is "in the tank for Obama".

My ass it is.

Marketing For Dummies (And We're The Dummies) 101

If you've not dropped by the new (old and new) Angry Black Lady Chronicles yet, do so.  Bon and I will often throw up pieces over there that we don't post here (our better stuff that we'd like to share) and we're both grateful to have the opportunity to get some wider audiences on our stuff.  There's an excellent crew of bloggers over there and it's a solid group effort.

The newest member of the Angry Black Borg is Leo Soderman, a photographer, dad, blogger, and a genuinely neat dude.  He's got some excellent advice on why the Left struggles with message, and why the Right is so good at it.

Marketing.

For example, let’s look at the ACA. Why, when the individual parts of the ACA are supported by the majority, is the ACA still not overwhelmingly supported by the average American? Because they haven’t been shown why it’s good for them. Piss poor job of marketing, frankly. The ACA allows kids to stay on their parents insurance much longer. And that’s where the conversation usually stops, with the assumption that everyone knows this is good. But this is where the conversation needs to start.

Explain why staying on the insurance is good for them. Explain that keeping kids on longer actually reduces healthcare costs because you will pay the same premiums and the risk pool is bigger, with younger adults that usually don’t need care. Explain that it allows their kids to go to school and not have to worry about getting sick. Explain that if they aren’t covered, they likely will not seek insurance, making the pool smaller, and that means more people that use the insurance are in the pool. Which drives rates up. In the end, being able to keep their kids on the insurance means more people covered while helping control costs. That’s more money in their pockets in the long run and better health for themselves and their kids. That’s what it does for them.

And that’s just one small aspect of ACA.

Do read the whole thing...and yes, I'm guilty of that myself.  I assume that the reasoning behind voting for President Obama is self-evident, and while I do explain various minutiae of the many individual reasons, the whole 30,000 foot level question of  "What's in it for me?" doesn't get answered as much as I'd like to.

I'm going to try to address that more as we head into the heart of the election season.

New tag:  But What Does It Do For Me?

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Egyptian voters go to the polls starting this weekend for the country's first free presidential elections, but not everyone is happy with the two candidates.
• Iowa Republican Steve King says he plans to take President Obama to court to stop his "Dream Act lite" directive involving undocumented students, announced yesterday.
• Mexican President Felipe Calderon has canceled a $2 billion resort development project in Baja California ahead of this weekend's G-20 summit of world leaders.
• Greek candidates made their final pitches before voters there go to the polls this weekend to select a new government and to determine if Greece stays in the eurozone.
• More game companies are looking to tap into the market for Linux games, including major gaming giants like Electronic Arts and Valve.

Last Call

So yes, it turns out that President Obama can do something about deportation, the DREAM act, and undocumented students.

President Obama will announce a new immigration policy this morning that will allow some undocumented students to avoid deportation and receive work authorization. 

Under the president’s “deferred action” executive order, students in the U.S. who are already in deportation proceedings or those who qualify for the DREAM Act and have yet to come forward to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, will not be deported and will be allowed to work in the United States.

An estimated 1 million young people could benefit from the deferral. To be eligible, applicants have to be between 15 and 30 years old, live in the U.S. for five years, and maintain continuous U.S. residency. People who have one felony, one serious misdemeanor, or three minor misdemeanors will be ineligible to apply. “Deferred action” will last for two years and can be renewed.

The Associated Press is already using terms like “immunity” and “amnesty”.  Republicans are expected to explode in 5…4…3…  Yep, Malkin and Co. throwing a fit according to Memeorandum.  And yes, the downside of executive branch action?  This program dies screaming the instant Mitt Romney should take office.  Might want to keep this in mind.

More on the announcement from MSNBC:

The Department of Homeland Security said that, effective immediately, the government would no longer seek the deportation of illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, and would allow them to apply for work permits if they meet certain criteria.

“Our nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a firm and sensible manner,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in a statement Friday.

A senior administration official said in a conference call with reporters that as many as 800,000 undocumented immigrants stand to benefit from this change. Napolitano said that the shift represented neither immunity nor amnesty—buzzwords for conservatives who oppose illegal immigration—but instead represented an instance of “prosecutorial discretion” in which the government had re-evaluated its priorities in enforcing the law.

Echoing the comments of several today, “Your move, Mittens”.