The Gravel Kraken highlights a Fox News article about Obama’s recent nothing-burger of an executive order:
What are your thoughts regarding Obama’s recent executive order? I read it this past weekend and didn’t think much of it, but I’m noticing that a lot of people, particularly those are on the far right, expressing concern. I’m honestly not sure I understand why.
My thoughts? I don’t understand it either. But its amazing the things the far right can make up to whip themselves into a frenzy. There’s really not much more to it than that. So now, if you’ll be so kind as to indulge me in one of my favorite pass times, I’m gonna mock Fox News for awhile.
In the Fox piece, Fox tries to drum up a controversy over the President’s alleged new powers to conscript you and your livestock in an emergency. Or something. Here are the bits where they talk to lawyers:
“There is enough that Obama actually does wrong without creating claims which do not hold up to scrutiny,” wrote William Jacobson, associate clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and blogger for the Legal Insurrection blog.
“I’m not ruling out the possibility that this is more than it seems, but unless and until someone does more than merely state that martial law is coming, I’ll consider this to be routine,” he wrote.
Ed Morrisey of HotAir blog explained his take on the document dump that occurred late Friday night before St. Patrick’s Day.
“Why the update? If one takes a look at EO 12919 (the previous executive order), the big change is in the Cabinet itself. In 1994, we didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security, for instance, and some of these functions would naturally fall to DHS,” he wrote. “Otherwise, there aren’t a lot of changes between the two EOs, which looks mainly like boilerplate. In fact, that’s almost entirely what it is.”
…
One person steeped in the legal basis said the document is pretty standard fare — presidents have been preparing for the possibility of a national emergency since before World War II, when the government ordered the private sector to shift from making cars and refrigerators to making airplanes, boats and other items.
“What he is saying is this one is a new one, this incorporates all the old provisions and this is the one that will control,” said Paul Rothstein, a professor at Georgetown Law School. “And that’s not unusual in this kind of implementing presidential orders, and I emphasize that is implementing powers that Congress over the years has given the president and have been used repeatedly.”
And here’s the… fair and balanced part?
But suspicions about the Obama administration spilled over as a result of the Friday document dump, lighting up the blogosphere with phrases like “terrifying” and “martial law” and pointing out potentially big changes in the order.
So, Fox quotes a bunch of actual, identifiable people as saying that there’s nothing there, but keeps that hope alive by quoting “the blogosphere”.
Gotta love ’em.
520 Chestnut 
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