Vox Sentences: Obama's immigration plan is coming. Here's what to expect.

1. What happens to an action deferred?

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Mitzi Pena, 19 (right), her sister Yaretzi Pena, 5, and her cousin Karina Terriquez, 20 (left), wait in line to receive assistance in filing out their application for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

• President Obama could announce his plan to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation as soon as next week, an administration source tells the New York Times.

  [NYT / Michael Shear, Julia Preston, and Ashley Parker]

• The NYT report says he's considering a plan that would shield almost 5 million immigrants.

• That's higher than many expected, but falls short of covering all 11 million undocumented immigrants, or even the 8 million who would get a path to citizenship under the immigration bill that passed the Senate.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The plan would be based on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which helps immigrants who came when they were under 16, and has reached about half the 1.2 million people eligible for it.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Keep in mind that the president doesn't actually have the power to pardon undocumented immigrants and thus make them permanent residents — he can only delay deportation.

  [Washington Post / Suzy Khimm]

• Even reform-minded conservatives have condemned the idea of broad-based anti-deportation action as "lawless, reckless, a leap into the antidemocratic dark."

  [NYT / Ross Douthat]

• Ted Cruz and a few other Senate conservatives want add a provision forbidding the program to a government funding bill ASAP; the Republican leadership just wants to prevent another government shutdown.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• John Boehner is already threatening to expand his anti-Obama lawsuit to cover the new program.

  [Washington Post / Robert Costa and Ed O'Keefe]

2. ISIS is still not dead

• Reports of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's death were greatly exaggerated.

  [NYT / David Kirkpatrick and Rick Gladstone]

• Worse, an AP report suggests that ISIS has teamed up with al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate.

  [AP / Deb Riechmann]

• ISIS and al-Qaeda have to this point been in open, bloody combat, so this is a real "whoa if true" report.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Senior administration officials tell CNN that Obama is coming around to the view that defeating ISIS is impossible without destroying Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad too.

  [CNN / Elise Labott]

• Deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes denied that any such Syria policy review is underway.

  [The Hill / Justin Sink]

• ISIS is minting its own gold, silver, and copper currency. Advantages include not being "based on satanic usury."

  [CNN / Hamdi Alkhshali and Dana Ford]

• The US anti-ISIS mission costs $300,000 an hour.

  [The Atlantic / Uri Friedman]

3. Grubergate

Jonathan Gruber, left, testifies during the Senate Finance roundtable discussion on health reform. (Scott J. Ferrell/CQ-Roll Call)

• Jonathan Gruber, one of Obamacare's intellectual godfathers, is under fire for saying the "stupidity of the American voter" helped Obamacare pass.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• It's one of a number of videos of Gruber that have provoked conservative outrage recently.

  [Vox / Adrianna McIntyre]

• For example, one from 2010 unearthed today featured Gruber saying Obama knows "the American public doesn't actually care that much about the uninsured."

  [CNN / Jake Tapper]

• Perhaps the most consequential video features Gruber implying people in federal health exchanges aren't eligible for subsidies — an issue the Supreme Court is considering right now.

• Gruber said he misspoke, and Ezra Klein argues the rest of his writing on Obamacare suggests it really was a slip-up.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• For example, Gruber wrote a comic book about Obamacare, which depicts federal exchanges as featuring subsidies.

  [Brad DeLong]

• The whole affair is a great illustration of the difference between how politicians and economists think: design details that economists think are inconsequential take on great political import.

  [NYT / Neil Irwin]

• That tension leads to imperfectly structured policies, which combine to make government much kludgier than it needs to be.

  [Bloomberg View / Megan McArdle]

• Meet Rich Weinstein, the Philadelphia investment advisor and amateur oppo researcher who keeps finding these damning videos of Gruber.

  [Bloomberg / Dave Weigel]

• Politics aside, I really like this paper Gruber wrote with Emmanuel Saez on the optimal way for governments to redistribute money.

  [NBER / Jon Gruber and Emmanuel Saez]

4. Misc.

• 45 years of severe depression, as told through psychiatrists' notes.

  [Baffler / George Scialabba]

• Two guys decided to buy used textbooks in the summer and sell them in the fall — and doubled their investment in the process.

  [Planet Money / David Kestenbaum]

• Facebook and Instagram aren't censoring Kim Kardashian's nude photos the way they censor everyone else's. Why?

  [Washington Post / Caitlin Dewey]

• Netflix is coming to France — and poses a threat to voiceover artists who make a living as the French voices of Hollywood actors.

  [Medium / Mac McClelland]

• Sick of hearing about Big Data? Too bad! It's a big part of Martin O'Malley's 2016 presidential campaign pitch.

  [Business Insider / Colin Campbell]

5. Verbatim

• "Makinde Adeagbo learned to cut his own hair as an Apple intern because he couldn’t find a black barber and there was nobody in the office to ask."

  [Bloomberg / Sarah Frier and Peter Burrows]

• "Britain, Israel and Norway are already deploying missiles and drones that carry out attacks against enemy radar, tanks or ships without direct human control."

  [NYT / John Markoff]

• "Plants talk to each other using an internet of fungus."

  [BBC / Nic Fleming]

• "It’s easy to imagine a transformative app in the near future … that normalizes the deferral of all flirtation to future digital approval."

  [BuzzFeed / Joseph Bernstein]

• "If 2014 Charlie Cook wants to argue for a bigger stimulus in Obama’s first year, he should have that argument with 2009 Charlie Cook."

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

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