Vox Sentences: Paul Ryan doesn't want to be House Speaker. No one cares.

Paul Ryan somehow doesn't want the world's most miserable job; why you'd never heard of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winners; and the Pentagon gives up on training Syrian rebels.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Paul Ryan: no means no

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• The only plausible candidate for Speaker of the House is Paul Ryan. Only problem: Paul Ryan says he's not running.

  [Erick on the Radio / Erick Erickson]

• His supporters (including outgoing Speaker John Boehner) are relying on reports that he's going to reconsider over the weekend.

  [Talking Points Memo / Caitlin Macneal]

• The Republican establishment badly, badly wants Ryan to run.

  [National Review]

• However, the party's hardliners have plenty of reasons not to like him: he supports comprehensive immigration reform and championed the 2008 bank bailout.

  [Talking Points Memo / Tierney Sneed]

• He has one advantage over thwarted Speaker candidate Kevin McCarthy: he doesn't have nasty rumors floating around about an extramarital affair, which appear to be one reason McCarthy wasn't willing to stand for a vote.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• But Ryan would still have to win over the House Freedom Caucus — which is demanding that speaker candidates promise not to raise the debt ceiling unless Obama agrees to defund Obamacare (and several other key administration initiatives).

  [House Freedom Caucus via Politico]

• And the Freedom Caucus matters: it only takes 30 Republicans to make it impossible to elect a speaker (or do anything else).

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

So about that "arming the rebels" thing

Stringer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• Remember the Obama administration's "train groups of moderate Syrian rebels" plan? It's officially getting scrapped.

  [New York Times / Michael D. Shear, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt]

• The program was, to put it mildly, totally FUBAR. It took until August for the US to train its first 60 rebels.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• It took only a week for over half of those rebels to get killed.

  [New York Times / Anne Barnard and Eric Schmitt]

• This wasn't the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario was that the US would end up arming and training ISIS or other "extremist" groups (which doesn't appear to have happened, at least not yet).

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• The Pentagon is instead going to focus on supporting "already-vetted" rebel commanders who are fighting ISIS on the ground.

  [Wall Street Journal / Gordon Lubold and Adam Entous]

• Hawks see this as a sign that Obama's "giving up" on Syria, just as Vladimir Putin starts sending planes and troops to prop up Bashar al-Assad.

  [Commentary / Noah Rothman]

• Meanwhile, this is an article a foreign-affairs reporter at the Huffington Post actually had to write: "This Doesn't Mean Everyone In Syria Is An Extremist."

  [Huffington Post / Akbar Shahid Ahmed]

The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, explained

Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images

• The 2015 Nobel Peace Prize has gone to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet — four organizations that calmed the Tunisian public and prevented civil unrest in 2013 by laying out a plan to transition to democracy. Vox's Max Fisher explains who those four groups are.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Tunisia is the closest thing the Arab Spring has to a success story, and the Nobel committee clearly wanted to lift it up as an example.

  [Nobel Prize Committee]

• Credit for that goes to the politicians who stepped down when asked, allowing a technocratic government to step in temporarily. But it also goes to the Quartet for coming up with that plan to begin with.

  [Foreign Policy / Brian Klaas]

• Until now, media coverage of Tunisia has often focused on the balance (or lack thereof) between secularism and Islamism. The Nobel committee is instead asserting the importance of civil society organizations, outside of politics, to help create political legitimacy and encourage dialogue.

  [New York Times / David D. Kirkpatrick and Carlotta Gall]

• This article from Farah Samti is the best explanation I've seen about what the Quartet's negotiations actually meant for Tunisia.

  [Foreign Policy / Farah Samti]

• And just a few hours before the prize was announced, a member of Tunisia's Parliament narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.

  [New York Times / Farah Samti and Kareen Fahim]

• That attempt is yet another reminder that Tunisia isn't out of the woods yet. This summer, it suffered the biggest terrorist attack in its history — when a gunman deliberately targeted tourists on a beach.

  [Wall Street Journal / Tamer E-Ghobashy and Radhouane Addala]

MISCELLANEOUS

Because of National Journal's weird scrolling design, yesterday's link to John Judis's excellent piece on Donald Trump supporters didn't work. Here's the actual one. Read it. [National Journal / John B. Judis]

• Also great: National Journal's graphic showing each 2016 candidate's positions on the issues.

  [National Journal]

• Hermione Granger's race isn't specified in the Harry Potter books. So why did the filmmakers cast a white actress?

  [Quora / Monika Kothari via Slate]

• So you want to survive a zombie apocalypse. Here's where in the US you should live.

  [Washington Post / Christopher Ingraham]

• Elephants have 100 times as many cells as humans, but they're much less likely to get cancer. A team of scientists think they've figured out why.

  [Slate / Rachel Gross]

VERBATIM

"The availability of firearms feeds this problem, but then, what the hell are you going to do about it? We're screwed. This is America." [Jay Wachtel to Washington Post / Max Ehrenfreund]

• "If you have a child in school, they could be sitting at a desk made by incarcerated workers."

  [The Guardian / Whitney Benns]

• "Most of your friends on average have more friends than you, tweet more frequently than you and even drink more alcohol than you."

  [Washington Post / Kevin Schaul]

• "The situation we find ourselves in is that money is free to travel as it pleases but people are not."

  [The Guardian / Giles Fraser]

• "The real Jobs was no Gordon Gekko or Bruce Wayne. He was, by most accounts … shaggy, Zen-seeking, fruitarian vegan who remained utterly convinced that he was a rebel and an artist even as he connived and elbowed his way to the pinnacle of the corporate world."

  [Slate / Will Oremus]

WATCH THIS

Third parties are the underpants gnomes of American politics [YouTube / Ezra Klein, Estelle Caswell, Joe Posner]

Vox / Estelle Caswell, Joe Posner

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