Vox Sentences: Argentina finally ousts the Kirchners

Argentina moves to the right; Donald Trump transcends truth; and how Louisiana managed to elect a Democratic governor.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The end of an era in Argentina

Mario Tama/Getty Images

• The next president of Argentina will be center-right opposition leader Mauricio Macri, marking the end of twelve years of leftist rule under Nestor Kirchner and his widow, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

  [Al Jazeera]

• Macri's election bucks the trend in South America, where leftist parties have been more successful than center-right ones over the past several years.

  [CNN / Catherine E. Shoichet]

• Macri’s margin of victory was narrower than you might expect, given Kirchner’s unpopularity; the votes for his opponent were more about stopping Macri than continuing Kirchner policies.

  [New York Times / Simon Romero and Jonathan Gilbert]

• But other Argentinians were more concerned about the country's rising inflation, rising debt, and slowing economic growth.

  [The Guardian / Jonathan Watts and Uki Goñi]

• Among other issues, Macri will have to deal with a legal battle with two American hedge funds who are trying to force Argentina to pay up on its sovereign debt (which it defaulted on in 2014).

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• The final years of the Kirchner era were dominated by a scandal over the Kirchners' alleged effort to cover up Iran's complicity in a 1994 Buenos Aires terrorist attack.

  [New Yorker / Dexter Filkins]

American Muslims did not celebrate 9/11 (apparently we have to clarify this)

ABC News

• Donald Trump, who has risen to new heights of xenophobic mendacity of late, told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday that he saw "thousands of thousands" of American Muslims celebrating in the streets of New Jersey after the 9/11 attacks.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• The problem is that this is totally made up and never happened.

  [Politifact / Lauren Carroll]

• Trump has defended himself by citing a Washington Post story written shortly after 9/11, which makes a reference to Jersey City Muslims being questioned after "allegedly...holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops." But the article doesn't evaluate whether the allegations were legitimate, and it certainly doesn't talk about thousands of thousands.

  [Washington Post / Serge F. Kovaleski and Fredrick Kunkle]

• The Post's Glenn Kessler followed up with the reporters behind that story, and found no evidence that the celebrations ever happened at all.

  [Washington Post / Glenn Kessler]

• Chris Christie, who as governor of New Jersey would be in a good position to shoot Trump down, punted instead, in the interest of not challenging a candidate whose supporters he wants to pick off.

  [Daily Beast / Olivia Nuzzi]

• Ben Carson went even further today, agreeing with Trump that there was actual footage of American Muslim celebrations — but his campaign later backtracked and specified the doctor was thinking of footage of celebrations in the Middle East.

  [Katherine Faulders via Twitter]

• The incident is a good illustration of a problem TV news has with Trump. They want to give airtime to the frontrunner of a major party. But they don't know what to do with the fact that Trump keeps lying in ways that are, as Dylan Matthews puts it, reminiscent of a conspiracy theorist.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• CNN certainly has one way to solve the dilemma: asking in a segment, "DOES DONALD TRUMP TRANSCEND TRUTH?"

  [Judd Legum via Twitter]

2015's ugliest gubernatorial race finally ends

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

• Louisisana will have a Democratic governor in 2016, as John Bel Edwards beat current US Senator David Vitter to succeed Bobby Jindal.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• After his defeat, Vitter announced he won't seek re-election to the Senate, which means his deeply embarrassing gubernatorial run could be the end of his political career.

  [BuzzFeed / John Stanton]

• Vitter managed to get reelected to the Senate after reports surfaced that he'd frequented prostitutes in DC. But Edwards used the scandal against him in the governor's race, saying in one ad that Vitter had chosen "prostitutes over patriots."

  [MSNBC / Steve Kornacki]

• The ad was pretty cheap, but so were Vitter's tactics. By the end of the campaign, he was claiming he'd tried to warn the State Department about Syrian refugees before the Paris attacks — citing a letter that turned out to have been written in mid-November and backdated several weeks.

  [Something Like The Truth / Robert Mann]

• The upshot of all this drama is that about 250,000 Louisianans will likely get expanded Medicaid. Jindal rejected Medicaid expansion but Edwards has promised to take executive action to accept it as soon as possible.

  [New Orleans Times-Picayune / Kevin Litten]

• As Vox's Matt Yglesias explains, Medicaid expansion is a pretty good issue for red-state Democrats to run on.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• But this doesn't mean the party's ascendant in states like Louisiana. The GOP candidate for Lieutenant Governor won decisively.

  [WGNO]

MISCELLANEOUS

The Washington Post's Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet talked to over a dozen ISIS members or defectors and got an incredibly detailed look at what life in the group's elite propaganda corps is like. [Washington Post / Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet]

• A new study finds that patients with acute heart problems did better when senior cardiologists were out of town. In other words: the better the doctors, the worse the outcomes.

  [NYT / Ezekiel Emanuel]

• The case against just throwing all our trash into a volcano.

  [Popular Science / Mary Beth Griggs]

• Roanoke, VA's mayor called for halting the resettlement of Syrian refugees, drawing an analogy to Japanese internment. But Roanoke is actually home to a thriving refugee community — including a number of Somali families who've also faced Islamophobia.

  [NYT / Beth Macy]

• So you know how Anonymous declared war on ISIS? Apparently "war" means rickrolling ISIS a lot.

  [Dazed Digital / Dominique Sisley]

VERBATIM

"There's no evidence that Trump knew his source was a neo-Nazi Twitter account." [NY Mag / Margaret Hartmann]

• "One of the blind spots of professors is that almost all of them were excellent students."

  [Reality-Based Communtiy / Keith Humphreys]

• "The neighborhood with the most concentrated poverty in America has Victorian-style homes with big porches, immaculate public parks, and tree-lined streets where children play."

  [The Atlantic / Alana Semuels]

• "It would be different, somehow, at Outer Coast. I would be different, hard-limbed and keen-eyed and I’d rise with the dawn every morning and my genitals would be carved from flint and Marcus Aurelius quotations, and things would be different, there."

  [The Toast / Mallory Ortberg]

• "The problem is not that Walzer wants US air strikes to stop massacres by ISIS, but that he calls for them in a frame of mind in which America is perpetually faced with upstart Hitlers."

  [The Nation / Thomas Meaney]

WATCH THIS

Sweet potato vs. yam: What’s the difference? [YouTube / Joss Fong]

Vox / Joss Fong

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