Vox Sentences: Obama: Don't hate on Muslims. Trump: Ban Muslims.

Venezuelans are sick of chavismo; President Obama tries to appeal to Americans’ better angels, plan backfires; and a tiny Department of Justice squad takes on the Chicago police department.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Goodnight Hugo

Carlos Becerra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• For the first time in 17 years, the Venezuelan parliament will be controlled by politicans who aren't socialist.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The weekend's legislative elections granted 99 seats to the coalition opposing current Venezuelan president and Hugo Chavez loyalist Nicolas Maduro. Maduro's party has won 46 seats. (22 seats have yet to be decided.)

  [CNN / Brian Walker and Tiffany Ap]

• This is definitely an anti-incumbent wave election. Many voters told reporters they didn't know the names of the candidates they were voting for — they just wanted to vote out the United Socialist Party.

  [New York Times / William Neuman]

• It's hard to blame them. Venezuela's economy is a shambles. Inflation is so bad that even thieves won't steal local currency.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Venezuela has paired rising crime with one of the most corrupt criminal-justice systems in the world.

  [Insight Crime / Miriam Wells]

• Whether or not the opposition can turn the country around, the people of Venezuela have won at least one victory: Maduro's government didn't resort to violence to alter the election outcome, which he did after nonviolent protests last year.

  [Human Rights Watch]

Hey, remember when the president told us not to give in to Islamophobia?

Pool/Getty Images

• Last night, President Obama gave a rare primetime address from the Oval Office on ISIS and terrorism.

  [The White House]

• The speech mostly restated what the US is already doing, which didn't impress media critics.

  [Mediaite / Alex Griswold]

• But that was the point — Obama wanted to reassure the public that the US is, in fact, fighting terrorism.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Obama also wanted to caution Americans against calling for a ground war to fight ISIS, because that's exactly what ISIS wants us to do — a point that the New York Times' Rukmini Callimachi backed up on Twitter.

  [Rukmini Callimachi via Storify]

• And (not for the first time) he urged Americans not to take their anxiety out on American Muslims — something that was already happening before the Paris attacks and is likely to only intensify after the San Bernardino shootings.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Shockingly, Donald Trump appears not to have heeded the president's message. Monday, he released a written statement calling to ban all Muslims from entering the US — including US citizens who are currently abroad.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Finally, Trump has said something so offensive his Republican rivals are rushing to condemn it.

  [Time / Zeke J. Miller]

• Not that Trump's rivals are covering themselves with glory on this issue: Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush have both suggested Christian refugees from Syria should be given preference over Muslims, and Ted Cruz and Rand Paul voted to halt all immigration from dozens of Muslim countries.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

The DOJ takes on the Chicago PD

Scott Olson/Getty Images

• This morning, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the DOJ will investigate Chicago's police department for a "pattern or practice" of denying residents' civil rights. The announcement follows the release of a video showing a Chicago police officer shooting and killing Laquan McDonald, an 17-year-old black man; McDonald's killer has been indicted for first-degree muder.

  [Department of Justice]

• Chicago is the largest police department ever subjected to this sort of investigation. It could overwhelm the small team the DOJ has to investigate police department misconduct, which, as Ryan J. Reilly writes, "could barely fill a baseball team."

  [Huffington Post / Ryan J. Reilly]

• Shortly after the announcement, Cook County attorney Anita Alvarez stated she would not file charges in another police shooting — the October 2014 killing of Ronald Johnson.

  [CNN ]

• Alvarez showed the dashboard camera video of Johnson's death as a way to justify her decision. The problem is that the video's too fuzzy to tell if Johnson is, in fact, holding a gun — as Alvarez and police officers believe.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Rahm Emanuel had been studiously neutral — if not outright supportive of the police — before the indictment of the officer who killed McDonald last week. Now that the federal government's involved, though, he admits that the city needs the intervention.

  [CNN ]

MISCELLANEOUS

Making philanthropy more effective is good. Making it devoid of emotion is not. [NYT / Jamil Zaki]

• New York Magazine tracked down 10 former viral stars — Tay Zonday, the "Evolution of Dance" guy, "Charlie Bit My Finger," "David After Dentist," etc. — to see how weird, unsolicited fame changed their lives.

  [NY Mag / Clint Rainey]

• Professional friend-of-the-Clintons and all-around DC scumbag Lanny Davis has found his latest scam: selling citizenships in small Caribbean island nations, citizenships that definitely aren't intended to help with tax evasion no sir.

  [The Atlantic / Molly Ball]

• Dylan got 100/100 on this "can you name all the Senators" quiz because he needs new hobbies. (Dara got 86/100 and is quite smug about it.)

  [National Journal / Libby Isenstein and Andrew McGill]

• Donald Trump tweeted something wrong about Jeff Bezos' media empire, so here is an explanation for him — in Trumpspeak.

  [Washingtonian / Ben Freed]

VERBATIM

"For some of us, aut­ism isn’t a dis­ease but rather something more ana­log­ous to be­ing gay or deaf—a con­di­tion that, yes, im­poses hard­ships but also helps to make us who we are." [National Journal / Eric Garcia]

• "I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation. Ten percent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head."

  [Rep. Devin Nunes to New Yorker / Ryan Lizza]

• "In the 1930s, when fascism and communism were at their ideological height, many believed they could produce higher living standards for ordinary people than democratic capitalist societies that were prone to devastating cycles of boom and bust. No one believes that about 'radical Islam' today."

  [The Atlantic / Peter Beinart]

• "Anorexia told me I was gross but promised me safety as soon as I attained some enchanted state of skinniness. My perfect body would be my charm against interior disaster."

  [Slate / Katy Waldman]

• "Every year in March, a group of disabil­ity-advocacy organizations holds a national day of mourning for people with disabilities who are killed by their caregivers; the Autistic Self Advocacy Network reports that more than 90 people with disabilities have been murdered by their parents over the last five years."

  [NYT / Jeff Himmelman]

WATCH THIS

How the DEA invented "narco-terrorism" [YouTube / Joe Posner and Ginger Thompson]

Vox / Joe Posner and Ginger Thompson

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