Vox Sentences: The big winner in Israel's elections is utter chaos

1. Bibi got back

These Likud supporters sure look happy. ( Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

• Exit polls from today's elections in Israel suggest that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conservative Likud party and its center-left challenger, Zionist Union, will get 27 seats apiece.

  [Natan Sachs]

• Here's what the seat breakdown looks like, according to the exit polls:

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

Vox / Johnny Harris

• It looks like ex-Likud politician Moshe Kahlon's Kulanu party — which is often labeled as center-right but has a lot in common with the Zionist Union on economic issues — will be the kingmaker.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• It'll be tough for Zionist Union to form a coalition; it'd need, among others, both Yesh Atid, which is fiercely secular, and an ultra-Orthodox party, which would make for an uneasy partnership.

• Israeli president Reuven Rivlin — who's mostly powerless but has to bless any coalition — has suggested that he'd like Likud and Zionist Union to form a national unity government, like the one that held power for much of the 1980s.

  [Haaretz]

• But Netanyahu has expressed opposition to the idea, meaning a right-wing coalition including Kulanu could be the likeliest option.

  [NYT / Jodi Rudoren]

• Netanyahu has already declared victory, while Zionist Union head Isaac "Bougie" Herzog has said "these results will bring Labor [the main component of Zionist Union] back into power." All of which is to say we have no idea how this will shake out yet.

  [Haaretz]

2. Hyde and seek

Sex trafficking bill sponsor Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) gazes thoughtfully into the distance. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

• Senate Democrats successfully filibustered a bill that would create a fund for victims of sex trafficking, paid for from fines levied against convicted traffickers.

  [NYT / Jennifer Steinhauser]

• Obviously, the filibusterers oppose sex trafficking, but they objected to a provision in the bill barring the funds from being used for abortions (an extension of the Hyde Amendment, which has for decades barred the use of federal money for abortions).

  [Slate / Betsy Woodruff]

• Democrats argue that because the money comes from fines, not taxpayers, it shouldn't be subject to Hyde-like restrictions.

  [Politico / Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim]

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said that he won't move forward on the confirmation of Loretta Lynch, President Obama's Attorney General nominee, until the bill makes it through.

  [NYT / Emmarie Huetteman]

• That puts Senate Republicans in the weird position of actively keeping Eric Holder, an Attorney General they loathe, in office.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• While the bill is uncontroversial in DC, some sex worker advocates and policy experts argue it would lead to overpolicing and civil rights violations, and could wind up hurting both trafficked and voluntary sex workers; a better approach, they argue, would be to fight the poverty and homelessness that put children at risk of being trafficked in the first place.

  [RH Reality Check / Emily Crockett]

3. Short sharp Schock

This was taken in 2011. Today, one of these men is resigning from Congress and the other is about to box Evander Holyfield. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

• Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) has resigned due to a battery of corruption allegations.

  [NYT / Ashley Parker]

• Schock, 33, was formerly considered a rising star in the party, weighing a gubernatorial run in 2010; he was also a bit of a sex symbol, which didn't hurt his rise.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews and Andrew Prokop]

• The allegations against him are many and varied but the charge that appears to have prompted the resignation was that he was reimbursed by his campaign fund and the federal government for 170,000 miles of travel on a personal car, when the car only had about 80,000 miles on its odometer.

  [Politico / Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer, and John Bresnahan]

• He was also accused of using campaign and PAC money to pay for rides on campaign donors' private planes and for Katy Perry tickets for his interns; some of the charges potentially broke campaign finance laws, while others are just more distasteful.

  [AP / Jack Gillum and Stephen Braun]

• The most serious allegations against him have to do with real estate; for one thing, he "paid a political donor $300,000 last year for a commercial property in Peoria then took out a $600,000 mortgage for the property from a local bank run by other donors."

  [Chicago Tribune / AP]

• He also allegedly sold a house to a campaign donor for substantially above market value; if Schock made money on deals set up by people wanting to influence him, he could be brought up on bribery charges.

  [Blue Nation Review / Jimmy Williams]

• But Schock's resignation does mean the Office of Congressional Ethics can't censure him, so he only has to worry about criminal prosecutors now.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews and Andrew Prokop]

• He also has funnier but more trivial expense mini-scandals, like the time he spent over $5,000 of government money to get a podium that looks like President Obama's.

  [BuzzFeed / Evan McMorris-Santoro]

• And, most famously, he redesigned his Congressional office to look like the Red Room from Downton Abbey.

  [Washington Post / Ben Terris]

• But that's not all! His communications director also resigned last month after Facebook posts of his surfaced in which he compared black people to monkeys.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

• Not to pile on, but I'm leaving out still more allegations levied against Schock. It looked real bad!

  [National Journal / Scott Bland]

4. Misc.

• Magic is a service that seeks to fulfill every request you text it, from pizza orders to car purchases. If you think it sounds too good to be true, that's because it is.

  [Wired / David Pierce]

• "Unauthorized use of a milk crate" is a real crime in Pennsylvania.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• The worst thing about Hillary Clinton's email shenanigans are that they deny historians and future Americans thousands of valuable records.

  [Slate / Fred Kaplan]

• Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has zero fucks left to give, and this interview is the wonderful result.

  [Boston Magazine / Simon van Zuylen-Wood]

• The real promise of driverless cars is the potential for automated taxis that are cheaper than buses or subways, making private mass transit not just possible but far cheaper than car ownership.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• For the record, 71-year-old accused murderer Robert Durst is not in fact the frontman of the popular nü-metal act Limp Bizkit.

  [Jim Romenesko]

5. Verbatim

• "My parents are so much my parents that they rewrote the past to make me theirs."

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

• "Those people posing in bikinis? Don't feel too envious of them, we've been told, for they are dead inside, too."

  [NY Mag / Julieanne Smolinski]

• "Want your kid to choose apple slices instead of fries at McDonald's? Ask her, 'What would Batman choose?'"

  [Mother Jones / Kiera Butler]

• "They say that you roast the ones you love, but I don't like you at all, man."

  [Hannibal Buress to Justin Bieber via Rolling Stone / Paul Thompson]

• "Hermione shows up in chapter eight, but for no particular reason, she changes her name to B’loody Mary Smith."

  [NY Mag / Abraham Reisman]

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