Vox Sentences: Ready for Hillary and Rubio

1. Ready for Hillary

A screenshot from Clinton's announcement video. (Hillary for America)

• It's official: Hillary Clinton announced her presidential campaign yesterday with a video posted to YouTube and Facebook.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Rather than doing a typical "here's my story" candidate ad, most of the video featured "everyday Americans" like a man transitioning to a new job or a woman reentering the workforce after having a baby.

  [Vox / Jonathan Allen]

• Todd VanDerWerff is impressed with the filmmaking on a formal level; for one thing, most of the subjects in the video are framed center-left (get it?).

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

• My Vox colleagues and I did a deep dive into Clinton's life, covering her time as first lady of Arkansas, the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals, her Senate tenure, and her time at the State Department.

  [Vox staff]

• Clinton was always on the hawkish end of President Obama's advisers, and would likely pursue a more militarist foreign policy as president.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• She's also to Obama's right on taxing capital gains, and rejected the idea of taxing it and wages at the same rate during a 2007 debate.

  [NYT / Josh Barro]

• Then again, her economic platform is expected to draw heavily from a report by the Committee for Inclusive Prosperity, which urged labor liberal policies like worker councils at businesses and increased unionization.

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

• She recently helped promote a child care program in New York City with Chirlane McCray, the wife of Mayor Bill de Blasio; she started her career as a children's advocate and is expected to make family leave and child care a major push.

  [NYT / Matt Flegenheimer]

• Her views on education reform are murky, but she's close with American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten, suggesting she may be less enthusiastic about Obama and Arne Duncan's reform agenda.

  [NYT / Maggie Haberman]

• President Obama won't automatically endorse Hillary, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said, because "there are other people who are friends of the president" who might run.

  [The Hill / Jordan Fabian]

• She's crushing her opponents in the Democratic party so far, but presidential election models suggest she has an uphill battle, as voters rarely elect the same party to the White House three times in a row.

  [National Journal / Alex Roarty]

• Then again, those models are based on relatively few cases, and consistent economic growth and not-terrible approval ratings for Obama suggest she's in pretty good shape for the general.

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

2. Ready for Rubio

Rubio announces his presidential bid at the Freedom Tower in Miami on April 13, 2015. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

• It's official: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) announced his presidential campaign today with an event at the Freedom Tower in Miami.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Rubio is widely considered one of the most plausible, mainstream conservative nominees out of the Republican field. He has a reputation as a charismatic speaker, and for being a workhorse in the Senate.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Andrew Prokop has a great breakdown of his views on the issues.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• His tax plan is among the more interesting in the field; it loses a ton of revenue and cuts taxes dramatically for high earners, but it also includes a child credit that many conservatives reject.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• It also (maybe, kind of, sort of) paves the way for a basic income in America by introducing a refundable tax credit for every working American.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• He's also gotten involved in tax subsidies for the poor, calling for replacing the Earned Income Tax Credit with a wage subsidy program.

  [Reuters / Reihan Salam]

• If implemented well, that could really help childless workers, but it runs the risk of hurting workers with children in the process.

  [Off the Charts / Sharon Parrott]

• He and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) have teamed up on legislation to force colleges to provide data on how their students fare after graduation.

  [USA Today / Marco Rubio and Ron Wyden]

• And he worked with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) on a bill that would free up more spectrum for wifi, enabling faster connections.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• Then again, his propensity for bipartisan bills could hurt him with the GOP base, as when he worked on the Gang of Eight immigration bill, which includes a path to citizenship.

  [New Yorker / Ryan Lizza]

• Rubio is a protégé of former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL), whom he will likely face in next year's primaries.

  [NYT / Michael Barbaro]

3. Justice for Eric Harris

Eric Harris during a police sting that caught him illegally selling firearms, moments before a reserve deputy shot and killed him. (Tulsa County Sheriff's Office)

• Robert Bates, a white reserve sheriff's deputy in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, is facing second-degree manslaughter charges for shooting an unarmed black man, Eric Harris.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Harris was lying on the street, being subdued by officers after a foot chase; Bates, 73, claimed he meant to reach for his taser and shot his pistol instead.

  [NYT / Richard Pérez-Peña]

• Bates is an insurance executive and an unpaid volunteer with the sheriff's department; he also was chairman of the sheriff's 2012 reelection campaign.

  [Washington Post / Lindsey Bever and Sarah Larimer]

• The sheriff's office "strongly argued that Bates was innocent of any crime," but the Tulsa County district attorney's office concluded otherwise.

  [LA Times / Matt Pearce]

• Prosecutions like this are very rare; thousands of people have been killed by police officers since 2005, but only 54 officers (not including Bates) were ever charged with crimes.

  [Washington Post / Kimberly Kindy and Kimbriell Kelly]

• Tulsa has a long history of racial violence, and was the site of what was likely the most violent act of racial terrorism in American history in 1921, with almost 300 people killed in anti-black race riots.

  [NYT / AG Sulzberger]

4. Misc.

• Three former Blackwater contractors got 30-year sentences, and one got a life sentence, for killing 17 people in Iraq in 2007, most of them unarmed civilians.

  [NYT / Matt Apuzzo]

• American society has, by and large, been set up by and for morning people, but let's not pretend that means we night owls are somehow less virtuous.

  [New Yorker / Maria Konnikova]

• The financial sector, as it stands, is largely a big rent-seeking operation, which makes elite college grads flocking to Wall Street a giant waste of talent.

  [NYT / Sendhil Mullainathan]

• A 14-year-old in Florida has been arrested on felony hacking charges for changing the background photo on his teacher's computer.

  [Slate / Lily Hay Newman]

• The director of Going Clear argues that Scientology should lose its tax-exempt status, not because it's not a real religion but because its activities are illegal and corrupt.

  [LA Times / Alex Gibney]

5. Verbatim

• "If they had a time machine, men would be more likely than women to travel to pre–World War II Europe and kill Hitler, according to a recently published study."

  [Haaretz]

• "There’s a very good chance that Ciccarello outlived his murderer."

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• "What free speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must. Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged. They’re allowed to feel pain."

  [The Atlantic / Garry Trudeau]

• "When you dismiss something as a take, you dismiss it as not worth reading … It gives people a way to dismiss any argument or story they don’t want to reckon with in a manner that’s as glib and facile as the takes they supposedly revile."

  [Slate / Julia Turner]

• "Paul Offit likes to tell a story about how his wife, pediatrician Bonnie Offit, was about to give a child a vaccination when the kid was struck by a seizure. Had she given the injection a minute sooner, Paul Offit says, it would surely have appeared as though the vaccine had caused the seizure and probably no study in the world would have convinced the parent otherwise."

  [FiveThirtyEight / Christie Aschwanden]

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