Vox Sentences: Jeb Bush's totally expected announcement and totally unexpected ad lib

Jeb!

Jeb! at the kickoff rally of Jeb! 2016. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

• Surprising exactly nobody, Jeb Bush officially announced today that he's running for president.

  [NYT / Michael Barbaro and Jonathan Martin]

• You can read his full speech here.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• The most memorable moment in the announcement came when immigration activists interrupted it, and Jeb responded by declaring, "The next president will pass meaningful immigration reform so that that will be solved – NOT by executive order."

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• While Jeb has suggested he opposes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, he's strongly supported a pathway to some kind of legal status, which sets him apart from more anti-immigration contenders.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• He's also called unauthorized immigration an "act of love" for America, which is a line you can expect his opponents to seize upon.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• In his speech, Bush called for economic policies that would spur 4 percent annual long-run GDP growth. Bill Clinton reached that mark for five out of his eight years in office. Neither Jeb's brother nor his father ever did.

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

• The speech includes some implicit digs at Jeb's brother, including a statement that middle class families "haven't gotten a raise in 15 years."

  [Washington Post / Philip Bump]

• He also didn't shy away from social issues, attacking Obamacare's contraceptive mandate on religious freedom grounds.

  [Bloomberg View / Ramesh Ponnuru]

• Both endorsements and polling suggest that Jeb is the frontrunner at the moment, albeit a very weak one.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Harry Enten]

• He's estimated to have raised nearly $90 million already, far ahead of the $20 million that Mitt Romney raised in the first half of 2011.

  [Politico / Anna Palmer and Tarini Parti]

• If you want to understand Jeb's ideology, I can't recommend highly enough this profile by Andrew Prokop, focusing on his failed 1994 bid for governor of Florida and his eventual 1999 to 2007 tenure in the office. Basically, he's deeply conservative, but has learned how to package himself as a moderate.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• The 1994 campaign is just fascinating in how unvarnished Jeb was. For example, when a black woman asked Jeb what he'd do for African Americans, he answered, "It's time to strive for a society where there's equality of opportunity, not equality of results. So I'm going to answer your question by saying: probably nothing."

• Ezra Klein: Jeb's announcement showed just how big a handicap his last name, and his brother's record, will be going forward.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Reihan Salam: Jeb would be a general election disaster, and the best he can do is force his opponents into substantive policy debates.

  [Slate / Reihan Salam]

Waltz with Bashir

Bashir is unimpressed with the Chinese military honor guard. (Liu Jin-Pool/Getty Images)

• Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir fled South Africa before he could be arrested for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Darfur.

  [NYT / Norimitsu Onishi]

• In 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an indictment for Bashir on five counts of crimes against humanity (murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape), two counts of war crimes ("intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population" and "pillaging"), and three counts of genocide.

  [International Criminal Court]

• The ICC called on South Africa to arrest Bashir when he arrived Sunday for an African Union summit.

  [Reuters / Anthony Deutsch]

• Then a South African court issued an interim order temporarily barring Bashir from leaving the country, due to the outstanding indictment.

  [BBC]

• South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, has close ties to Bashir, and some government officials claimed that the country's obligation under international law to arrest people indicted by the ICC didn't apply to the African Union summit.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Mere hours after Bashir left, a judge ruled that the South African government was legally obligated to arrest him.

  [Reuters / Dinky Mkhize and Khalid Abdelaziz]

• In response to the push for an arrest, the African National Congress accused the ICC of being biased against Africans and of being "no longer useful."

  [Slate / Joshua Keating]

Greece is doing great LOL no everything is terrible

It's Athens, gentlemen. The gods will not save you. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

• As Greece and its European lenders keep failing to reach a deal to provide the country with more bailout funds in exchange for economic reforms, some German leaders are calling on the EU to brace for Greek default.

  [NYT / James Kanter, Alison Smale, and Niki Kitsantonis]

• Greece has rejected European offers that would require cuts to pensions; if the country continues to hold its ground, that could force the European leadership to either relent on their demands or cut Greece off.

  [WSJ / Marcus Walker and Andrea Thomas]

• "11th hour" talks between Greek ministers and their creditors broke down on Sunday night, increasing the odds that a deal wouldn't be reached before Greece needs to make a €1.5 billion loan repayment to the IMF in two weeks.

  [FT / Peter Spiegel and Kerin Hope]

• Now, leftist Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says he's waiting for the Europeans to propose a more reasonable, less austere plan, while the Europeans are not budging.

  [FT / Peter Spiegel and Kerin Hope]

• Not getting bailout money might mean default and Eurozone exit, but there are some creative ways to avoid default, like setting up a parallel currency to the euro.

  [FT / Ferdinando Giugliano]

• Capital controls — which de facto set up a parallel currency by making the Greek euro worth less than the regular euro — are another possible way to avoid default.

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

• Confused on any of this? Check out our explainer on the Greek debt crisis.

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

Misc.

• Meet Samuel "the Cookie Crumbler" Feldman, who allegedly caused almost $8,000 in damage to various breads, potato dinner rolls, bagels, and cookies in supermarkets in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• It's no longer legal to kill Basque people on sight in Iceland, so there's that.

  [Washington Post / Ishaan Tharoor]

• The basic problem with Entourage is that the characters don't acknowledge they're sociopaths.

  [Jon Daly and Wendy Molyneux Drake to AV Club / Marah Eakin]

• Rich people in California are really not pleased about water rationing. What will become of their horse stables?

  [Washington Post / Rob Kuznia]

• The case for the White Walkers, the true heroes of Game of Thrones.

  [Medium / Daniel Victor]

Verbatim

• "America would be more suitable; I could live there with dignity."

  [Napoleon Bonaparte via Washington Post / Ishaan Tharoor]

• "Circus elephant named 'Baby' finds new home after killing man."

  [CBS News]

• "The loss of a mother must be quantifiable by some measure of creative accounting, but in my experience it is immeasurable. This much I knew: There is the thing that I want, I cannot have it, but I can give it to somebody else. That seemed to honor the etymology and the root of altruism."

  [The Atlantic / Derek Thompson]

• "The thesis of the panel—which featured at least one 'tankie,' slang for Soviet apologist, or actual Stalinist—was that Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek is some kind of COINTELPRO crypto-Nazi."

  [The Baffler / Amber Frost]

• "João’s case shows that generosity isn’t part of some ethereal 'human spirit'—it’s hardwired into our brains."

  [The Atlantic / Sam Kean]

Song of the day

• First Aid Kit, "America"

  [YouTube]

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