Vox Sentences: Japanese legislators start public brawl to defend pacifism

Carly Fiorina wins her second GOP debate; the Fed isn't cutting interest rates — yet; and Japan's on the verge of ending a 70-year commitment to pacifism.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Carly Fiorina, explained

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• The second Republican presidential primary debate was pretty heavy on policy. That was bad news for Donald Trump, who failed to impress, but good news for the well-rehearsed Carly Fiorina.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Fiorina came off as smart and detailed while often being totally wrong. His biggest moment was a condemnation of the Planned Parenthood sting videos, which do not actually show what she says they do.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• Fiorina's other biggest moment: talking openly about losing her daughter to drug addiction. But while in the past she's used her story to argue against treating addiction as a crime, last night she took a harsher line, arguing erroneously that marijuana is more dangerous than beer.

  [Washington Post / Jenna Johnson]

• She presented a surprisingly detailed plan for military expansion — which, the Daily Beast estimates, will cost at least a half trillion dollars.

  [Daily Beast / Kate Brannen]

• One topic she must be glad didn't come up: Social Security. Fiorina has said she won't express an opinion on whether to cut Social Security until after she's elected President.

  [Huffington Post / Arthur Delaney]

• No Republican challenged her on these. Instead, Donald Trump hit her for being a bad CEO; as Vox's Tim Lee explains, she was simply an average one.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• And when Fiorina got the chance to respond to Trump's comments insulting her appearance last week, she delivered her zinger with relish.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

Zero (Interest Rate) Hour

Win McNamee/Getty Images

• The Federal Reserve is keeping federal interest rates at zero — for the next three months, at least.

  [New York Times / Binyamin Appelbaum]

• The Fed's job is to keep both inflation and unemployment as low as possible. As this really good Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder explains, most economists think there's a tradeoff between the two.

  [Council on Foreign Relations / James McBride and Mohammed Aly Sergie]

• But neither is really a threat right now. Unemployment is low (at least among the participating labor force). And inflation is coming in below the Fed's 2 percent target.

  [Cleveland Fed]

• Since interest rates have been at zero for a while, the Fed definitely wants to raise them in the near future.

  [New York Times / Binyamin Appelbaum]

• This week, the current weakness of the global economy scared Fed Chair Janet Yellen out of doing anything too disruptive. Economists expect the Fed will raise rates in December instead.

• But as the Economist points out, the Fed is taking the whole world's economy into account, which makes it a lot harder to predict what the board will do in the future.

  [The Economist / Buttonwood]

• Is today's announcement good news for you? As Tim Lee explains, it depends where you sit in the economy.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• In other financial news, please do not listen to this terrible, terrible internet thinkpiece about how spending all your money going to clubs in your 20s will make you rich and happy.

  [Elite Daily / Lauren Martin]

Fisticuffs for Peace

Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images

• Japan is on the verge of passing a bill that would end its constitutional commitment to pacifism after nearly 70 years.

  [AFP]

• The law would change the way Japan interprets Article 9 of its constitution, preventing the country from getting involved in wars when it isn't directly under attack. The constitution was enacted during the American occupation after World War II, but many Japanese people feel it's important to the country's modern identity.

  [ABC Australia / Janak Rogers]

• Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, however, wants to allow Japan to send its military to help its allies — like the US. Last year he announced he was reinterpreting Article 9 to do just that. Now, he and his party are trying to pass a bill to codify the new interpretation.

  [Time / Kirk Spitzer]

• The bill is generally seen as another step in a passive-aggressive rivalry that Japan's developing with China; the US hopes the bill (and other moves Abe has taken to build up Japan's military) will check China's power in the region.

  [The Interpreter / Yanmei Xie]

• But the Japanese public doesn't like it.. Thousands of them have been protesting daily in Tokyo, and getting into scuffles with police.

  [Los Angeles Times / Jake Adelstein]

• It's been so divisive that on Thursday night, during a committee vote, opponents of the bill tried to physically block the doors — and legislators ended up getting into a fistfight.

  [Quartz / Caitlin Hu]

• The bill is expected to pass at the end of this week. But Abe is spending a lot of political capital to do it — when he wanted to spend his second, and final, three-year term focusing on economic policy.

  [Wall Street Journal / Tobias Harris]

• Why didn't Abe understand how unpopular the bill would be? One argument: he underestimated how strongly the nation's aging population would oppose spending money on guns instead of butter.

  [New York Times / Yoichi Funabashi]

MISCELLANEOUS

Bill Murray doesn't have an agent. Instead he has a 1-800 number that he expects directors to call if they want him in a movie. [Washington Post / Emily Yahr]

• You know all those "If you have a daughter, you'll get more liberal/conservative" studies? Turns out that when you control for academic journals' bias towards splashy results, there isn't actually a relationship between the two.

  [Social Forces / Byungkyu Lee and Dalton Conley]

• H&R Block hosted Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) at their headquarters and told him that they wanted to make taxes more complicated for poor people. Smith subsequently pressured the IRS Commissioner to do just that. Democracy is fun!

  [CREW / Matt Corley]

• Most selective universities admit mostly rich students, but the University of California has stayed economically diverse. What are they doing right?

  [NYT / David Leonhardt]

• Contrary to popular belief, poor people don't actually drink more soda than rich people.

  [Washington Post / Roberto Ferdman]

VERBATIM

"White people don’t like it when we don’t do well and they don’t like it when we do. But most of all, they don’t like it when they don’t do well." [BuzzFeed / Jenny Zhang]

• "If a chef with a large, unmanaged beard or long, unmanaged hair cooks in the kitchen or an animal wandered into the kitchen, he or she used to receive a death penalty along with their family."

  [Smithsonian / Marissa Fessenden]

• "The real challenge for aspiring mind uploaders will be figuring out how to create a fully functioning model of a human brain from a static snapshot of its connectome."

  [NYT / Amy Harmon]

• "I love the Muppets. I love Kermit. I do not need to imagine his felted member encased by hog flesh."

  [NY Mag / Rebecca Traister]

• "In Tanzania, people appear to trust their government more than economists do."

  [CGD / Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall and Mujobu Moyo]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Joe Posner

• What Bill Gates is afraid of

  [YouTube / Ezra Klein and Joe Posner]

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