Vox Sentences: Obama’s “untraditional” State of the Union, explained

What to watch for if you're watching tonight; relief for a town under siege in Syria; and Bernie Sanders, early-state Democratic frontrunner.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

One last time

The White House

• President Obama is delivering the final State of the Union of his presidency (until he overturns the Constitution and declares himself Dictator-for-Life, of course) tonight at 9pm.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• The White House has been building an impressive amount of hype around the speech (up to and including a video trailer with an organ track) to indicate it's a "nontraditional" State of the Union.

  [Politico / Edward-Isaac Dovere]

• Sadly, "nontraditional" just means it will be "thematic" (read: bypassing Congress to talk to the American people about what they want) and focused on Obama's "legacy" (read: victory lap).

  [NYT / Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis]

• (If Obama really wants to cause a stir, he could use the Sunlight Foundation's Random State-of-the-Union Speech Generator and just deliver whatever comes out.)

  [Sunlight Foundation]

• This could be the least-watched State of the Union in decades. Since people tend to watch the speech when they feel they're in crisis, though, that's a good thing.

  [Vox / Alvin Chang]

• One person who will be watching is Kentucky marriage clerk Kim Davis — who is apparently attending as the guest of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), something Jordan didn't know until this afternoon. Surprise!

  [Huffington Post / Matt Fuller]

• The Republican response, which most Republicans appear to regard as career poison at this point, will be given by South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.

  [The Hill / Scott Wong]

• The fun response to watch, however, will be the Spanish version given by Mario Diaz-Balart — who is one of the few immigration bipartisans left in the GOP, and now gets to sell the party of Trump to Latinos.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

Starvation in Syria

Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images

• Food aid trucks have finally arrived in the Syrian town of Madaya, which has been under siege by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad (and Hezbollah fighters) since July 2015.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Between September and the first week of January, the town received a single food shipment.

• According to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has been operating in Madaya throughout the siege, 23 people have died of starvation — many of them children.

  [MSF]

• Assad agreed to allow an aid convoy into Madaya last week, but trucks did not arrive until Monday.

  [NYT / Anne Barnard]

• But the trucks only include enough food to feed the town's population for two months (and that assumes that international groups are accurately estimating how many people live there).

  [Al Jazeera]

• The convoys also include blankets, which will be only moderately helpful to residents suffering from sub-zero temperatures.

  [MSF]

• According to the Syrian ambassador to the UN, all of this is a lie anyway, because he claims the MSF is wrong and no one has died of starvation.

  [AFP]

Sandersmentum

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• Don't look now, but Bernie Sanders is leading Hillary Clinton in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

  [WSJ / Patrick O'Connor]

• More surprisingly, he's polling better than she is against Republicans in general-election matchups. Sanders has incorporated this into his stump speech; he's now an ideological primary challenger making an electability argument.

  [The Atlantic / David A. Graham]

• The feeling of unsettledness in the Democratic field wasn't helped by some very odd comments from Joe Biden, who said that Sanders "struck a chord" with voters and that Clinton was a relative newcomer to the issue of inequality (she is not).

  [Reuters / Dona Chiacu and Ginger Gibson]

• For her part, Clinton is going hard in attacking Sanders from both the left (on guns) and from the center: she assailed a 2013 bill he proposed for a single-payer health care system as "risky," arguing it would give too much control to Republican governors.

  [Washington Post / Abby Phillip and Philip Rucker]

• The guns attack is fair, if a bit dated; Sanders' current platform on guns is indistinguishable from any other liberal Democrat's. The health-care attack is ridiculous.

  [The Week / Ryan Cooper]

MISCELLANEOUS

The Iran deal is now six months old, and it's already dismantling Iran's nuclear program more quickly than experts expected. [The National Interest / Ilan Goldenberg]

• Ever wished you could, say, search for all movies with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 100 currently streamable on Netflix? There's an app for that.

  [Cinesift]

• Dean Baker proposes a deal for corporations: no more corporate taxes, but the government gets to seize a bunch of your stock.

  [NYT / Dean Baker]

• Boredom is as strong a determinant of student performance in school as innate intelligence.

  [Nature / Maggie Koerth-Baker]

• The only map you'll ever need of American squirrel attacks.

  [Washington Post / Christopher Ingraham]

VERBATIM

"It truly was this Burning Man meets chic Hamptons garden soiree with Hawaiian bonfire and bluegrass music lovefest." [Marissa Vosper to Vogue / Katie Kiefner]

• "Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug assholes than consider alternative views."

  [Medium / Sean Blanda]

• "They were adamant about not being cast as pickup artists in my story. But they readily admitted to lying to girls when they met them, saying they were writers from the British GQ, or the entire band the Arctic Monkeys."

  [Vice / Crissy Milazzo]

• "It may be possible for island nations surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, such as Japan or Australia, to maintain strict controls on immigration. It will be all but impossible for an EU that is part of a Eurasian landmass and is separated from Africa only by narrow stretches of the Mediterranean."

  [FT / Gideon Rachman]

• "In the movie, Cole, a happily married father of two, is an abstract painter, which raises the question: How can he afford a brownstone in the West Village? I’ve been writing movie reviews for a blog that attracts more than eight hundred and forty-five unique views a month, and I live in the kind of housing complex that rappers brag about escaping."

  [New Yorker / Jesse Eisenberg]

WATCH THIS

David Bowie, remembered in 9 songs that sampled him [YouTube / Joe Posner, Joss Fong, Carlos Waters]

Terry O'Neill/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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