Vox Sentences: How to win a debate without showing up

Trump stumps Fox; why Obama wants companies to tell the government how much they pay people; hypocrisy in Flint.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Trump 1, Fox News 0, Cruz -8

Scott Olson/Getty Images

• Donald Trump did not attend last night's Republican debate. Donald Trump won last night's Republican debate.

  [NBC News / Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Carrie Dann]

• This isn't as dumb as it sounds. Ted Cruz, Trump's main competition in Iowa, had a terrible performance, making Trump's life easier.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• In fact, Cruz is shifting his energies to attacking Marco Rubio in the days before the Iowa caucuses — which might mean Rubio is gaining momentum but definitely means Trump's lead is presumed secure.

  [Politico / Shane Goldmacher, Eli Stokols, and Katie Glueck]

• The Fox News moderators worked hard to make Cruz look bad. They succeeded, but they made themselves look bad in the process — and made Trump's decision to skip look pretty wise.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• (If you want a description of what Trump did instead, by the way, here it is.)

  [Vox / Tara Golshan]

• The Fox News debate was the second-lowest-rated of the cycle. Fox protests that it did better than the last GOP debate, but that was on Fox Business, which is a channel many fewer Americans get.

  [MarketWatch / Greg Robb]

Can Obama close the wage gap with data?

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

• President Obama proposed new regulations today that would require all companies with more than 100 people to send the government information about the wages of their employees by gender and race.

  [The White House]

• These companies are already required to submit the demographic breakdown of their employees. The new regulations would just add pay data to hiring data.

  [USA Today / Gregory Korte]

• The government claims that filing the reports will help companies ensure "voluntary compliance." But they aren't ruling out the possibility that the EEOC will use the data to go after companies with egregious pay gaps.

  [The Atlantic / Bourree Lam]

• Even without the data, the White House's task force on the gender pay gap has gotten employers to pay $85 million in "relief" to women who were the victims of pay discrimination.

  [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]

• But with the data, employment lawyers claim, it will be easier for future women to make complaints about their pay to the EEOC — because there will be readily available data showing it's not just a woman's perception.

  [Washington Post / Danielle Paquette and Drew Harwell]

• Of course, fixing the social factors that, say, discourage women from trying to negotiate for higher salaries? That will take a little more work.

  [Vox / Danielle Kurtzleben]

A choice of water

Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

• Newly released emails show that eight months before admitting that the water in Flint, Michigan, was tainted with lead, the government trucked in water coolers for state employees there.

  [Progress Michigan]

• The emails claim that while the water was safe, employees should be able to "choose" which water they preferred.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• (At the time, the government, under Gov. Rick Snyder, was claiming that the only problems with Flint's water supply were "aesthetic.")

  [CNN / Dana Ford]

• In a not totally unrelated development, Gov. Snyder signed a bill into law today granting $28 million in emergency funding to Flint for bottled water, filters, and tests, even for people who are not state employees.

  [WSJM]

MISCELLANEOUS

The Big Short argues the housing crash caused the Great Recession. It didn't. The Fed did. [NYT / David Beckworth and Ramesh Ponnuru]

• Why doesn't the heart symbol look anything like a heart?

  [Priceonomics / Zachary Crockett]

• In praise of Blooks: items that look like books but are actually lighters, or compartments for flasks, or cookie jars.

  [NYT / Jennifer Schuessler]

• In 1996, People magazine tried to get people to care that the Oscars only nominated one black person out of 166 nominees total. Basically no celebrities other than Quincy Jones cared.

  [New Republic / Esther Breger]

• Inside Cher Twitter, the only Twitter that truly matters.

  [NYT / Jenna Wortham]

VERBATIM

"'It is wicked,' Rumsfeld said, wearing green corduroys and a Heritage Foundation fleece vest, and lounging in a conference room overseen by a bust of Churchill wearing a bow tie and smoking a cigar." [NY Mag / Annie Lowrey]

• "A typical email would begin by discussing how 'all this talk of Czech weather and soft-core pornography has inspired me to speak up and introduce myself'; or how someone has 'a bellyful of wine and passiflora' and 'still can’t sleep'; or how another gets 'mocked for having Nietzsche under my bed … not a book … the actual german philosopher.'"

  [New Republic / Evan Fleischer]

• "Legislative agendas matter, but voters should also ask which presidential candidates they trust with the extraordinary power to choose who will fight on the front lines to enforce the laws."

  [NYT / Elizabeth Warren]

• "What you call plain is properly called rational. This house is a reflection of the reason of man … Your dolls are trash."

  [McSweeney's / Kyle Sammin]

• "The thing with some American politicians, such as Sarah Palin, is – I don’t want to use the word stupid, but I do. They are. They are so ignorant about the rest of the world. They think there are two monarchies in the world. And that’s the U.K. and Monaco, because of Grace Kelly."

  [Roger Lundgren to The Local]

WATCH THIS

Save the salamanders, unsung heroes of the forest [YouTube / Estelle Caswell, Joss Fong, Brian Resnick]

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