Vox Sentences: Make America Stop Talking About Melania Trump Again

Turkey: Let’s purge the civil service; Donald Trump: Oooh, interesting idea!; good news for voting rights from the US’s most conservative court.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The Purge: Donald Trump edition

Win McNamee/Getty Images

• Here's what you need to know about the Republican National Convention's second night: Nothing happened that was as interesting as Melania Trump's plagiarism scandal from the previous night of the convention, which the Trump campaign finally laid to rest today by releasing an apology from a speechwriter.

  [The Hill / Harper Neidig]

• Of course, because Donald Trump thinks that all publicity is good publicity, he thought the attention paid to Melania's speech was great (seriously).

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• But the situation crowded out coverage of fully half of Trump's convention. If not for Melania, maybe everyone would be talking about how poor Chris Christie got his groove back with a barnburner of an anti-Clinton convention speech — or about how creepy it is that the entire convention arena interrupted Christie multiple times by chanting, "Lock her up!"

  [CNN / Chris Moody]

• Maybe everyone would be talking about the message of last night's convention coverage: "Make America Work Again." No, never mind, nobody would be talking about that, because none of the convention speakers last night actually kept to the theme. It was all Hillary Clinton bashing, all the time.

  [Nate Silver via Twitter]

• That said, reports indicate that Christie and Trump plan to create jobs for Republicans by purging Obama appointees from the civil service and replacing them with part-time externs from the private sector.

  [Reuters / Emily Flitter]

• Trump gets another chance tonight with the theme "Make America First Again" — officially bolstering his 1968-vintage "law and order" racist dog-whistling with 1934-vintage anti-Semitic dog-whistling. (If you don't know the history, read Vox's Libby Nelson.)

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Tonight's convention also features more Trump family members, some of whom might actually tell America some stories about how Donald Trump is a good human being — standard convention fare that's been notably absent from the speeches of the first two nights.

  [Washington Post / Philip Rucker]

• It's not an insult to say Trump isn't running a typical presidential convention, because, after all, he doesn't really want to be president. He wants to be king — the head of state but not the head of government.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

Turkey: "Been there, done that"

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

• Continuing to consolidate power after Friday's failed coup, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invoked "emergency powers" under the constitution Wednesday. The emergency powers, which will last for three months, allow Erdogan and his cabinet to enact laws without the approval of parliament.

  [WSJ / Ned Levin and Emre Parker]

• One law reportedly on the table: civilian oversight of the military, which has traditionally prided itself on its independence and secularism (which is why it's been the breeding ground for this and past coups).

  [Washington Post / Loveday Morris, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, and Souad Mekhennet]

• Erdogan continues to blame cleric Fethullah Gulen for the coup; he's formally asked the US to extradite Gulen, who now lives in Pennsylvania.

  [CNN / Angela Dewan]

• But Erdogan is also taking the opportunity to clean house: In addition to purging the government of thousands of bureaucrats, his government fired 15,000 education workers on Tuesday.

  [The Guardian / Patrick Kingsley]

• Erdogan's had his eye on academia for some time. In January, he detained, then released, professors who had signed a letter supportive of Turkey's Kurds. By all appearances, the purge is simply Erdogan's way of enacting that old Rahm Emanuel maxim: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

  [NYT / Ceylan Yeginsu]

• All of this puts the US, and specifically John Kerry, in a tremendously awkward position. Kerry has gone so far as to publicly float the idea that Turkey could be kicked out of NATO over the purge. But he's tried very hard, over the past several days, to be a force for stability above all.

  [Time / Massimo Calabresi]

There's no I (or ID) in Texas

Erich Schlegel/Getty Images

• The Fifth Circuit struck down Texas's voter ID law Wednesday. Unless the decision is reversed by the Supreme Court (which is unlikely), 600,000 Texans will be able to vote legally in November who would not have been able to do so under the ID law.

  [Reuters / Jon Herskovitz and Lawrence Hurley]

• Texas's law was regarded by voting rights advocates as the worst in the nation: A handgun permit was considered acceptable ID, but a tribal ID card was not.

  [Brennan Center for Justice]

• Because the Supreme Court is currently split 4-4 on voting rights issues, the Fifth Circuit's decision will likely stand through November — as will pending lower court rulings on lawsuits against other state voting laws (including Ohio and Wisconsin).

  [CNN / Ariane de Vogue]

• On the whole, voting in 2016 will be more restricted than it was in 2012. The biggest reason: The Supreme Court's decision in 2013 striking down a provision of the Voting Rights Act requiring federal approval of changes to voting in certain jurisdictions. According to the Nation's Ari Berman, 70 percent of electoral votes come from states that have passed voting restrictions after the SCOTUS ruling.

  [The Nation / Ari Berman]

• What makes the Fifth Circuit's ruling interesting, though, is that Texas's law was initially challenged under the VRA section the Supreme Court struck, then brought under a different provision (Section 2) instead.

  [NBC News / Zachary Roth]

• That the Section 2 challenge succeeded — in one of the nation's most conservative courts — might indicate that states don't have carte blanche to restrict voting even without the federal government's preemptive oversight.

  [Think Progress / Ian Millhiser]

• In particular, voting rights advocates may be heartened by one passage in the Fifth Circuit's decision: "Neutral reasons" for passing a law "can and do mask racial intent."

  [WSJ / Jacob Gershman]

MISCELLANEOUS

The case for hosting the Olympics in hundreds of different cities simultaneously, rather than doing every sport in the same place. [The Conversation / Paul Christesen]

• The economy is largely recovered. But hunger levels are still way above where they were pre-crash, and recent SNAP restrictions in states aren't helping.

  [The Atlantic / Ned Resnikoff]

• Alphabetical ordering in listing of academic paper authors leads to "alphabetical discrimination" against people with last names toward the end of the alphabet, according to a paper by someone with the last name Weber.

  [SSRN / Matthias Weber]

• 72 percent of Americans born before World War II say it's essential to live in a democracy. Only 30 percent of millennials do. Democracy, in the US, is simply becoming less popular.

  [Journal of Democracy / Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk]

• Meet Stimtastic, a company run by autistics selling jewelry specifically for autistics who need to stim.

  [Daily Dot / Jaya Saxena]

VERBATIM

"A beautiful dark boar emerged from sea foam and barreled onto the beach, in a vision out of Greek myth." [Deadspin / Giri Nathan]

• "You hear my old buddies talk about ‘them,’ and what ‘they’re’ getting—free phones, free furniture. ‘What next, free TV’s?’ You try to argue, ‘well, we grew up in a dominant U.S. economy that doesn’t exist anymore’ or talk about ‘robotics’ — they don’t want to hear it."

  [Politico Magazine / Jeff Greenfield]

• "Of course global capitalism has made the goods available in one country more like the goods available in another country. But this seems deplorable only to that privileged minority who spend more time in aeroplanes than buses, and who regret the fact that the exotic goods they used to bring back from their travels are now available at their local corner shop."

  [London Review of Books / Paul Seabright]

• "A lot of artists think that suffering is necessary. But in reality any kind of suffering cramps the flow of creativity. Let's say that Van Gogh every time he went out and painted got diarrhea. It wouldn't be so good for him to go out."

  [David Lynch to The Atlantic / Jackie Lay, Katherine Wells, and Jennie Rothenberg Gritz]

• "[Google] put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games."

  [Bloomberg / Jack Clark]

WATCH THIS

How the Republican Party went from Lincoln to Trump [YouTube / Johnny Harris and Andrew Prokop]

Getty Archive, D Dipasupil/Getty Images for Extra

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