Vox Sentences: A State of the Union cheat sheet

1. SOTU: the basics

President Barack Obama shakes hands with Speaker of the House John Boehner at the 2014 State of the Union. (Larry Downing-Pool/Getty Images)

• Obama's 2015 State of the Union address is tonight.

• Obama will propose raising taxes on capital gains and dividend income, and on bank borrowing, to pay for tax cuts for low- and middle-income people.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• He will reportedly ask for $68 billion more in spending, split evenly between defense and domestic priorities.

  [Bloomberg / Jonathan Allen]

• Expect him to bring up his recently outlined plan to make the first two years of community college free …

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• … and to re-up his call for Congress to require employers to let workers accrue up to seven paid sick days a year …

  [Vox / Danielle Kurtzleben]

• … and to reiterate his position that the Federal Communications Commission should stop states from cracking down on city government-provided broadband internet.

  [Vox / Tim Lee]

• Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst will give the Republican response to the speech.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

2. SOTU: the context

US Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) practices the Republican response to the 2015 State of the Union. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

• Fun fact — the State of the Union was given in written form by every president from Jefferson to Taft. Woodrow Wilson started doing it as a speech again in 1913.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• The White House will be live-annotating the speech with data visualizations and other footnotes on WhiteHouse.gov.

  [Vox / Tim Lee]

• Obama's bringing Alan Gross, the American prisoner he freed from Cuba as part of his big Cuba deal; Republicans are bringing a bunch of Cuban dissidents in turn.

  [The Atlantic / Russell Berman]

• The big tax proposal doesn't bring the dividend tax rate to where it was before the huge 2003 tax cut — a cut that didn't appear to spur any investment or wage growth.

  [Roosevelt Institute / Mike Konczal]

• If Obama wants to keep peoples' attention, social psychology suggests he should go negative and use a lot of lists.

  [New Republic / Alice Robb]

• Is the state of the union really strong? Here are 33 maps and charts breaking it down.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• 66 countries — including Ireland and Sweden! — have never been mentioned in a State of the Union since 1964.

  [Washington Post / Adam Taylor]

3. SOTU: the commentary

Joe Biden pointing at some folks at the 2012 State of the Union. (Pool / Getty Images)

• Ezra Klein: Obama should, but won't, address the fundamental brokenness of the US political system.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Neil Irwin: Obama didn't propose his tax plan to enact it, he proposed it to influence Democratic party policy after his presidency.

  [NYT / Neil Irwin]

• Tax expert Daniel Shaviro: Obama's tax plan fixes one of the biggest loopholes in the entire tax code, the one that prevents people from being taxed on assets' growing value if they don't sell them before death.

  [Daniel Shaviro]

• Michael Kinsley once dubbed the above provision the "angel of death loophole."

  [Slate / Michael Kinsley]

• Peter Orszag: the White House should propose policies to give workers a stake in their companies' profits.

  [Bloomberg View / Peter Orszag]

4. Misc.

• An artist put up a sign for I-5 North on California Highway 110 without permission — but the government left it there and didn't prosecute him, since it was so helpful.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• Inflation in Venezuela is officially up to 65 percent — and the real number is probably much higher.

  [Forbes / Frances Coppola]

• Sony's stock price has risen 35 percent in the past three months, despite being the victim of a giant cyberattack.

  [FT / Kana Inagaki]

• Google Image Search was created partially in response to Jennifer Lopez's 2000 Grammys dress.

  [Project Syndicate / Eric Schmidt]

• Former federal judge — and women's legal advocate — Nancy Gertner on how to reconcile colleges' need to protect students from sexual assault with the rights of the accused.

  [The American Prospect / Nancy Gertner]

5. Verbatim

• "In an effort to develop 'easy care' sheep that can survive without costly shelters or shepherds, ewes are giving birth, unaided, in open fields where newborns are killed by predators, harsh weather and starvation."

  [NYT / Michael Moss]

• "Last year, six leading Washington think tanks presented more than 150 events on the Middle East that included not a single woman speaker."

  [Washington Post / Tamara Cofman Wittes and Marc Lynch]

• "For security reasons the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault."

  [Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Edward Said, via London Review of Books]

• "TL;DR – Paul Ryan is the Petyr Baelish of the USA."

  [Slate Star Codex / Scott Alexander]

• "How far are you willing to push the Pareto principle?"

  [Marginal Revolution / Tyler Cowen, responding to an article about a father-daughter couple]

• "By the time we got married in 1968, we were pretty nose-down toward what we wanted to do, and having a child was going to be an excuse to fail."

  [Richard Ford to NYT / Andrew Goldman]