Vox Sentences: A beginner’s guide to Ted Cruz 2016

1. Cruz control

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) announces his campaign Monday morning. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

• Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced his presidential campaign at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia on Monday, the first major Republican to officially jump into the race.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Cruz is hugely popular with the Tea Party wing of his party, but he's expected to do worse with the donors and party elites who many political scientists believe are decisive in presidential primaries.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Harry Enten]

• Cruz's counterargument is that he beat the odds in his 2012 Senate race, and that Ronald Reagan proved candidates commonly thought to be too conservative to win can make it.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Liberty, founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, was a thematically appropriate choice, as Cruz is expected to aggressively court religious voters. The school also sued the federal government over Obamacare, the repeal of which is a major cause of Cruz's.

  [Washington Post / Fred Barbash]

• Cruz was born in Canada but that doesn't affect his eligibility to run; his mother was an American citizen who'd lived at least ten years in the US (at least five of them after age 14), which is what federal law requires for children born abroad to be natural-born citizens.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Cruz hasn't laid out a lot of detailed policy proposals yet, but his overall standards are down-the-line conservative: repeal Obamacare, no amnesty for undocumented immigrants, drastically lower tax rates, block net neutrality, and amend the Constitution to allow states to ban same-sex marriage.

  [PBS / Lisa Desjardins]

• In his announcement, Cruz repeated his frequent call to abolish the IRS, but back in 2013 a spokeswoman of his conceded that "a small department that would enforce the tax code" would still be necessary. Presumably Cruz would give it a different acronym.

  [Slate / Jordan Weissmann]

• Cruz has a hawkish record on foreign policy, recently introducing a bill that would increase sanctions on Iran and make it harder for the Obama administration to cut a nuclear deal.

  [Ted Cruz]

• He also has a more conspiratorial bent than other potential candidates, warning supporters of plots like a "George Soros-led United Nations environmental initiative to banish golf courses from the local American communities."

  [The Atlantic / David Ludwig]

• Ezra Klein: given how loathed Cruz is in the Senate, even within his own caucus, it's hard to see him being very effective as president.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Ramesh Ponnuru: Cruz is more effective than he's given credit for, blocking a White House initiative on the International Monetary Fund and getting a law passed banning a certain Iranian diplomat from entering the US.

  [Bloomberg View / Ramesh Ponnuru]

2. The world's favorite dictator

Lee and President Obama in the Oval Office at the White House October 29, 2009 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• Lee Kuan Yew, who served as prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990, during which time the country became independent, has died at age 91.

  [WSJ / Chun Han Wong and PR Venkat]

• Lee was the leading force behind the city-state's famed free-market policies and low levels of corruption — and also its authoritarian tendencies, including strict restrictions on speech.

  [NYT / Seth Mydans]

• Singapore's economy grew 100-fold from 1960 to 2011, for which Lee's policies deserve a substantial amount of credit.

  [Bloomberg View]

• Lee credited the country's multiculturalism for its success, along with "Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics."

  [Vox / Katy Lee]

• But Lee also helped spread the idea that Asian countries couldn't handle liberal democracy, which has had major deleterious consequences for the region.

  [Washington Post / Ishaan Tharoor]

• China looked to Lee's model as proof that economic liberalization and growth could coexist with authoritarianism.

  [NYT / Chris Buckley]

• Lee was particularly fond of using libel laws to intimidate the press, as well as political enemies.

  [WSJ / Melanie Kirkpatrick]

• On one occasion, he took on the International Herald Tribune for having the temerity to note that Singapore's current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is Lee's son; IHT (which hadn't even implied that the younger Lee got the job through nepotism) negotiated a cash settlement and apologized.

  [Washington Post / Justin Moyer]

• Under his rule, Singapore took to caning and the death penalty as common punishments.

  [Reuters]

• The grip of the People's Action Party, which Lee founded and which has ruled Singapore since independence, appears to be loosening, but it's still by far the dominant political force in Singapore, and the country is certainly not a liberal democracy.

  [Quartz / Devjyot Ghoshal]

3. I'm sorry you feel that way

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a speech in front of thousands at a rally in support of right-wing parties in Rabin Square on March 15, 2015 in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)

• Newly reelected Israeli prime minister has apologized for pre-election comments warning of Israeli Arabs voting "in droves."

  [NYT / Jodi Rudoren]

• Well, sort of apologized anyway. It's much more of an "I'm sorry you feel that way" kind of thing: "I know that my comments last week offended some Israeli citizens and offended members of the Israeli Arab community. This was never my intent. I apologize for this."

• State Department spokesperson Marie Harf wasn't convinced: "He said diametrically opposing things in the matter of a week, so which is his actual policy?"

  [State Department]

• President Obama said on Friday that the administration is now acting on the assumption that Netanyahu opposes a Palestinian state; Netanyahu also tried to walk back comments he made to that effect, apparently to no avail.

  [Huffington Post / Sam Stein]

• White House chief of staff Denis McDonough: "We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made, or that they don't raise questions about the prime minister's commitment to achieving peace through direct negotiations."

  [USA Today / Gregory Korte]

• The administration's view is backed up by the fact that Netanyahu's been criticizing the idea of a Palestinian state since at least 1978.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The International Crisis Group's Nathan Thrall notes that even his supportive statements have been full of caveats: "Who better to wink at the world and say, 'I'm in favor of two states with many, many asterisks, while actually doing nothing to bring that about on the ground, than Bibi?"

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

4. Misc.

• Jeff Keacher hooked up a 1986 Mac Plus to the modern internet. It was an ordeal, but did result in the following excellent screenshot:

  [The Kernel / Jeff Keacher]

Jeff Keacher

• Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallstrom stood up for human rights in Saudi Arabia — and now the Saudis are trying to damage Sweden's economy in retaliation.

  [Washington Post / Adam Taylor]

• The marbled murrelet is an endangered species of bird in the Pacific Northwest, whose eggs are often preyed upon by another type of bird in the area. So researchers are creating poisonous fake murrelet eggs to convince the other bird not to eat the real ones.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• When at the State Department, Jake Sullivan was Director of Policy Planning and one of America's top nuclear negotiators with Iran; Hillary Clinton also had him periodically print out news articles so she could read them on paper.

  [NYT / Michael Schmidt]

• You've heard of communism. You may have heard of #FullCommunism. Now get ready for "fully automated luxury communism."

  [Vice / Brian Merchant]

5. Verbatim

• "After the death verdict in the Ford trial, I went out with others and celebrated with a few rounds of drinks. That's sick. I had been entrusted with the duty to seek the death of a fellow human being, a very solemn task that certainly did not warrant any 'celebration.'"

  [Shreveport Times / Marty Stroud]

• "For a study on whether everything we eat is associated with cancer, academics randomly selected 50 ingredients from recipes in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Most foods had studies behind them claiming both positive and negative results."

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• "Once you start noticing anti-homeless design, you can’t stop seeing it."

  [San Francisco Chronicle / Caille Millner]

• "Sons of senators had an 8,500 times higher chance of becoming a senator than an average American male boomer."

  [NYT / Seth Stephens-Davidowitz]