Vox Sentences: On paper, Bobby Jindal is the most impressive GOP candidate. In reality…

Jindal-mania, catch it!

Jindal at his first presidential campaign rally in Kenner, Louisiana, earlier today. (Sean Gardner/Getty Images)

• Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) announced his presidential campaign by posting a hidden camera video to Facebook of him talking to his children about the decision.

  [Vox / Tez Clark]

• Whatever you make of Jindal's politics, he's had a pretty remarkable career. He became Louisiana's health secretary at age 25, took over its university system at 28, and narrowly lost the governorship at 32 before winning it at 36.

  [Time]

• Here's a brief rundown of Jindal's positions on the issues.

  [Vox / Tez Clark]

• He's one of the few candidates who's actually laid out a detailed alternative to Obamacare. His would have states provide insurance coverage for people with low incomes or preexisting medical conditions, using federal money, with much more flexibility that Medicaid or SCHIP has now.

  [America Next / Bobby Jindal]

• He's argued that aiming for universal health insurance is playing into Democrats' hands: "If we start with the premise that we’ve gotta give every single person a card, and that’s the only way we can be successful, we’re done. We’ve adopted their metric of success."

  [Philip Klein via Washington Post / Greg Sargent]

• Jindal has tried to eliminate Louisiana's income and corporate taxes and replace them with higher sales and cigarette taxes; that didn't work, but some of his other tax cuts have passed.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Jindal raised taxes this year, but crafted the plan in such a way that he didn't technically violate Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge, which he's signed.

  [NYT / Campbell Robertson and Jeremy Alford]

• The plan is truly bananas: the budget levies a $1,600 fee on all public college students but also gives them a $1,600 tax credit. The former doesn't count as a tax increase, but the latter counts as a cut, letting Jindal raise taxes elsewhere without Norquist concluding he raised taxes overall.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Jindal is a big supporter of school vouchers, which has provoked numerous court challenges, including from the Justice Department.

  [New Orleans Times-Picayune / Jessica Williams and Danielle Dreilinger]

• He used to be a supporter of Common Core, but flip-flopped.

  [PolitiFact / Linda Qiu]

• His handling of Hurricane Gustav in 2008 brought widespread praise, in stark contrast to his predecessor's handling of Katrina in 2005.

  [Washington Post / Peter Whoriskey]

• Jindal is more of a moderate on immigration than many in the GOP field and has called for the US to let in more high-skilled legal immigrants.

  [The Hill / Mark Hensch]

• He's helped spread myths about Muslim "no-go zones," segments of European cities which Westerners are supposedly not allowed to enter.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Jindal signed a bill into law enabling the teaching of creationism. Before signage, his old Brown genetics professor Arthur Landy commented, "Governor Jindal was a good student in my class when he was thinking about becoming a doctor, and I hope he doesn't do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana's doctors."

  [New Orleans Times-Picayune / Jarvis DeBerry]

• Jindal faces an uphill battle. He hasn't polled higher than 2 percent nationally, 2 percent in Iowa, or 3 percent in New Hampshire all year.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Harry Enten]

• A recent poll found him trailing Hillary Clinton by 2 points in a hypothetical match-up — in Louisiana.

  [The Advocate / Elizabeth Crisp]

• He used to be more of a rising star in the party, but his dreadful performance delivering the 2009 Republican response to the State of the Union greatly reduced his national reputation.

  [Vox / Tez Clark]

Terrorism is not a major threat, part 13,751

Airport security: a solution in search of a problem. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

• Since 9/11, nearly twice as many Americans have been killed by right-wing extremists as by Muslim terrorists.

  [NYT / Scott Shane]

• According to a count by the New America Foundation's David Sterman and Peter Bergen, 48 Americans have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment radicals, and other right-wing non-Muslims since 9/11, and 26 have been killed by radical Islamists.

  [New America Foundation]

• The US has, by the estimates of political scientists John Mueller and Mark Stewart, increased counterterrorism spending by a staggering $75 billion a year since 9/11.

  [Cato Institute / John Mueller and Mark Stewart]

• That's roughly $1 billion, every year, per American killed by right-wing and Muslim terrorists since 9/11.

• 490,457 people died from motor vehicle-related injuries from 2002 to 2013, in case you were interested in things that are major threats to American lives.

  [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]

• And between 2006 and 2010, an average of 75,118 people died due to alcohol-related causes every year, not including motor vehicle deaths.

  [CDC / Mandy Stahre, Jim Roeber, Dafna Kanny, Robert Brewer, and Xingyou Zhang]

Heat wave

Pakistanis receive ice outside a hospital in Karachi earlier today. (Qaisar Khan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

• Over 800 people have died in a heatwave in Pakistan, centered around Karachi, its largest city (and, with about 23 million residents, it's the second-largest in the world after Shanghai).

  [NYT / Saba Imtiaz and Zia ur-Rehman]

• Farooq Dar of the Pakistan Meteorological Department called the heatwave "unprecedented … It has never been this bad."

  [Time / Rishi Iyengar]

• The extreme heat has fueled a rise in electricity consumption, sparking power outages.

  [Bloomberg / Kamran Haider and Khurrum Anis]

• Opposition parties are launching protests, alleging that the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was ill-prepared for the heat stroke and failed to take emergency measures to mitigate its effects.

  [FT / Farhan Bokhari and Amy Kazmin]

• The government is weighing a process, popular in China, called "cloud seeding" to produce artificial rain.

  [Dawn / Asad Farooq]

• But the thickness of clouds over Karachi has delayed seeding until next week at the earliest.

  [Dunya News]

• Climate change is expected to increase and intensify heat waves in coming decades.

Misc.

• Can't tell if a joke is transphobic or not? Well, there's an app for that.

  [Tiny Subversions / Darius Kazemi]

• French high schoolers are very upset that their national English exam expects them to know what the word "coping" means (presumably not just because it sounds exactly like the French word for "female friend").

  [BBC]

• The Women's World Cup is, in one sense, about soccer. In another, more accurate sense, it's about folding your arms while pivoting your body 90 degrees to the left.

  [Slate / LV Anderson and Anne Marie Lindemann]

• The surprisingly complex linguistics of Blink-182.

  [Atlas Obscura / Dan Nosowitz]

• This is a rather convincing argument that recent hand-wringing by college professors about their allegedly inflexible left-wing students is a product of America's higher ed system — and that Canada's system has no parallel phenomenon.

  [Ottawa Citizen / Joseph Heath]

Verbatim

• "Exposing a woman’s body in the name of class warfare is an ugly impulse."

  [Slate / Amanda Hess]

• "When a white person claims that they are not racist today, what they are saying, for the most part, is that they are not 'white trash.'"

  [New Republic / Frank Guan]

• "What is this, Arkansas? This looks like a design for a Confederate ketchup bottle."

  [Washington Post / Alexandra Petri]

• "We're proud that we've made poor taste affordable for everyone."

  [Donald Featherstone via CityLab / Laura Bliss]

• "Taylor Swift is Daenerys Targaryen. In the relatively short space of her public life, she’s gone from underestimated little blonde girl to full blown, not to be messed with khaleesi. And like the Mother of Dragons, she is seemingly both benevolent and fierce, at once respected and reviled."

  [Salon / Mary Elizabeth Williams]

Video of the day

• Swim lessons for infants sound absurd. But they could save your baby’s life.

  [YouTube]