Vox Sentences: Cruz or Trump?

Marriage fight in the Anglican Church; it's looking like a 2-man GOP race; and Walmart is doing something it almost never does.

TOP NEWS

A fragile communion

Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images

• The Episcopal Church has been sanctioned by its parent church, the global Anglican Communion, over its decision to allow priests to perform same-sex marriages.

  [Religion News Service / Kimberly Winston]

• The church hasn't been banned or suspended from the organization itself. But its members have been directed to sit out of any Anglican Communion decision-making bodies for three years.

  [Rev. Mike Angell]

• This is actually a relatively moderate outcome. The four-day conference of Communion denominations that ended today was widely expected to threaten to break the Communion apart entirely.

  [The Economist ]

• The Communion has been in tension at least since 2003, when the Episcopal Church elected an openly gay bishop.

  [New Yorker / Peter J. Boyer]

• It's been very hard for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who leads the Communion but doesn't have Pope-like powers, to appease both the liberal North American churches and the conservative African ones. (In fact, one African bishop walked out of the conference because the Episcopalians weren't dealt with harshly enough.)

  [Church Times / Madeleine Davies]

• This is a good close reading of the conference's ultimate decision, which leans heavily on the desire for the whole church to "walk together."

  [Psephizo / Ian Paul]

• And this blogpost summarizes the feelings of many Episcopalian clergy: the sanctions are sad, but turning their backs on LGBT people would be worse.

  [Rev. Sara Irwin]

A two-man race

Scott Olson/Getty Images

• Ted Cruz won last night's debate. It's looking increasingly like a two-man race.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Cruz has hit on an attack on Donald Trump he likes: accusing Trump of "New York Values." Even some of his supporters don't really think it's a great line.

  [Talking Points Memo / Caitlin Macneal]

• But Cruz has grabbed on with both hands. This quote from him on the trail today is the most explicit culture-warmongering we've seen in the 2016 race.

  [Elizabeth Landers via Twitter]

• Faced with the choice between Cruz and Trump, many House Republicans actually prefer Trump — on the theory, in my (Dara's) opinion misguided, that Trump is a blank slate on which they can write their preferred policies.

  [National Review / Elaina Plott]

• Meanwhile, in the establishment, Jeb Bush donors have started admitting to themselves that they're setting money on fire for the sake of Bush loyalty.

  [Politico / Anna Palmer and Ben White]

• But even for a Jeb donor, some things aren't worth spending money on. Like a Super Bowl ad. So an allied super-PAC is crowdsourcing money from other people to buy one.

  [NYT / Ashley Parker]

Walmart almost never closes stores. It's closing 250.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• Walmart is closing 269 of its stores — 154 of them in the US.

  [Forbes / Clare O'Connor]

• 10,000 employees work at the US stores that will close. Walmart will try to find jobs for them at nearby stores.

• It's been a rough winter for large big-box stores. The Walmart news comes the week after Macy's announced its own store closures.

  [WSJ / Sarah Nassauer]

• But Walmart is also closing all 102 locations of its smaller Express stores, which it rolled out only a few years ago — a sign that it hasn't necessarily figured out its medium-term strategy.

  [AP]

• And the closing of any stores is extremely unusual. Walmart has closed only 30 stores over the past 5 years.

  [FT / Lindsey Whipp]

• Here's a list and map of the US locations that are closing.

  [Quartz / Nikhil Sonnad, Christopher Groskopf, and Zachary M. Seward]

MISCELLANEOUS

Against small talk. [NYT / Tim Boomer]

• The Obama administration is planning to invest $4 billion in a ten-year-plan to support and "accelerate" development of self-driving cars — and committing to a federal policy whereby fully driverless vehicles will be allowed nationwide.

  [Re/code / Mark Bergen]

• Lale and Joan Roberts say their daughter is accusing them of sexual and physical abuse because of faulty "Recovered Memory Therapy," a now discredited psychotherapy practice. Their children all say the abuse actually happened. Is this a case of quack therapy tearing a family apart — or a family railing against quack therapy in an attempt to hide real abuse?

  [Medical Daily / Ed Cara]

• The most-edited Wikipedia page of 2015 was, "Geospatial summary of the High Peaks/Summits of the Juneau Icefield."

  [FiveThirtyEight / Andrew Flowers and Carl Bialik]

• Mea culpa: that Vice item about DJ Khaled posting his credit card to Snapchat we included yesterday was a hoax. Sorry for linking to it. If you want a more accurate, but no less fascinating, story about how Khaled became an unlikely Snap sensation, this piece is excellent.

  [The Verge / Lizzie Plaugic]

VERBATIM

"It is unclear if any of the Hog’s Breath staff knew they were getting attacked by a Backstreet Boy as the situation was unfolding." [The Daily Beast / Asawin Suebsaeng]

• "Our animals aren’t killed by farmers or butchers. That’s right, we let the animals kill themselves… slowly… over years of relatively small, bad decisions. So you can feel good in knowing they are killed the same way you and I are."

  [McSweeney's / Dan Kennedy]

• "The convenient far-right mythology that violence against women is only a problem ‘Out There’ perpetrated by ‘Them’ foreigners is little more than a figleaf to justify a very real epidemic of sexual violence against women in the US and UK, perpetrated by American and British men."

  [Medium / Nafeez Ahmed]

• "Hey, I need you to throw away money on Jeb — out of loyalty."

  [Anonymous Bush fundraiser via Politico / Anna Palmer and Ben White]

• "Every airline has its horror stories, of course—air travel is full of opportunities for customer disenchantment. But United has proved an industry leader: On all major performance metrics—delays, cancellations, mishandled bags, and bumped passengers—United has, since 2012, been reliably the worst or near worst among its competitors."

  [Bloomberg Businessweek / Drake Bennett]

WATCH THIS

The racist history of US immigration policy [YouTube / Alvin Chang, Joe Posner, Gina Barton]

Vox / Alvin Chang