Vox Sentences: Your viewing guide to Thursday’s Republican (and Canadian) debates

The roster is set for the first GOP presidential debate; Canada's having an election; and Planned Parenthood lives to fight another day.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

How do you prep to debate Donald Trump?

Vox / Javier Zarracina

• Here is your lineup for the first Republican presidential debate (happening 9p EDT Thursday): Donald Trump; Jeb Bush; Scott Walker; Mike Huckabee; Ben Carson; Ted Cruz; Marco Rubio; Rand Paul; Chris Christie; and John Kasich.

  [Fox News via Facebook]

• (Be the hit of your debate-watching party by being the only one in the room who knows anything about John Kasich.)

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• 9 of those candidates now have 48 hours to solve a metaphysical question: how do you prepare for a debate with Donald Trump?

  [Washington Post / Dan Balz and Robert Costa]

• Trump himself, of course, wants you to know that he is definitely not prepping for the debate at all, because he's authentic and unfiltered.

  [Daily Caller / Alex Pappas]

• There's a pretty persuasive argument that this debate could actually matter — if it gives party elites someone to rally around to stop Trump, or if it leads voters to start scrutinizing Trump more closely.

  [Real Clear Politics / David Byler]

• The debate is also likely to hinder the campaigns of the 7 candidates who didn't make it. The also-rans include some candidates you might be surprised aren't polling better (Perry, Santorum) and some who were never going to make it (George Pataki, Jim Gilmore).

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Some pollsters are crying out that Fox is putting too much into arbitrary distinctions. You can see the distance between #10 (Kasich) and #11 (Perry) here: it's not much.

  [NPR / Danielle Kurtzleben.]

• But while Kasich is prepping for the debate, Perry et al. will be included in their own "loser's bracket" debate, which will air Thursday at 5p — for which at least one candidate has been preparing by playing Solitaire on her phone.

  [BuzzFeed / Rosie Gray]

The longest (79 days!) and most expensive campaign in Canadian history

Bernard Weil/Toronto Star via Getty

• On Monday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper officially announced that Canada will hold a general election on October 19 — starting a 79-day campaign, which is the longest in modern Canadian history (typed with no small amount of envy).

  [Maclean's / Aaron Wherry]

• The major players: the incumbent Conservative party, headed by Harper (who's going for a fourth and possibly final term)...

  [Canadian Press / Jordan Press]

• ...the leftist New Democratic Party, which has grown from a fringe party into a major party by gobbling up support from Quebecois separatists and winning a surprise victory in Alberta's provincial elections....

  [National Post / Mark Kennedy]

• ...and the center-left Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, who is arguably an intellectual lightweight but is very pretty (and whose father Pierre was Prime Minister for fifteen years and defined Canadian politics in the 1970s).

  [Canadian Press / Bruce Cheadle]

• If the election were held today, the creator of ThreeHundredEight.com projects Conservatives and NDP would be tied with 127 seats apiece — which would provoke a spectacular fight over who got to join with the third-place Liberals to form a government.

  [CBC / Éric Grenier]

• But it's being held 78 days from now, and in the meantime the Conservatives (nearly as well-funded as the other two major parties combined) are expected to bombard the airwaves with ads.

  [CBC / Adrienne Arsenault]

• Now that the election's officially been called, third-party groups need to restrict their ads. But the long election season means the election will be more expensive to hold. Elections Canada (the more aggressive Canadian equivalent of the FEC) could spend $500 million between now and the election.

  [Toronto Star / Wendy Gillis]

• Oh, and in the middle of the campaign the Conservative government is trying to finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which it would then have to sell voters on before the election.

  [Canadian Press / Alexander Panetta]

• If all this sounds more interesting to you than watching 9 other Republicans try not to fall into the Vortex of Trump, consider skipping the GOP debate Thursday and watching the Canadian party leaders debate instead.

  [Maclean's / Aaron Wherry]

How Planned Parenthood became the symbol of American abortion

Getty / Andrew Burton

• Last night, the Senate failed to pass a bill to defund Planned Parenthood. For now.

  [The Hill / Peter Sullivan and Jordain Carney]

• The bill was introduced — and championed by Republican presidential candidates Rand Paul and Ted Cruz — in reaction to the latest round of Planned Parenthood sting videos from the group the Center for Medical Progress.

  [Reuters / Alina Selyukh]

• The vote has led some very confused conservatives to get mad at Mitch McConnell because they don't understand Senate procedure.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• The sting videos might continue to be a big deal. Pro-choice groups are reportedly very worried.

  [Mother Jones/Molly Redden]

• How did Planned Parenthood become the symbol for abortion providers, anyway? Sarah Kliff blames former Indiana congressman Mike Pence.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• Alternatively, Elizabeth Nolan Brown says that stricter licensing laws for abortion providers — pushed by pro-lifers — created Big Abortion.

  [Reason / Elizabeth Nolan Brown]

• But here's the problem with making a nonprofit a culture war symbol: you rally people to its defense. To wit: in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this week, Americans saw Planned Parenthood more favorably than any other entity pollsters asked about.

  [NBC News / Carrie Dann]

• The second-most-favorably viewed? The NRA.

MISCELLANEOUS

In the future, fewer of the people talking about the future will be men. [The Atlantic / Rose Eveleth]

• Trying to forestall the salamander apocalypse.

  [New York Times / Carl Zimmer]

• If you believe that jet fuel can't melt steel beams and also are a huge fan of The Bachelorette, then boy oh boy have I got the conspiracy theory for you.

  [Glamour / Megan Angelo]

• Buzz Aldrin has an official government travel voucher specifying a trip from "Cape Kennedy, Florida to Moon" in a "Government Spacecraft."

  [Gizmodo / Kiona Smith-Strickland]

• Housing segregation used to mean white families flocked to the suburbs and left inner cities to black and Latino families. With gentrification, that's starting to flip.

  [Pacific Standard / Francie Diep]

VERBATIM

"More than half of people who run will experience some sort of injury from doing so, while the percentage of walkers who will get hurt is around 1 percent." [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• "Does he make you want to start sculpting? Like, you've never thought about sculpting before?"

  [LeBron James via Slate / Laura Bradley]

• "I regret that I didn't have a more serious life; that my films were too entertaining when I started. I wanted to be Ingmar Bergman."

  [Woody Allen to NPR / Sam Fragoso]

• "A lot of people don’t know this, but the Empire State Building is open until 2 a.m. The last elevator leaves at 1:15. If you go up then, it’s empty, it’s beautiful, and the city sounds like the ocean."

  [NY Mag / Zach Woods]

• "My nephew is a grave, grim boy who takes weekly oatmeal baths, writes trivia cards for no one, and dreams of designing a superior cigarette."

  [Clickhole]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck

• How saber-toothed tigers grew their mouth swords.

  [YouTube / Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck]

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