I am not bald.

Did you hear me, Emily Bazelon?

I'm not bald.

Hello, and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, October 7, 2011.

My name is David Plotz, and I am not bald, and I'm the editor of Slate and I'm here in

Washington, D.C., with John Dickerson, who is also not bald, Slate's chief political correspondent

and joining us from New Haven, also extremely hairy, is Emily Bazelon, Slate's senior editor.

Hello, Emily.

Hello, I shouldn't have made this joke for starting out because now you're in a bad mood about me and I haven't even opened my mouth barely.

We're going to talk about just two topics today because we're going to have a mega political

discussion to encompass topics one and two. Topics one and two will be,

it will be lavish. You'll think it was almost five topics. It will be so rich and full of

political wisdom and insight from John and Emily. And then we'll have a third topic,

which will be the life and death of Steve Jobs, and we're going to connect it to politics

in an extremely insightful and brilliant way. And then we'll have cocktail chatter.

So, John Dickerson, it seemed to me that almost everything that could possibly happen in the

Republican presidential race has happened in the last week. We had Sarah Palin working backwards,

kind of Sarah Palin announcing

that she is not going to run for president, surprising nobody. We had Chris Christie, the governor

of New Jersey, announcing that he was not running for president, disappointing a lot of people,

not surprising that many people, but definitely disappointing people. We had Texas governor,

Rick Perry Perry continuing his

...