Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, July 11th.

I'm David Plotz. I'm here in the Slate Lavish Recording Studios with Emily Bazelon, and John Dickerson remains on vacation.

I feel like she's been on vacation forever.

For so long.

And our guest today is the editor of the route, Lynette Clemanson, who has kindly walked down from the office across the hall to.

If only to defend John's right to have a vacation.

That's right.

To have a vacation.

His vacation is, Obama's vacation was quite short.

His vacation's been extensive.

But we look forward to having him back next week.

Today we're going to talk about the usual three topics.

The first one will be Barack Obama and all the various excitements about him this week,

including the Jesse Jackson episode.

And then we'll talk about Iran firing some missiles.

And then we will talk the mystery topic about a chocolate chip cookie recipe.

And we'll have the cocktail chatter.

So let's start up by listening to the comments Jesse Jackson made about Barack Obama,

which were overheard on a microphone,

Fox News, Mike.

Right, and they're a little hard to hear because he was whispering.

Pulling down the people on those faith pages.

...