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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for September 27th, 2013. The Ted Cruz is one angry Canadian edition. I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate. John Dickerson, Slate's chief

political correspondent is next to me, sharpening a pencil in the DC studio. John, are you ever going

to pick up your guitar for my house? Just a question. Well, I tried. I tried, and you had things to do. You had commitments. You offered one moment. You offered one 15-minute window in the entire week. And that's, well, but your response for why I couldn't make it there was such a blanket response that I figured it would take a little while,

and I hope those hives are better.

All right.

Somewhere in the wilds of Ohio is Emily Bazelon dressed for success, wearing an 80s suit.

You are so mean and unnecessarily.

You can't even see the rest of my suit. You're just surprised because I never wear blazers. I am surprised because you never wear blazers. But I bought this blazer with my fashionable sister and she approved of it. So I'm going to continue to wear it with confidence, even though you're running it down. Emily, you, I don't know if you know this, but you brought me one of the great moments of inadvertent joy this week. So we did our redesign. Slate did a redesign this week. Many of you saw it. A lot of people have sent me email about it. As with all redesigns, the email is overwhelmingly negative. And so much of my day is spent paging through email after email like hate it are you crazy are you trying to

destroy slate what's your problem you know what you're you're feeling the ted cruise experience

right you are standing firm on principle while people even some of them uh in your own party are

calling you crazy exactly yeah but so why did emily bring me joy because as I'm going through all these complaints, I come across this email. Like, you know, another email was just like hate. And what does it say, David? I think you should read it. It was very amusing. The subject line was like Slates terrible or something. And it said, Emily is a mainstream media shill and an idiot. And I was so glad to get an email that wasn't about how awful the redesign was and just how terrible Emily was.

I literally was, I was so happy about it.

There was a typo in it.

Sometimes there's always a typo in these emails.

It makes me feel almost like it's there just to make me feel better.

Yes, there was a typo.

...