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Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for Octoberth, 2013, the Was That the Alamo or the Battle of the Bulge edition?

I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate. John Dickerson's guitar has left my house, which means the shutdown is over.

John, Slate's chief political correspondent, joins me in the Washington studio. Hello, John.

Hello, David.

Did you play that guitar?

I did.

I did.

It was nice to go back to an acoustic after living off and electric while I was at your house.

I knew that you weren't guitarless.

That just didn't make sense.

No, you know, I was not guitarless.

And that, friends, is Emily Bazelon, Sl senior editor, joining us from New York this week. Emily's happy because all over the country young people are being bullied and treated in awful ways, which means that Emily is in demand to go speak. Is that right, Emily? That is mean of you. I think you are bullying me right now what do you think oh yes that if you think

that's bullying then you're understanding of what bullying is yeah you should go read this book about it

yeah i can recommend its book david does have a little bit of the bully in him sometimes though

it's funny it's just it's purely it's purely for's purely for show. Right. Do you think I'm a bully in real life? No. No, I don't. I don't at all. I don't at all. No, it's. Oh, man. That is like that was that denial is. No, no, no, I think it's true. I don't. I don't. I think you sometimes, yeah, in the moment, sometimes you get a little carried away. But you're right. It's ingest, and we certainly take it ingest on this show. So I don't mean to discourage you in the slightest. Be your most bullying self. Awesome. There we go. Here we go. All right, this week, well, I, for one, feel rung out after the week we just had.

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