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Hello, and welcome to the Slate Political political gap fest for the 4th of February.

I'm John Dickerson in Washington with David Plotz to my left, and Emily Beslan is in New Haven or are you in New York?

New Haven.

She's in New Haven.

You're going to be in New York sometime soon.

And we also, if you can feel it in the air or in my voice, we have there is in the studio today a hedgehog.

A live hedgehog. A live, real hedgehog.

Lest they think you're playing with stuffed animals. That Gail, our former intern, has come back for a visit and she's brought a hedgehog.

And at this point, somebody should step in with a hedgehog analogy, right? The fox and the hedgehog, but nobody's doing so.

So I'm going to go and explain that our three topics are going to be Egypt,

and then the second will be health care in the ruling in Florida, declaring it unconstitutional,

and then we'll go into the 2012 Republican field as it shapes up.

Ambassador Huntsman to China sent his letter of resignation in advance of probably a presidential run, and there's a little other news in that topic

space as well. So let's move on to our first topic. We don't have any announcements this week.

Egypt, Emily, before getting your reaction on things this week,

which seemed to be spinning out of control, I'll just kind of roll the week forward, which was

that we started with tension in Egypt, which started last Tuesday, increased pressure from the

U.S. on Mubarak to leave. Finally, he said after several conversations with the president that he would, in fact,

not run for re-election.

Upon saying this, it seemed like things might change into a new, slightly more positive

...