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 continuing his extremely exciting descent into the netherworld of Republican politics being put on the defensive for a remarkable story about a hunting camp that he used to hunt at, which had part of the camp was named niggerhead and had written on the rock that introduced that part of the camp, that word, and when that he would take people to that camp allegedly at some point and didn't do anything or took a long time, according to the Washington Post, in getting rid of that.

...