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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gad Fest for Friday, August 26, 2011.

I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate, finally back here in Slate, Washington, D.C. headquarters to do the Gab Fest. I missed you. I don't think you missed me very much. The people who filled in were incredibly good. David Leonhardt from the New York Times was fantastic last week, and I thought maybe I shouldn't come back.

But here I am. You can't get rid of me. And joining me here in Washington is Slate's chief political columnist John Dickerson. And joining us by phone from her hideaway in Vermont is Slate Senior Editor Emily Bazelon. And then we have a special guest for our first segment who is Slate Technology columnist Farhad Manjou. We are going to talk about three topics

today. We're going to talk about the retirement of Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple. That's why Farhad

is going to join us for segment one. Then we'll talk about the unstable but exciting situation in Libya.

And our third topic will be the Republican presidential race, which was, as always,

interesting this week.

And we'll have cocktail chatter.

Before we go to topic one, though, I want to put a call out. We have a wonderful GabFest

intern, a young man named John Griffith, who is a magnificent researcher, writer, assistant,

Facebook poster, planner, an all-around good dude. And he, unfortunately, has too much work to do at his day job

to continue as our intern. So we'd like to hear from you. We'd like you as our intern. It's a very

fun position. It's unpaid. But it's only a few hours a week. You'll get to sit in on the show,

help us plan our live shows, do some research, help manage our Facebook page.

It's a very pleasant place to be and thing to do.

So if you're interested, please send us an email at gabfest.

At slate.com.

That's gabfest at slate.com.

And we'll be back in touch with you.

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