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Hello and welcome to Slate Political GabFest for June 26th Friday.

I'm John Dickerson here with David Plotz in Washington, and Emily Bazelon is in New Haven,

Connecticut, the subject of a 4,000-word slate piece.

We're going to talk about Iran and the president at the beginning of the show for the first topic.

Then we're going to go on to Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, at least for the moment.

And then we're going to talk about the Supreme Court, which issued a series of decisions this week, which Emily will explain to all of us.

So, David, where are we on Iran this week from where we were last week?

Bad, bad, really bad places, much worse than we were last week.

So the Iranian regime, which now, and I thought a very really super smart piece in the New York Times on Thursday sort of identified the Iranian regime as much less a theocratic dictatorship these days and

more military dictatorship, that then we've had this notion in our heads for the past 30 years

that crazy Shiite mullahs were ruling this country with this Sharia and, you know, Islamic

thuggery. And now it just turns out to be run-of-the-mill thuggery.

That the military really seems to have, the military in kind of its unofficial arms,

the sort of man-on-the-street militias have seized control of the country

or have concretized their control of the country and and effectively

suppressed the movement to overturn the election results and it's it's really terrible news

but we knew this last week they do we you know they'd done the shootings they'd done the

beating but we did have this video come out over the weekend of um 26-year-old woman, Neda.

And I was confused whether that is her actual name because a lot of the journalism was saying the so-called, so anyway, this video that the president saw, that all around the world they saw.

Emily, the president got tougher this week in his language. Do you think that matters?

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