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Hi, and welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, April 14th.

It is the Three Balls Edition.

I'm Jessica Gross, and I'm here in New York with Nina Shen Rostogi, who is a double-X editor and a manager of browbeat. Hi, Nina.

Hello, Jeff.

And joining us in D.C. is Hannah Rosen, double-ex founding editor. How are you, Hannah?

I'm good. And if you're going to call it the three balls edition, you've got to say it with some confidence.

I'm sorry. I said that with only two balls. I should have gone with all three. Just look at this picture of Lynn Tilton and let her inside.

Lynn Tilton being one of our three topics that we are discussing. She is a Wall Street wizard who had a very interesting profile

in New York magazine this week. We will also be discussing how the federal government almost

shut down over funding for Planned Parenthood. And we will also be discussing the movie Hannah

with our very own Hannah.

So let's start with Planned Parenthood and the budget.

So the federal government almost shut down last week.

And were Republicans just using Planned Parenthood as a bargaining chip to get Democrats to accept deeper budget cuts?

Or is there something else going on here? And Hannah, can you explain the situation and tell us a little bit more about the wrangling that went on on Thursday and Friday? Yes, I fear we're going to be a little bit of group think on this issue because there's really only one way to see it. In fact, yes, the Republicans were using funding on Planned Parenthood to hold up the budget deal. Within this, I'm going to describe there are a couple of heroes in this situation. Republicans who said, look, wait, we really care about the budget. That's what we ran on this year. And that has to be our priority. So we can't hold this up because of Planned Parenthood. It's not necessarily surprising. It's not the first time that Republicans have tried to slip in some sort of anti-abortion provision into a budget showdown. The reason that it got so much attention this year was twofold. One is because they made such a big priority of tax cuts that it's sort of surprising, that you would just kind of slip in the same culture war issues, which you know are going to derail and take the focus off actual budget cutting.

So number one, that's a little bit surprising and annoying.

Okay.

My question for you on that is, do you think, so that's happened.

Do you think that the public buys it?

I have no sort of barometer of how the country is reacting to the fact that the federal government almost

shut down. And it is about this thing that is a complete, this writer that is total BS, basically.

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