Hello and welcome to the slate political gabitas for August 15th, 2019, the Public Charge Edition.

I am David Plotz of Atlas Obscura.

I am not in Washington, not in New York.

I'm actually in my brother's dining room in Boston, Massachusetts,

because it's that kind of year. And joining me from somewhere, I saw her yesterday, so she's

probably in New Haven. I saw her in New Haven is Emily Bazelon of Yale and the New York Times.

Yes, indeed. I am still in New Haven where you left me. I hope

you're not where I left you, which was like in your house. You're probably in a studio.

I'm in the Yale studio, my, my happy place for recording. And John is still trying to negotiate peace

in Europe and so he is not with us, but that's okay, because

we have Josie Duffy Rice, who is now the president of the appeal. We have a president on our show.

Hi, thanks so much for having me. And Josie's joining us from Sea Island, Georgia. That means that

she too has a kind of vacation mode.

It's going to be a vacation mode kind of GabFest, even though the news is totally dire.

So maybe it won't be that vacationing.

On today's GabFest, we're going to talk about the obscene new effort by the Trump administration

to restrict legal immigrants by punishing them for taking, accepting, using

public benefits.

Then we're going to talk about Jeffrey Epstein's suicide and the cloud that it put over,

well, just about everyone in the whole country, apparently, or every man in the whole

country.

Then, oh, and actually one woman, too.

...