Political Gabfest - Read My Letter
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2019
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emily, John and David discuss impeachment, the pushback against Pete Buttigieg, and they offer a review of the most important stories of 2019.
Here are this week’s cocktail chatters:
- Emily: The, soon to be, end of an era with her warm and welcoming neighborhood grocery store Romeo and Cesare’s
- John: Thomas Fuller and Josh Haner for the New York Times: “Portrait of an Oakland California Homeless Encampment.” and A 5700 year-old human genome and oral microbiome from chewed birch pitch in the journal Nature.
- David: Anna Fifield for the Washington Post: “Taiwan’s tea party aims to burst Beijing’s one-China bubble.”
- Chatter from listener Ionic Tonic @ionictonic about a series of tweets from Surprised Eel Historian @greenleejw about the importance of eels in the economies of British medieval and renaissance times.
For this week’s Slate Plus bonus segment, Emily, David, and John recite some favorite passages of poetry and non-fiction.
- Emily: Blood History by Dwayne Betts
- John: Sorting it out by Philip Booth
- David: Lytton Strachey’s book Eminent Victorians writing about Florence Nightingale
You can tweet suggestions, links, and questions to @SlateGabfest. Tweet us your cocktail chatter using #cocktailchatter or post it to our Facebook page. (Messages may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
The email address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (Email may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Jocelyn Frank.
Research by Bridgette Dunlap.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for December 19th, 2019, the Read My Letter Edition. |
| 0:13.4 | I am David Plotz of Atlas, Obscura. So happy, me and John and Emily. That is John Dickerson of |
| 0:20.0 | CBS 60 Minutes and Emily Bazelon of Yale University Law School and the New York Times Magazine. We are all together. We are gathered in Skyline Studios in Oakland, California. Hello. It's so nice to be with you guys. I know. We're so lucky. I love it when we're all together. I know. It's really we should. Anyway, yes, it's wonderful. No, we should seek to make this happen more. Absolutely. We are together on Wednesday, and it's Wednesday afternoon Eastern. And so the House is still debating the articles of impeachment that they're considering for the President. So by the time you listen to this, the House may have impeached the president. Probably will have impeached the president. |
| 0:54.4 | You'll know the vote count. Yeah, we don't know the vote count because we're preparing before we have a live show in Oakland tonight. So just heads up that we are talking about events that are ongoing for us, but are history for you. On today's Gab Fest, the House impeaches the president. |
| 1:16.1 | Then what is with the Young Left's deep, deep unhappiness with Mayor Pete Buttigieg? |
| 1:19.8 | And then what were the most important stories of the year? |
| 1:23.7 | Actually, we went back and looked and thought about what really happened in 2019 that mattered. |
| 1:26.2 | And we will tell you what really mattered. |
| 1:29.1 | We will. Emily's nodding. We're going to do it. |
| 1:35.0 | Plus, we will have cocktail chatter. As I said, we're taping as the impeachment debate is happening. The president will almost certainly be impeached by the end of Wednesday, only the third time in |
| 1:39.9 | American history that will have happened. Fun fact, if you had a baby on the day Bill Clinton was impeached, today is the day |
| 1:48.5 | that that baby would be able to drink legally. |
| 1:51.7 | Wow. |
| 1:52.6 | Turn 21, that baby. |
| 1:54.0 | Turn 21. |
| 1:55.0 | December 19th, 1998, the president Clinton was impeached. |
| 1:59.9 | And December 18th, President trump will be impeached but |
| 2:02.5 | December 19th when you're listening to this right very well 21st birthday yeah excellent so there's |
| 2:07.7 | something about the pre-christmas rush that gets the impeachment forces moving yeah why let's |
| 2:14.3 | start with that why did they why are they rushing this through before Christmas? |
| 2:23.4 | Well, I have very mixed feelings about the rushing part. And what I mean by that is that the Democrats obviously decided to go ahead based on the evidence they have on and exclusively on the grounds of Trump's conduct regarding Ukraine. |
| 2:33.4 | The other choice was to leave this open, see what various |
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