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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Tax Day, Friday, April 15th, except it's not really tax day. 2011. It got pushed forward. It got pushed forward to Monday. Oh. Because of a D.C. obscure D.C. holiday. But that's just in D.C. the rest of the country. No, no. The whole country is pushed forward until Monday. Oh, my gosh. Can you believe it? Wow. I wish I hadn't filed so early. You could have saved the four days of interest. Exactly. I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate. I'm here in Washington with John Dickerson, Slate's chief political correspondent, joining us by teleconference from New Haven, Connecticut.

By telex.

By fax is Emily Bazelon, Slate's senior editor.

And we have a great post-Purdue show for you this week.

We're going to talk about the fiscal discussions that happen, the fiscal bills in Washington and the ongoing fiscal,

fiscal, fiscal, fiscal. Everything in Washington is all fiscal these days. I liked it better when it was

about impeachment and sex. Washington was more fun. It was more fun. Or even war. War seems

better than definitely. Well, that's because with impeachment, somebody else was getting screwed.

And now we're getting screwed.

And we'll also talk about an interesting lawsuit brought against the Huffington Post this week, and we'll have cocktail chatter.

So first, John, set the stage for us.

We had unbelievable amounts of action involving the budget, the deficit, the debt in

Washington this week. That was amazing. Okay, so we've traveled an incredible distance since our

last show, and we'll try and give you a quick recap of what happened with the vote that came

at the last minute before the government was going to shut down. So basically, Friday night

at about 10 o'clock, 1030, actually, after

days and days of negotiations, the president, John Boehner, Speaker of the House, and Harry Reid,

the majority leader in the Senate, finally agreed to an almost $40 billion package of reductions.

The final day of debate was basically

revolved around this incredibly, this very interesting kind of seesaw, if you think of it as a

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