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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for February 8th, 2013, the drone on edition.

I'm not David Plotz, the editor of Slate. Instead, I'm John Dickerson, sitting in for David Plots, the editor of Slate.

I am joined in not being David Plotz by Slate, senior editor Emily Bazelon, who joins us from New Haven. Hello, Emily. Hello, it's kind of nice having you back in the host's chair, I have to say. It feels a little odd, but I'm lumbering through it. And this week we have a special guest star who is also resolutely not David Plots, but he is David Leonard from the New York Times.

He is the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times. Welcome, David. Thank you, John. Hello, Emily.

Hello, hello. And David is also among many things, the author of an e-book called Here's the Deal, which makes a great and patient case for how we can be smart about our messy federal budget. And we're going to talk about that in our third topic. But first, we're going to

discuss the President Obama's drone policy and then his coming State of the Union address,

which will be next week. And then we'll have cocktail chatter, of course, which will be the one

important thing at the end of the week that you need to know to fortify you for the State of the Union address. Now, before we do that, Emily, you have an announcement. I do. We are doing a live show in New York on March 21st, 7 o'clock at the 92nd Street Y at Tribeca.

And we would love to see all of you, as many of you as possible there.

We'll do some kind of cocktail hour beforehand, and there will be details about all of this on our show page and also on the website for the Tribeca 90 Second Street Y.

So March 21st, hope to see you there. Excellent. All right. So our first topic,

the Department of Justice this week leaked its legal justification for drone strikes against

Americans. John Brennan, the president's nominee to head the CIA and also the mastermind

of that drone program, testified Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

And that's likely to be the place, in addition to this memo, where we're likely to hear the most in public about America's ongoing drone war.

As Brennan's testimony started Thursday, it was interrupted five separate times by protesters, one of whom shouted,

I speak for the mothers. The Obama administration won't even tell Congress. We are killing

children. Do your job. So, Emily, this is a huge and contentious issue. Let's try and break it down

into manageable pieces. What did we learn this week?

We learned a little bit this week about the Obama administration's legal rationale for these drone killings, which before had been utterly secret.

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