Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for the 16th of January 2009.

I'm John Dickerson here with David Plotz.

Emily Bazelon is in our New York office.

Today we're going to talk about Obama and the last few days of his president-electness,

the stimulus package that's moving through Congress and other things associated with his presidency.

The number – the second topic is going to be the incoming or potentially not incoming Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, who ran into a bit of a bump in his smooth progression into the Treasury office this week.

And then third topic will be the Bush administration.

President Bush gave his valedictory press conference this week.

And we're going to assess that and talk about the 43rd president before going on to cocktail chatter.

But first, a message from David Plotz.

Thank you, John. You know, I was thinking this was our last Bush-era podcast, but it isn't because we're doing on Monday, as some of you will be in attendance, we're going to do our special live Gab Fest on Monday here for the inauguration, and that will be while Bush is still president. So it isn't our last Bush-era podcast, but that's not what I was talking about. As we announced last week, the GabFest has a new sponsor, audible.com, which has great audio books, audio of all sorts that you can download

50,000 titles. And for GabFest listeners, there's a special offer at audiblepodcast.com forward slash GabFest, where if you sign up for an Audible membership, which does require giving a credit card, you can get a free book.

And that's a great offer from our new sponsor, Audible.

So that's David's portion of the beginning.

And now we're going to talk about the Obama administration, which busy week, obviously, with a lot going on.

He moved into Blair House with his family.

Finally, moving across from the house, he'll move into next week.

He wrote a letter to his daughters in Parade Magazine about why he ran for president.

He announced and released his official White House photo.

He showed up the Lincoln Memorial. He showed up at Ben's Chili Bowl.

That's right. He did. He showed up the Lincoln Memorial. Went to Ben's Chili Bowl, which is a local,

which is a Washington institution. And he also, David, had some meetings with the press,

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