The Gab Fest Posse Rides Again.

This is the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, November 9, 2007.

I'm Dale Wilman.

On this week's agenda, Hillary the Woman, battling lawyers in Pakistan,

and just how bad off is the economy.

And now to introduce the discussion, here's John.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest.

I'm John Dickerson in Slate's Washington office with Emily Bazelon and David Plotz.

I'm happy that we're all here together because it's two years ago to this very minute that we started the Gab Fest. And it's nice to have us all together. We haven't even confirmed it. And you're already claiming that? Well, I just thought we would. We will confirm it afterwards. It may not be the two-year anniversary. It may not. But I was trying to give us a sense of oomph for this show to give it a real... It could be our 100th show, even if it isn't our two-year anniversary. That's true. It's both our two-year anniversary and our 100th show. Clearly, it's a memorable moment of one kind or another. And we have a... So it's good that we're all here, and also it's incredibly good that Plots is here because, David, where have you just been and come from? I've been in Israel for the last week, which is why I missed last week. And now I've been up for something like 40 hours straight because I flew in this morning. And basically the first thing I've done is to come here to do the Gab Fest. And because you missed us so much. Exactly. Yes. That's exactly why. No, I'm excited to be here. I'm sorry not to be in Israel. It's a great, it's a fun country to be in. Well, maybe we'll take the gab fest on the road to Israel someday. We tried that. It didn't go that well. Yeah. you didn't get to come. No, that's true. Well, there we go.

That's where we're going to start, but not with Israel, though. We'll start politics. Okay. How could you not start with Israel? It's so anti-Semitic. It is the world, John. It is our world.

Well, that'll be the separate David Plots on Israel Gab Fest, which will come at our 114th show.

So politics, what happened?

Where should we start?

We'll start with Republicans.

So the Republican field has been totally topsy-turvy and competitive, and this week it sort of proved it again when Rudy Giuliani was endorsed by Pat Robertson, the former

head of the Christian Coalition. Then John McCain was endorsed by Sam Brownback, a socially

conservative senator. And earlier Mitt Romney was endorsed by Paul Weirich, a long-time

Christian conservative co-founder of the moral majority. So you have the, and then Fred Thompson

didn't do anything as the other sort of man in contention on the Republican field, but you have it

all spread out. So Pat Robertson, were you shocked

Emily Bazelon that he endorsed Rudy Giuliani, who is a, well, we know about his problems with

the social concerns. I don't know enough about Pat Robertson to know whether to be shocked. In other

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