Hello and welcome to this late political GabFest.

I'm John Dickerson here with David Plotz.

Emily Bazelon is in our New Haven Bureau.

And before we start on this week's show, we want to announce the happy news that we found a sponsor, Audible.com.

And it's not just a sponsor at the GabFest, but you as a GabFest listener can go to a special

site to get your free audiobook from Audible.

And that site you would go to is www.

www.audiblepodcast.com slash GabFest.

We'll have more discussion about Audible, why we like it, why we picked it, and a series of other

things that Emily will enlighten us about later in the show. But first we're going to get to the

Obama administration. There's a lot going on. In fact, we will talk about Obama for the first

two topics. And then our third topic will be, well, Obama again, the inauguration. So this will

be the all Obama interrupted briefly by Audible podcast. With

cocktail chatter. With cocktail chatter at the end. Emily, we have a stimulus package. It has taken

some, a bit of a road bump this week. Obama, they wanted to have something the president

elect could sign when he's president in his first few days of office. It now looks like the target

is the second week

of February. What's your reaction to this? Well, what's your reaction to it? I feel worried

about this delay. What is Congress going to accomplish in this extra time? We're in sort of

desperate straits. The economy needs help now. And I don't like the idea of Congress getting

its fingers all over this and larding it up with a lot of pet projects.

Is that just, is that crazy?

...