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Hello and welcome to this late political GabFest for the 14th of May.

Friday, I'm John Dickerson in Washington.

Emily Bazelon is up in New Haven in the Arboretum,

and we are joined by Bill Smee, executive producer of the Gab Fest. It's a delight to have him

actually at the microphone instead of in the back of the room waving his arms at whatever stupid thing Plotz has said.

It's particularly nice for me because I can never hear what he's talking about either

before or after the show, which drives me crazy. David Plotz is on assignment in China for a piece

he's doing on pandas. That's alive. That's not true. We're all praying for good weather in Florida

tomorrow. David is about to witness the space shuttle launch,

which is a big thing. It's something I've always wanted to do in life. And there are only,

what, two left, three left? Yeah, before they, before they mothballed the entire space shuttle fleet.

Hopefully he will get to see what he wants. He'll come back and tell us all about it.

Emily, before we start on our first topic, which will be Elena Kagan and her nomination to the High Court, and then number two will be the primaries coming up next Tuesday. And then our third topic will be the BP oil executives and Halliburton executives and TransOcean executives who were up on the Hill this week. Emily has a brief, brief announcement about our upcoming live show. As many of you, we hope know, we are doing a live show in Philadelphia

on Thursday, May 27th, downtown at the Friends Center at 7 p.m. And we have sold a good number of

tickets for this show, but not as many yet as we would like. And I would like to say

that this is my hometown. And so David Plotz has me on the hook for this show. If it is not

a rousing success, I may never live it down. This plays into all of my social anxiety. And so I

really hope that many, many of you are coming to our excellent show. It will be really fun.

To get a ticket, go to Phillygabfest. Eventbright. Bright is spelled, B-R-I-T-E.com. Or just go to our

Facebook page or the Slate Gab Fest page on Slate. Thank you. And we really look forward to seeing you. It's going to be super fun. Emily, you've just had to speak, but I'm going to make you speak again, which is that Elena Kagan was nominated to almost no one's surprise on Monday by the president. What do we know now after all of the initial flurry, or what I guess for you, after all of the initial flurry,

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