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Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for Friday, October 16th.

I'm John Dickerson here with David Plotz, as always, and Emily Bazelon has joined us in Washington.

I wish John was in New Haven today because John is sick and I think he's like going to infect us here in our closet.

But your child is already second so is mine.

So what do you have to lose?

They're both, it turns out.

John probably has something worse.

Yeah.

I think I'm, I probably do have something worse.

But whatever it is, I'm not going to infect any of our listeners except with my bad ideas, which will be in serial first about health care, then about White House and policy towards gays.

And then finally, the White House's attack on Fox News.

But first, before we get to those three exciting topics, David, you have an announcement.

Yes.

So, as you know, we're going to do a fantastic live GabFest in a few weeks on Tuesday, November 10th here in Washington, D.C.

Emily will again come down for it and be a beneficent presence in the nation's capital.

At 6th and I Historic Synagogue at 7 p.m. Tuesday, November 10th, please reserve your tickets now from 6th and I.org or there's links on our

Facebook page or on the Slate GabFest page where you can see where to go and get tickets. And we

really hope to see you there and there will be prizes and ponies and there'll be ponies, John.

And all sorts of great stuff. So please come and see us.

And now to our first topic, health care reform, it passed out of the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday of this week with the votes of Democrats, but also somewhat surprisingly, the vote of Olympia Snow, who we thought might be behind reform,

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