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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for Friday, March 20th.

I'm John Dickerson here in Washington with Emily Bazelon, and we are fortunate to be joined by

Chris Beam this week sitting in for David Plotz.

David's off.

He's in Seattle. He'll be back. He'll be back, and we'll look forward to his return. But for now, we're going to talk about three things. The first is the AIG mess and the president and the administration's response to it and Congress's response to it. then the second topic we'll talk about is Dick Cheney, who said we're less safe now that Barack Obama is the president, and the response from the administration.

Then the third topic will be about John Stewart.

Apparently, he has a television show, and Tucker Carlson wrote about him, and there's some back and forth about John Stewart and his new role in our media environment.

Then we'll have cocktail chatter and wrap it up.

Wrap it up.

And that'll be it.

So let's start with AIG.

What did you think, Emily, when you heard about the bonuses to the 418 AIG officials?

Well, my first thought was, didn't I read about this in November or December? And then it

turned out that indeed I had that they had given out $50 million in retention bonuses in November

and December. And I had read about it. But, you know, like all of these kind of incredible

symbolic snowball events, it's not rational that it's, well, it's more money now, but it's this

confluence of the event itself, which is really totally outrageous and the timing where

we're deeper into the recession. We are watching the government struggle mightily to figure out

...