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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, June the 3rd, 2011. I am David Plotz. I'm the Eddurv Slate. I'm here in Washington, D.C., with my trusty companion, Tonto. Tonto Dickerson, John Dickerson, Slate's chief political correspondent, resplendent in a check shirt, as always, and joining us from New Haven, not with us this week. Wouldn't you say that's checked? It's a hound's tooth, actually. It's hound's tooth, sorry. Oh, my God. That's a real word? My vision is going to. I try and get hounds tooth into basically everything. Is it a shirt or a jacket? It's a shirt. Wow. It's hound's teeth. There's so many tooths on there. I guess not. It's just hound's tooth. And joining us from New Haven, you heard. Emily Bazelon, Slate, Senior Editor. Hello, Emily. Hello. Before we get to our three topics, Emily, you have a quick announcement for us.

I do. David and I taped an audio book club for Slate recently with David's favorite historian in the whole world. David had a serious fan moment. And I'm talking about Yale historian David Blight. It's a book club about the Civil War

Classic, The Killer Angels, and we hope you guys go and listen to it since you've been

listening to David go on and on about the Civil War forever. This is really your chance.

And it was super fun. David Blight is the professor who I've raved about his iTunes University class over and over again on the podcast.

And he's wonderful in that class, which you should listen to.

But he's also really great talking about the killer angels.

And also while we're on the subject of the book club, our next book club for June is going to be the book, Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks. So start reading. We're excited to talk about that one.

All right. Three topics this week. We're going to talk about the economy and the president and the debt ceiling and the president and the general state of politics and the economy.

That's going to be topic one.

Topic two is going to be the amazing news that Mitt Romney has entered the presidential race.

I was surprised to learn this.

I'm sure John was very surprised too.

We'll talk about Mitt Romney and a New Yorker article about Mitt Romney's health care plan.

And then third topic is We're

We'll talk weiner. We'll be topic three. John. David. So the get us briefly past this debt ceiling thing. I want to get to the general, generally shoddy state of the economy.

Right.

It seems to be much more important than the debt ceiling.

Well, it's, although they're interrelated, I think you're, but your instinct, as always,

is spot on.

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