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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Thursday, December 24th, Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas Eve.

I am here in Washington.

I'm David Plotz.

I'm here in Washington with Tim Noah, Slate Senior Editor and Healthcare columnist.

And joining us from New Haven is Emily Bazelon.

And not joining us today is John Dickerson, who must be off sort of, you know, preparing.

Underneath the mistletoe somewhere.

He's making out underneath the mistletoe with Mrs. John Dickerson.

We're actually taping on Wednesday.

So the Senate vote on health care has not been finalized yet, but we're going to talk

about the health care reform bill, which seems to be about to come out of the Senate.

Then we are going to talk about the new airline regulations about how long you have to sit

on the tarmac, which seems very appropriate for this holiday weekend.

And we're going to talk about the Salahis.

And those are going to be the three topics.

We will have some cocktail chatter at the end.

So, Tim, the Senate has not yet passed this health care reform bill at the time that we're

talking about this, but we expect they will.

We have every expectation, yes, that early the morning of Christmas Eve, there will be a vote, a 60-person vote in favor of final passage of the Senate bill, which is not the end, because then the Senate bill needs to be combined with the House bill, and there needs to be vote on the House Senate conference.

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