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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for October 24th, 2014, the fake ID edition.

I'm David Plotz, the CEO of Atlas Obscura, in Washington, D.C. On this week's show, have billionaires become more powerful than political parties? Then the confusing political showdowns over voter ID. And then Ben Bradley's death and the legacy of Watergate is journalism better or worse off now because of Watergate.

We will find out.

Plus, we'll have cocktail chatter and in Slate Plus there will be a Bazelon special.

Emily will riff majestically on Obama's judicial appointments and whether he will ever get another judge confirmed after the Republicans take the Senate. That's code for David is unprepared to discuss that topic. Not at all. Come on. This is like, this is, our listeners are sitting there waiting. They're sitting there waiting. So Emily Bazelon is back. Thank God, after her one week absence. We missed you. It's good to have you back. Do you know that by saying that you didn't know where I was, you made my mom panic? She sent me an email that was like, where are you? David doesn't know where you are you. He has no idea. Where are you? That's so great. Your mom, I'm sorry, I embarrassed you with your mother. Did you get back in touch with her? Yes, it was all fine. Good. I didn't want to worry.

Worry Mama Bazelon.

But now that Emily is back, John has decided to make himself scarce. I don't know where he is either. I think he's probably out covering the so-called campaign. He has politics covering to do. But there's no worries because in Dickerson's place, we have Gab Fest veteran, at least one time, two-time possible GabFest veteran. David Lienhardt. David is the editor, the creator of the most delightful and exciting and brilliant new section at the New York Times. The upshot. David, welcome back. Thank you. It's great to be here. I cannot be John, but I will fill in best as I can.

So just a quick announcement before we get started. We have, of course, a live show sponsored by Accura in Chicago, November 12th at the Park West. There are still tickets available. Slate.com slash chai Gab Fest, C-H-I-Gabfest, I guess the letter Chai, possibly. We have special guest Amy

Dickinson of Ask Amy. It's going to be a great

show. It's our conundrum show, our annual conundrum

show, so we're going to tackle really

both difficult and fun and weird,

ethical, moral, practical questions about life.

So one, what's the first thing you do when you're visiting a new city alone?

There's another one which is 75% of NASA employees say they would take a one-way ticket to Mars to go on a Mars expedition.

Would you take that?

...