Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for January 17th, 2019, the Pocketing Your Notes Edition.

I am David Plotz of Atlas Obscura. I'm in Washington, D.C. Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine is on the West Coast, which means it's

hella early, as you Californians say, wherever you are, Emily. Now I'm here for two days. I'll

be a Californian. Exactly. It is really early. It's true. But here we are. Ready to go.

Can you tell us the nature of your visit to the West Coast? I am visiting the great Stanford University to do some reporting for an upcoming New York Times Magazine article.

I really hope it is an upcoming York Times Magazine article.

There are a lot of really smart people at Stanford.

That's my big discovery.

Oh, yeah.

That other voice, of course, is John Dickerson of CBS this morning, who's in New York. Hi, David. Sorry to just clamber in in the middle of your carefully orchestrated opening. Are you done now? Can we get the show going? On this week's show, the shutdown continues. The State of the Union is in doubt. How is this crazy situation going to resolve itself?

Then the extraordinary revelation that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation to determine if the president was acting on behalf of Russia.

And that it was not even the most disturbing news about Russia

and Trump this week, I would argue. Maybe it not even the second most disturbing news about

Russia and Trump this week. Then the House of Representatives moves to dissociate itself from

Steve King. Even Republicans are moving to dissociate themselves from Steve King. Why now? What

did he do? Why did it take so long? Plus, we will have cocktail chatter. And a reminder, dear GabFest listeners, those of you who are going to be in D.C. or near D.C. on Wednesday, March 27th, we are going to do a live show at the Lincoln Theater that night. Go to slate.com slash live for information tickets. And it is going to be a special show. We're going to do our regular great Gab Fest of the week, but you're going to get a preview, an advanced look at Emily's fantastic new book, The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and Mass Incarceration. It's going to be two-week early preview. She's going to talk about the book, and she will sign your book. So join us on March 27th at the Lincoln Theater, Slate.com, slash live, to see the show and to support Emily. It's my book kickoff. I'm totally excited for it. Wow. Doing a better job of selling it since last week. I was all nervous about it. But now I'm totally excited that that's my first kick off.

Yeah, exactly.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.

The president called back 50,000 federal employees to work without pay, including more air traffic controllers, some people in the IRS, some people to do issue permits for offshore drilling of all things.

These are people who were not deemed essential, but because the shutdown is dragging on and on,

the president was like, screw it, they're essential. I want this to be done. We're not going to pay them.

They can come do their work. The shutdown now in nearing four weeks long as we tape is a total mess. Nothing is happening. We have government workers who are truly starting to suffer. They've lost millions and millions and millions of dollars in pay. We have people who receive federal benefits, whether housing benefits or food stamp benefits, who have lost

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