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Hello, and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for July 25th, 2014, the Joe Biden's

White Teeth edition.

I am David Plotz, the editor at large of

slate in Washington, D.C. today, we're going to talk about the Ukraine crisis, the Malaysian air

shootdown, Vladimir Putin. We have Julia Yafi in from the New Republic to talk to us about that.

Then an appeals court tosses another Molotov cocktail at Obamacare.

Will the Supreme Court abolish the subsidies that make the law work? Then the huge, big profile of Joe

Biden and the New Yorker, is he going to run for president? Could he win? And we will have cocktail

chatter, of course. And in our Slate Plus segment today, we were going to revisit the fight that we had last week about whether you can call the cops when you see an abandoned child alone in a park.

We will yell at each other even more about that.

You can listen to that if you get Slate Plus, if you become a member of Slate Plus, and you can go to slate.com slash GabFest Plus to sign up where you're going to get an extra segment every week, ad-free podcasts, all sorts of other good stuff, just $50 a year, $5 a month. Or you can email me directly at David.plots at slate.com to get the best offer. Joining me in Slate's DC Studio today is Slate's cheap little correspondent John Dickerson. Hello, John. Hello, David.

And with a lovely special visit, Emily, why did you come down? Emily Bazelon, Slate Senior Editor.

I was out reporting, prowling around nearby, so here I am. Is that why? You just had like a

reporting trip? Yep. That's so great. Yeah. Was it fruitful?'s... Good. I can't wait to read more about it.

The world is having a really bad week, which is worse. Gaza, Syria, Ukraine. Any votes? Any decisions?

We were going to talk about Ukraine, but it did feel like, man, Gaza's bad, too.

...