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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest.

The Can We Get In on that IPO edition for May 17th, 2012.

I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate.

I'm joined to my right, Emily Bazelon, Slate's senior editor and just Slate's senior editor.

That's all she is.

She's many other things.

Yes, many other things. And to my left is John Dickerson, who is Slate's chief political correspondent and the political director of CBS News. This is a special live show where the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Innovation Days. We are live in

downtown Manhattan. We know that you, the audience, are here. John and Emily can see you. We can

barely see you. But our audience at home does not know you are here. If you could please, like,

alert them that you're here with some noise. It would be good.

And I think the audience should also know they're very attractive and well-dressed.

They are. They're much better dressed than our usual live audience.

Mostly made up of hobos.

But free-spending hobos.

So we have three topics today.

We're going to talk about the state of the presidential campaign,

in particular some developments today involving advertising and the Republican campaign against President Obama. Our second topic will be about technology and politics.

How has the rise of Twitter, the rise of Facebook, the continuing dominance of the web as the medium of news,

how has that changed politics and what does it say about what's going to

happen in this coming election? And then our third topic will be the Facebook IPO and what it

...