Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for the 6th of August. I'm John Dickerson in Washington with David Plotz. Emily Bazelon is off somewhere enjoying a well-deserved rest, and so we are joined by two special guests.

Cord Jefferson is here in the actual new, new expansive vast studio with us in Washington,

and then Dahlia Lithwick. He writes about politics for the route. And Dahlia Lithwick is in

Charlottesville in her palatial manner in Alamara County. And the reason we have Dahlia is that we had a very big piece of news.

Well, Dahlia, why don't you just tell us with the big piece of news is that you're going to tell us our

topics, too? Well, okay, so the first topic is going to be the overruling of Proposition 8 by a judge.

The second ruling, the second ruling, the second topic will be a conversation about the Islamic Center near ground zero.

And then the third topic will be the political fallout or whether there will be any political fallout from the ethics charges against Maxine Waters, Congresswoman from California and Charlie Rangel, congressman from New York City.

And then we'll have cocktail chatter and a brief samba at the end.

Dahlia, tell us about the judge's ruling.

Can I actually say there's two pieces of big news because even though nobody cares, the other thing is that Elena Kagan just got confirmed by a vote is 63 to 37.

That's the third fewest votes.

Thomas and Alito scored lower. But there it is.

Elena Kagan, the new Justice of the United States Supreme Court. And she got two Republican votes,

Brown and Graham, or were there any others? No, Brown voted against her. She got, oh, God. She got five Republican votes. She got five, but she lost Nelson. She got

Graham and then the maybe snow in college.

Okay, so that wasn't what I was supposed to talk about at all. Well, no, that's okay.

It's certainly news in some quarters. And then the other piece of news, huge news, in the legal community,

was the decision on Wednesday by Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco striking down Proposition 8,

that was the California ballot initiative that prohibited gay marriage.

And finding that Prop 8 violated both the due process and the equal protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

So monster big news in the gay marriage world.

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