Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gap Fest for the 18th of February. I'm John Dickerson in Washington with David Plotz and Emily is in New Haven. Today we're going to talk about the budget, the fight in Washington over the budget and then the budget, Wisconsin and the fight over the budget. And then we're going to talk about the Middle East and the fallout after Egypt and including the horrible story about CBS correspondent Lara Logan and the controversy over near Rosen who made some stupid remarks about her.

And then also, of course, the political ramifications of what's happened in Egypt and

the trouble as it spreads throughout the Middle East. But before we get to those three topics,

David's going to give us an announcement. As I announced last week, and I'm going to keep announcing,

we're coming to West Lafayette, Indiana to Purdue in early April, April 7th, to be exact. We're going to do a show at the

University Church there. It's going to be free. It's going to be great. We're really excited

to come to our second Big Ten school of the past few months for a live show. It's going to be

adventurous. We're going to talk about Indiana's role in national politics. We're going

to talk about whatever is going on in the news that week, and we're really looking forward

to it. So if you go to slate.com slash Indiana, slate.com slash Indiana, you can register for

the free tickets come, bring your friends, drive in. It's going to be awesome.

So the president's admitted his budget this week, an enormous document, that despite

cutting $400 billion in discretionary spending over the next 10 years, nevertheless leaves

us for this year with a $1.6 trillion dollar for next year with a $1.6 trillion deficit.

And we have the sort of the next round in the fight over sort of this three act play going on over government spending, the one being the continuing resolution to keep government just minimally functioning, which will come to a head in the beginning of March.

Then we have the budget which the president submitted today, but which will come out of Congress then in April.

And then finally, sometime in May, probably we're going to have the debt limit fight.

So this is sort of that was going on.

Then in the House, they were passing or going through the process of passing this continuing resolution with $100, well, with $68 billion in cuts for this year, which is a big thing to do since there's not that much of this fiscal year left.

So we have a huge budget mess going on.

David, your reaction.

Well, it's an extraordinary moment because you have the Republicans taking a very large axe to a very small portion of the budget,

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