The GabFest is sponsored by Audible, the Internet's leading provider of spoken audio entertainment.

GabFest listeners can download a free audiobook by signing up for an Audible membership at Audiblepodcast.com slash GabFest. Hello welcome to this late political gab fest for Friday, May 8th. I'm John Dickerson here with David Plotz. Emily Bazelon, we assume, is in New Haven, though we can't see her, so we're not sure where she is. I am here. Excellent. We're going to discuss today three topics. The first is going to be the replacement for David Souter, the Supreme Court Justice, who's retiring at age 69. The second topic will be Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was crisis a week in Washington with both leaders from those countries visiting the president for a two-day summit. And then the third will be about Elizabeth Edwards Edwards who has a new book. But before we

dive into the topics. But the same husband. For the moment, anyway. Before we dive into those,

we will hear from David. So one last time, an exhortation, a, no, I used that word last week.

We're doing a live show this coming Wednesday, May 13th, 7 p.m. at 6th and I Historic Synagogue here in Washington. It's going to be a fantastic live show. And we'd love for everybody who can make it to come. You can reserve your tickets at the GabFest page, slate.com slash GabFest, or at 6thenei.org.

All those not numbers, just S-I-T-H-A-N-D-I.org.

Wow, I think I got that right.

So please, we look forward to seeing you.

And now back to you in the studio, John.

And, oh, look, there's Emily, just as we go to her topic.

That was all worked out better than it normally does.

So Justice Souter's retiring, Emily, tell us we're in this weird phase.

We know he's going, but we have a long bunch of months before he actually leaves.

The president hasn't named his,

and so there are all these lists going on. Very few of them informed by the White House.

Tell us quickly, if you can, what the state of the list is, and then I want to ask you a question.

I think no one knows anything, really, except a small group of people in the White House about who should be taken seriously

on these lists. And so as a result, the lists are, they're all over the place. There are five or

10 people, almost all of them women, who are getting a lot of attention. And it could be that one

of them actually will get the nomination, or it could be someone who hasn't shown up on anybody's radar screen yet.

And so what's happening is that a few people are starting to actually read the opinions of the judges on the list and look at the work and try and understand it.

And most people are just speculating by talking to clerks and talking to scholars who say that they've read various

...