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GabFest.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political gab vest for the week of August 3rd, 2012, the Chick-Fillet edition.

I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate, here for one last show before two weeks of vacationing in foreign climes.

Like Mitt Romney, I'm going to Europe to tell the Europeans how much better America is. Across the table for me is not John Dickerson, who is away

in a manger somewhere, but is rather Will Dombson Slate's political editor, now a Gabfest veteran.

You've been on before, so you know how it goes. Well,

welcome back. Good to have you. And joining us by phone from some vacation land in New England

that is surely more beautiful and more comfortable than Washington, D.C. Slate Senior Editor,

Emily, are you in a canoe or a hammock?

A canoe or a hammock? Well, I had to

or are you wrestling, are you wrestling a lobster? Yeah, so I can eat it for dinner, except that I

don't usually eat shellfish, but sometimes I make an exception when I'm in Maine.

When you kill it yourself and boil it, you play pleasure in boiling another creature alive.

Exactly. Why not? We boiling another creature alive. Exactly.

Why not? We have three topics today. We will talk about Mitt Romney's foreign tour as well as his taxes.

We're going to talk about Ted Cruz, the Texas Tea Party Wunderkind. That's like the third time in three shows I've used that phrase, Wunderkind, each time.

...