Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for Friday, August 20th, 2010.

I'm David Plotz, recording from Cabot, Vermont, and joining me in Washington, our Slate

political editor Michael Newman and Slate political reporter Dave Weigel.

Newman is an occasional guest, Weigel, making his podcast debut.

Welcome, Dave.

Thanks.

Thanks a lot.

And Emily and John are going to be back next week, so we should have the regular podcast lineup next week.

The whole original podcast team is in New England, I believe.

We're all in New England.

In fact, I'm having dinner with the Baselons tonight.

Why not record it there?

Because this is going to be so good.

We thought we actually entertained the idea of trying to find a studio and me and my wife Hannah and Emily

and I could have recorded it, but then we just thought it would make life incredibly difficult.

And plus we had the entire genius of slate politics back in Washington in the form of Wigel

and Newman.

No, I wasn't fishing for that.

I was just trying to inform listeners what they might be missing, but they already know that.

Your attempt to pretend that you weren't fishing for a compliment has gone awry,

Weigel. So we're going to talk today about three topics, as always. First topic is going to be the ground zero-ish mosque. The second topic is going to be the fact that our president is a

Muslim. And the third topic is going to be sort of a state of play in the primaries that Dave

...