Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest.

It's Friday, June 13th.

That must be why I'm hosting.

I'm Emily Bazelon.

I'm here with David Plotz, who will be with us forever more on the Gab Fest.

We wrote it into his contract when he became the editor of Slate last week. And John Dickerson, who is somewhere, some parts unknown. Hi, John. Hi. It's actually, David will be there. It's just now that he's the boss, we may not be. Oh, true. I hadn't thought of that part. The Gap Fest with David Plotz and two substitutes, two fill-ins.

As yet to be named.

You're right, yet to be hired, yeah.

I'll be taking applications at david.plots at slate.com to be the next Emily Bazelon.

Exactly.

So, John, you wrote about the Jim Johnson trash.

What are we talking about this week?

Oh, right.

We're talking about the Obama campaign's small vice presidential search committee disaster.

We're talking about Hillary Clinton supporters who are flirting with the idea of voting for John McCain.

And we're going to talk about the big Supreme Court decisions this week involving Guantanamo Bay

and United States citizens being held in Iraq.

So, John, you wrote about the Jim Johnson crash.

What happened to the Obama campaign, and did they mishandled this?

Well, just to give a brief runout of what happened, Jim Johnson is a longtime Washington insider and Democratic

insider. He was picked to lead Obama's vice presidential team, and it turned out he got a series

of insider loans from countrywide financial, which is the company that Obama on the stump

...