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 and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest. I'm John Dickerson. It's Friday, February 20th.

I'm here with David Plotz and Emily Bazelon. We're all in the same room, and it's all very happy and glorious that we're all here today.

We're going to talk about three things. The first is

Senator Obama, President Obama, his presidency and the big rollout this week of a between

$75 and $275 billion home foreclosure plan. And then we're going to talk about our second

topic is going to be Eric Holder, the attorney general gave a speech on race. And then our second topic is going to be Eric Holder.

The attorney general gave a speech on race.

And then our third topic is going to be on the Uyghurs, the 60s folk band out of Newport, Rhode Island.

No, the Chinese dissidents, 17 of them held in Guantanamo, who had an important legal ruling this week, which

Emily will tell us about. The first thing, though, is this foreclosure plan, which of you want to jump in on this? Why don't you jump in? You don't have a topic. I've got Eric Calder. No, you've got Eric Folder. All right, and I have the U.S. All right, well, here's some things here's some things about foreclosures six 6,000 of them a day we have.

And of the nearly 52 million U.S. homeowners with a mortgage, about 14 million, that's

about 27 percent, have mortgages that are underwater.

So the value of the house is less.

It's already that many.

I thought it was 10 million the other day.

It's 14 million.

I thought that was like in six months it will be 15 million.

All I can do is refer you to the morning papers in which I got that statistic.

It's jumping by millions a day. The Obama plan seeks to do two things. One is to help those homeowners who are underwater who've been paying their mortgage. So you bought a $250,000 house. You got a $210,000 mortgage. That house is now worth $190.90. You've been paying your mortgage and you want to take advantage of these better rates, but you can't because your house is underwater. So this will hope there's an effort here. I'm not sure that you would

...