The Gab Fest Redistrics. This is the daily podcast from Slate.com for Friday, March 3rd. I'm Andy Bowers.

John Dickerson and company are here for their regular end-of-the-week chinwag in the Slate DC conference room.

Topics today include the Supreme Court's take on Texas redistricting, the newly

released video of George Bush getting a briefing on Hurricane Katrina just hours before the storm hit

and wither the working woman. We'll get underway right after this. Slate's ad report card takes a

critical look at the world of advertising. Of course, it's easy to see why Ford wants to link itself to the iPod. The risk for Ford, though, is that this move reeks of desperation. It seems to say, that's right, we're totally down with Apple, yo. We're like best friends. We're on the soccer team together, and we talk on the phone sometimes, and Apple even came to our birthday party last week. Seth Stevenson's ad report card, only at slate.com.

Hello and welcome to another Slate Political Gab Fest.

I'm John Dickerson here today with our regular panel of Slate senior editor, Emily Bazelon,

and Slate Deputy Editor, David Plotz,

once again in the Slate conference room,

which looks depressingly like the conference room the president was in

when he received his briefing about Hurricane Katrina.

The video of that briefing has just now appeared to the public.

And I want to ask you, David, what you make of this first behind-the-scenes look we get at the president doing his job.

Well, you're already one up on the president, John, because you've already asked one probing question about the situation. As you wrote so convincingly this week, the president's performance was disheartening because he seemed just to be sitting there. And according to the AP, which got the video, at least, he did not ask a single question during this briefing time, you know, when you would expect him

to be at least probing, you know, how prepared are we, what have we done, what's going to happen?

But he sat there as I normally sit in meetings that Slate has and like a lump.

Emily, you were earlier saying my piece was eloquent.

What did you think about the video,

though? I didn't think you were so eloquent. But what I want to know is where are all the other

videos? Can we watch the president sit there like a lump now when people are briefing him on Iraq?

When does he start acting like the president does on the West Wing? And I don't think that you do sit like a lump in slate meetings

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