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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, July 24th.

I'm here in Washington.

Oops, I'm here in New York staging a takeover of the political gab fest with two guests.

Jacob Weisberg, who is the editor of the Slate Group, and Jim Ledbetter, the editor of the Big Money, one of our excellent sister sites. Hi, Emily. So you guys are going to, you know, put John and David to shame, and they'll come back, and they'll just feel totally replaced. That's the goal. I'm still trying to figure out how this works. You're John, so Jim's Emily and I'm Plots. Yeah, yeah.

I got an upgraded. It depends on who's the most cantankerous. That person wins the Plots

award. Jim, are you feeling curmudgeonly? I'm not really. No, I think it's going to go to you.

Well, then Jacob, it'll be up to you. So we are going to talk about Obama and the prospects of his

health care legislation, the arrest of Henry Lewis Gates Jr. in Cambridge and the stimulus package six months in.

We're going to have the rare, informed discussion of economics on this state political campaign.

Who are we bringing in?

Yeah.

That would be Jim.

So let's start with Obama. He gave this press conference last

night at a moment at which he has reason to feel concerned, I think, given the dropping poll

numbers for support of his package. Or maybe not. Jacob, what do you think? How worried do you

think the president needs to be? And how effectively did he make his case last night? Well, in terms of his popularity, I don't think anything

terrible has happened yet. But it's a political problem, but I guess I'm more worried about the

substantive problem in that this legislation has really gotten away from him. And the three

bills that are working their way

through Congress, I think, look deeply, deeply flawed. They basically accomplish the one goal

...