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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for the 22nd of July, Friday.

I'm John Dickerson, joined by Dave Weigel here in Washington, and Emily Bazelon, is up in New Haven.

We're sad to report that our colleague, David Plotz, is not with us.

The tubing incident that he talked about.

But we're happy to report he's still alive, which we were a little worried about earlier in the week. The tubing incident that caused the staff infection has caused basically a roller coaster of illness and recovery since David mentioned that. And so he is on the downward slope. The tubing gods are taking their revenge. But David is, David is vindicated in his loathing of tubing.

That's right.

He certainly is not going tubing anymore.

I'm never going tubing again after this.

Yeah.

I just don't take the risk of another day of going tubing.

It's not a good pattern.

We're going to wash down all of the furniture in the office as well in case it's

somehow contagious. So today we're going to talk about the negotiation, the ongoing negotiations

over raising the debt. Wait, did you say that Dave Weigel is with us? I did say Dave Wagle is with us.

You did. Okay. I'm sorry. Hence he's joke about another Dave going tubing.

All right. I just missed. People are just now recovering from.

So we're going to talk about the debt ceiling and the lifting the debt ceiling, which

is such a moving picture that it's probably going to change even in the course of our conversation

here.

We'll talk about the 2012 Republican field.

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