Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, August 27th with David Plotz

here in Washington, Emily Bazelon somewhere out in the country, and I am John Dickerson, of course,

the former governor of the state of New York. Welcome all of you to the GapFest.

We're going to talk first about... It's so great to have you guys back. Can I just say like the Gapfest audience?

This is, I know you guys grew to hate me in the last few weeks. I apologize. I don't think they hated you.

They so grew to hate me. And I apologize to all of you. And I know you're so happy to have John and Emily back.

It's just all to make us feel needed.

It's a very nice gift of all of those people we paid to post those comments.

First, we're going to talk about the primaries of this week.

Then we're going to talk about Ken Milman, the former chairman of the Republican Party,

who announced that he is gay or came out of the closet and said he was gay this week. And then the

third topic will be Glenn Beck's rally. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin actually are rallying in

Washington, D.C. But before we get to the meat of the show, we've got a couple of things,

interesting things happening. One is we're going to talk about a live show happening in New York

at the, we'll give you details at the end of the

broadcast. And then also we're going to try a little experiment. Our fabulous intern, Gail,

writes up these summaries of the week's news that help us stay informed as much as our brains can

allow. And we're going to publish a shorter version of that based on the topics we talk about today

so that if you want to go and read some of the things that we read in putting the show together,

you'll have a nice tidy guide to that.

And we'll post that on the Facebook page, but it'll also be linked through the Slate GabFest page.

And have I taken care of all of our announcements?

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