Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for the 7th of January 2011. Welcome everyone to the new year. Emily Bazelon is in New Haven, but she'll be with us next week, about which we'll hear more later. And David Plotz is here with me around the white table in our little room here. Emily, why don't you tell us what's happening next week before we get into our topics?

That's the most fun thing we have to talk about.

I am happy to talk about that.

Next week on January 12th at 7 p.m., we are doing a live show at the Sixth and I Synagogue in downtown Washington, our usual home.

I am totally excited to have a great excuse to come down.

And we want you all to come. We want to beat our record of GabFest live show attendance, or at least

equal it. And we want lots of... Or just not be talking to ourselves alone.

We, no, lots of people are coming, but we want even more people to come because it's going

to be super fun and there's a new Congress to make fun of.

It's going to be awesome.

Next Wednesday night, please join us.

And actually, we throw out one open question to you, one perhaps enticing open question,

which is, so at previous live Gab Fest before the show, we've been meeting some of you who were interested for drinks, a happy hour beforehand because of the holidays and so forth.

We're kind of late and planning it, so we're not 100% sure we can pull it off.

But if you are interested and joining us for drinks before the live show, sort of about 5 o'clock on next Wednesday, at a local tippling place nearby, nearby Sixth and I.

It would be, I think, $25 a person.

If you are interested, please let us know by posting on the Facebook page or better yet emailing us at GabFest at Slate.com. Let us know if you can join us before the show, then come to the show slightly soused and it'll be even more fun. We're trying to get a headcount and see if we can pull it off. Thanks. All right. Well, that takes care of the business portion of our program. We're going to talk about the new Congress, John Boehner's.

Well, it's the House of the People, as he pointed out several times on Wednesday, but it's John Boehner's Republican majority, and we're going to talk about that, some staff changes at the White

House. Then we're going to, in our second topic, talk about the Constitution, apparently

the nation's founding document, and I thought it was TV guide, but the final topic will be the iPad and whether it should be used in schools, right? Is that right? Yes, that's right. All right. Emily, did you watch, did either of you watch the John Boehner ascend to his moment

take the gavel and become

Speaker of the 112th Congress?

...