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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, February 12th, 2010, the day the

Olympics began, the day that I may finally dig out of my house, the day that John Dickerson

gets the ice dams off his roof. John Dickerson will tell us possibly about the ice dams, but maybe not.

And Emily Bazelon will join us from New York where there are no ice dams at all.

And we're going to talk about three subjects today.

The topics are going to be, number one, politics, Obama, the Senate, all that kind of stuff.

Number two, we're going to talk about the New Yorker piece about Eric Holder and the criticism of the administration's handling of terrorist suspects.

And number three, we're going to talk about the Olympics.

Right.

So, John, Emily, are you there?

We are. I am here. I don't know what Emily's doing. I'm here, too. The ice dam is not broken. You still are, you're still alive, John. The ice dam is... I'm still alive. The ice dams, I probably won't break until July, but they are slowly breaking through the ceiling of my guest room. So in the most sort of kind of horror show kind of way.

Anyway, so... Oh, that's awful.

Yeah.

Well, it's just, yeah, it's just really gross-looking, too.

Anyway, but everybody else is a lot of...

Look, at least you're not President Obama, whose entire domestic agenda seems to be stalled.

He can't get his National Labor Relations Board nominee even through the Senate.

He's reduced to having meetings to talk about bipartisanship.

John, what is going on with the president?

Is it as, are things going as badly for him as they appear to be?

...