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Hello and welcome to this late political GabFest for the 14th of May.

Friday, I'm John Dickerson in Washington.

Emily Bazelon is up in New Haven in the Arboretum,

and we are joined by Bill Smee, executive producer of the Gab Fest. It's a delight to have him actually

at the microphone instead of in the back of the room waving his arms at whatever stupid thing Plotz has said.

It's particularly nice for me because I can never hear what he's talking about either before or after the show, which drives me crazy.

David Plotz is on assignment in China for a piece he's doing on pandas.

That's alive.

That's not true.

We're all praying for good weather in Florida tomorrow.

David is about to witness the space shuttle launch,

which is a big thing. It's something I've always wanted to do in life. And there are only,

what, two left, three left now? Yeah, before they, before they mothballed the entire space shuttle fleet.

Hopefully he will get to see what he wants. He'll come back and tell us all about it.

Emily, before we start on our first topic, which will be Elena Kagan and her nomination

to the High Court, and then number two will be the primaries coming up next Tuesday.

And then our third topic will be the BP oil executives and Halliburton executives and

TransOcean executives who were up on the Hill this week.

Emily has a brief, brief announcement about our upcoming live show. As many of you, we hope know, we are doing a live show in Philadelphia

on Thursday, May 27th, downtown at the Friends Center at 7 p.m. And we have sold a good number of

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