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Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for Thursday, March 4th.

I'm John Dickerson here with Emily Bazelon and David Plotz.

We are not in the stuffy closet of our normal world, but we are instead at Housing Works downtown

cafe, bookstore cafe in New York City,

which is wonderfully filled with 300 of our dearest and closest friends.

And we are now having our first live Gap Fest outside of Washington.

And welcome, Emily, David.

I feel like I've been with you all day.

You have actually.

You feel that way because you have been with us all day. Tonight we're going to talk. Our three topics are going to be health care reform, which the president spoke today on this topic today. Then we're also going to have a discussion about the 2010 races. And then finally we're going to end with a conversation about the Supreme Court case that was heard this Tuesday. Emily is going to talk about that, and we'll join all of you at the bar during that period.

So the first of some housekeeping, for those of you who are listening and are not able to join us here for this wonderful experience,

there's a drinking game going on.

In the audience, they've been giving a list of words and behaviors that we sometimes

participate in. We will...

Could you need ticks, perhaps? Ticks, coping mechanisms, obsessive, compulsive disorders.

And we will be posting this on our Facebook page so people who are listening can participate

at home with their own bottle of ripple. And we don't know what's on this list. So the way this will work is if one of us engages in one of these behaviors, perhaps like a long and tedious explanation of a thing that's pretty easy to grasp, then... Mentioning a poll, perhaps. That might be on there. Then everybody will drink, and then we will see everyone drinking, and then we will feel the social pressure, and we will drink.

It'll be just like high school, except without all the music videos.

So this is, it leads me all to health care, Emily.

That's all, that's my whole entry.

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