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GabFest listeners can download a free audiobook by signing up for an Audible membership at Audiblepodcast.com slash GabFest. Hello Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for Friday, March 27th. I'm John Dickerson here in Washington with David Plotz and Emily Bazelon is in, you're in New York, right, Emily? Yes, unfortunately. You're very slurry, John. Oh, I'm sorry. Are you drunk? It's all that booze I've been at again this afternoon. Well, I got a clean bill of health from the doctor, so it's back to the rye and cheerios for me in the morning. So today we're going to talk about – that was a little shout out to Dr. Chester. This morning we're going to talk about – or this – At some point in the day, whenever you're listening to it. We're going to talk about the president. First, we'll talk about the bank bailout bill that was announced this week. Then we're going to talk about President Obama, who had a series of events this week at press conference. Then he also had an online town hall, which was the first of its kind for president. And then we're going to talk about the White House Garden, something David's talked about before on the Gab Fest, and that he and Amelie will discuss because I have to go run off and do an interview. Do you want to say what your interview is? Because it's kind of exciting. Well, no, I can't. I can't say who the interview was with, but it's not what the president. Okay, so anyway, the first topic, let's talk about the bank bailout bill.

David, I want your reaction to it.

We'll stay away from the details because we, well, we're not bankers and even the people who do know what this bank bailout bill does,

which was try to get the toxic assets off the balance sheets of these banks in order to get capital flowing to entrepreneurs and investors.

The details of it are quite tricky, but I want to get your reaction to it, David.

My reaction to it is, you know, I was sort of surprised that, so when this was initially sort of floated, I guess, some time ago,

when Geithner sort of first talked about it, the stock market was very worried because there were no details.

And then this time it came out and the stock market was thrilled because the details seemed to be good.

500 points up in one day.

But I confess that I just don't, I don't know whether I'm supposed to trucks.

The Wall Street reaction has been taken as a proxy for something, that this is symbolic of something.

But I don't, I can't tell if it's meaningful.

I still don't know whether Wall Street's response is a useful, meaningful gauge of how good this thing is going to be.

And it does seem to me that this is an unbelievably sweet deal for the private investors who choose to jump in on it.

But I could be wrong.

Again, I feel like this is the complexity of these issues is so profound, and the difficulty

in explaining them to the public is so profound that it's very hard for anybody, and even

in a fairly active citizenry, to make a good judgment about this stuff.

The plan to the extent that we can sketch it before you jump in, Emily, is it's a public

private partnership between the government and hedge funds or other kinds of large investors,

where the government basically assumes a lot of the risk and gives short-term loans to

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