Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for Friday, September 2nd of 2011.

Our first gab fest of the fall season.

We're back.

We're ready for the fall.

We're ready for the explosion of politics and political activity and news that

is going to happen throughout the end of 2011. I'm David Plotz. Eddorf-Stlate. I'm here in

Washington with the estimable, esteemable, esteemed John Dickerson, Slate's chief political correspondent,

joining us by phone from somewhere. Where are you, Emily Bazel. Because my sister's getting married on Sunday. Oh, you, Mazel. Congratulations. Thank you. Oh, you said Mosul. We were just having a conversation before the show about whether John was sufficiently Jewish. Now we know that John is sufficiently Jewish and I am insufficiently Jewish.

That's great.

Okay.

We're going to have three topics of conversation today.

We're going to talk about President Obama's job speech and jobs proposal that's coming

at us next week.

We will talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Irene and the politics

of disaster spending. And we'll talk about Dick Cheney's new memoir. And next week, I think we'll

do some, we'll talk about September 11th. So if you guys have thoughts about the anniversary

of September 11th and what it means, post them on our Facebook page, the Slate Political Gapest Facebook page.

We'd like to hear from you about it.

And we're looking forward to a vigorous discussion next week.

So to the president's job speech.

So John Dickerson, do we need to talk about the theatrical conflict over when the president was giving his speech, or was that not important?

Tell us who blew it. That's what I want to have. No, I think we do and we don't. In one sense,

...