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Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for Friday, May 22nd.

I'm David Plotz here in Washington, D.C.

Emily Bazelon joins us from New Haven, as always.

Welcome, Emily.

Well, thank you.

Double X editor, Emily Bazelon, I should say.

And today, sitting in for John Dickerson, who is weirdly off reporting something, which is good news for Slate, but bad news for us today.

Except it's not bad news because we have Slate's other political correspondent, Chris Beam, is joining us.

Chris, it's good to have you back in your blonde, floppy hair, Dickersonian Dickersonian 20 years ago kind of way. It's a good thing I'm not reporting. I feel like David is trying to do the hosting thing, but he's now backhandedly insulted you just on the way to introducing you, Chris. That's all right. That's all right. I'll get them back.

Okay, good.

Well, I will find a way to front-handedly insult you later, Emily.

So we are going to talk about three topics today.

We're going to talk about, first of all, the amazing, growing, mushrooming conflict between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney and the fight over Guantanamo that

Dick Cheney has escalated and Barack Obama has then raised him and then Dick Cheney, you know,

doubled down to mix my betting metaphors.

The second topic is going to be Michael Steele, who is the head of the Republican Party, who's had an adventurous few weeks, and we'll talk about him.

And then finally we're going to talk about the unfolding economic and budget catastrophe in California.

And we will have cocktail chatter, as always.

So first, let's go to topic one.

Emily, did you watch on Thursday the dueling speeches between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney about national security? Obama using it to talk mostly about Guantanamo or significantly about Guantanamo and Dick Cheney using his speech mostly to criticize the Obama administration's position on interrogation. Well, I did my usual, I watched YouTube clips of these things. Does that count? That counts. Sure, it does. Yeah. Okay. Good. You know, I mean, I think the, it's so crazy to me, first of all, that we would be having this particular duel. And it's, you know, we've talked about this in the past, but it's so crazy to me, first of all, that we would be having this particular duel.

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