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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, August 10th, the Ode to Nixon edition.

I'm Emily Bazelan, as usual.

But not as usual, John and David are on vacation.

They have both deserted me for better places.

But it's okay because I am staging a New Haven takeover with my dear friends,

Beverly Gage, who is a professor in the Yale History Department, and Tony Lyserowitz, who is at the Yale

Forestry School, and who I now realize I didn't ask how I wanted to be introduced. Tony, what's the

best way to introduce you? Oh, geez. I'm the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Excellent. Thank you. That was a better job than I just did. Okay. We are going to talk about three things, as usual this week. First, we're going to talk about politics, in particular the blow to Romney's tax plan from a report by a neutral-seeming group saying that Romney is going to raise taxes on the middle class, even though he says he's not.

Second, we're going to talk about extreme weather and climate change, which Tony knows lots about to my great excitement since often we talk about this topic without perhaps sufficient knowledge.

And our third topic is Ryan Liz's profile of Paul Ryan in the New Yorker this week and the kind

of idea that either Ryan or Mark O'Rubio would be the bold choice for vice president for Mitt Romney.

And then we'll have cocktail chatter for you as usual. So, okay, topic one.

We had yet another poll showing a very divided voter landscape in the swing states this week.

It seems like we're kind of stuck in this dead heat. Obama versus Romney, Obama has an edge in some swing states, but it's not definitive by any measure.

And then we have this report by the Tax Policy Center, which holds itself out as this, you know,

nonpartisan group, saying that basically they tried to fill in the blanks in Romney's tax

...