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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, January 29th, 2010.

I'm David Plotz here in Washington, D.C., with Chris Beam, who's substituting for John Dickerson,

who is on assignment. I've always wanted to say that. John Dickerson is on assignment. And joining us from New Haven is Emily Bazelon. Welcome, Emily. Hello. And this is, you know, this is, I just noted something, which this is my last Gab Fest in my 30s. Oh, yikes. It's going to be all different. I'm going to be really sober next week and and I'm going to become really sort of ultra conservative as I age. So my 40s will be expect something totally different for me next week. You wish. We're going to talk about three subjects today or maybe two. One will be the state of the union that President Obama gave on Wednesday

night and all the myriad political and policy implications of that. So his proposal is about the

deficit, the status of health care, the general state of the Democrats. And that will be, that'll count for for at least one, probably two topics. And then we're also going to talk about the political and social implications of the new iPad, the Apple product that was also introduced on Wednesday with great fanfare by Steve Jobs in San Francisco. And then we'll have cocktail chatter.

But first, before we do anything else, Emily, tell us a little bit about the update to our New York

Live Gab Fest on March 3rd. Our New York Live Gab Fest has proved to be very popular for which we're

extremely grateful and we are excited to be coming to New York. A lot of

you have asked about the remaining tickets and here is the story. There are about 40 tickets that are

going to go on sale. They should be on sale on Friday when the show goes up or soon thereafter.

We're charging $20 for them in order to defray our own costs.

There are also five pairs of VIP front row tickets that are going to go up for auction on February

10th. The site for that is shophousingworks.org. And the reason for the auction is a benefit for the AIDS works, the AIDS work that Housing Works does. So we hope that makes sense to all of your listeners. And we thank you very much for making this fun and exciting for us.

Right. So the key message is we are not sold out. There are 50

extra tickets that are going to be available in these two different ways. So people should,

should check it out that way. Let us talk about the State of the Union. Chris, you went to the

State of the Union speech, right? I was there. You were there. Chris Beam is Slate's political,

other political reporter and John Dickerson to be. So tell us about the atmosphere in the House chamber when President

Obama gave his speech and then the sense of the room afterwards and whether President

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