Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, December 5th.

I'm David Plotz here in Slate, Washington with Emily Bazelon down from New Haven.

Emily, thank you for...

Hello, hello, yeah.

Gracing us with your presence.

And sitting in for John Dickerson today is none other than my wife, Hanna Rosen, not just my wife, but X-Factor blogger.

Extraordinaire.

Atlantic Monthly contributing editor and also my wife, mother of my children.

Hannah Rosen, welcome, Hannah.

How are you, sweetie?

I'm good.

I'm happy to have a heavily female gap fest today. I feel like we're taking it over. I know. We really shouldn't know that you host. We should have, like, taken that. Yeah, it's true. It doesn't look good for David to be hosting, you know, us. It's a little Charlie's Angels. But anyway, keep going to. That's awesome. That's cool. I like that.

Who's the third? That's the question. That's why I wanted to have Megan. We were going to have Megan O'Rourke. Another Slate person joined us, but we decided three was enough. I want to start today. Well, we're going to have, as usual, we're going to have three topics. We're going to talk about the transition. We're going to talk about the Mumbai-Bombay terrorism, and we're going to

talk about the transition. We're going to talk about the Mumbai-Bombay terrorism, and we're going to talk about the car industry's increasing woes and the spectacle of Washington dealing with a possible car industry bailout. And then we'll, of course, have cocktail chatter. But let me just start by saying had, last week we asked listeners if they would be

interested in a live gab vest in front of an audience during the inauguration period in January

in Washington.

And I'm really pleased to report that we got a huge response from you.

We got tons of emails from listeners who look forward to attending such a thing, and we are

going to do it. We're

going to do it on probably the afternoon of Monday, January 19th, the day before the inauguration.

It's a little bit of a quiet time. We're going to get back to you with the venue and the exact

time, but we're looking forward to seeing you all in person and having a live Gab Fest on that day, And we'll probably ask you to RSVP and let us know if you're going to come. Yes, we want you to actually show up now. We don't want this to be like the Facebook friends party that you throw and none of your Facebook. It's going to be really, it'll be really fun. It'll be really fun. You know, if you keep saying that, it makes it seem like fun. It won't be really fun. It's going to be really lame.

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