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GabFest.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for April 26, 2013.

The Vatim bag will be 1450 with tax edition.

I'm David Plotz, the Enderf Slate, here in our DC studio with John Dickerson, the Great Oak in the Forest of Slate, our chief political correspondent. Hello, John. Hello, David. And from New York today, not from New Haven, from New York,

is our senior editor, Emily Bazelon, Sticks and Stones author. Hello, Emily.

Hey, David. Wait, I thought you weren't going to New York. Oh, right, exactly. I had a whole crisis about that, but it was not possible to go, and he forgave me.

Your attempt to, in case him in a satin-padded world has failed, he's now going to have to go out into the wiles without you at his side.

You know what I have to say? He said to me yesterday, Mommy, you say you always go on one field trip every year and you haven't gone on a field trip

this year. And my heart completely sank. And I had no feeling other than total guilt. He was

completely right. So now I have to go. Now I have to. Now I am looking forward to going to his

kickball game. But he actually only wants my husband to go the kickball game. So it's really not what he

was looking for. Man, we should just stop the show right here. That would cut like three topics all at once.

You know, in reading the last line, Manchester's last line, in the beginning it talks about

Churchill. And it lists like 20 times he wrote his mother and father to come visit him at boarding school.

These pleas, these anguished pleas to come by, including the one time his father was across the street and they never visited him.

His father was across the street and he didn't come down.

...