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Music visit Stamps.com and use the promo code GabFest. Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for August 23rd, 2013.

The Washington is not really so bad edition.

I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate.

With me in Slate, DC, our Slate Senior Editor, Emily Bazelon, down from New Haven. Hello, Emily.

Hey, David. And Slate's chief political correspondent, John Dickerson. Hi, John. Hi. And although you are

listening to this in the week of August 23rd, we are not actually recording it in the week of

August 23rd. We are recording this in advance.

We're recording it in advance, which is why if there's some hot political topic that's happening this week, we aren't talking about it. We don't know about it. We don't know about it

because actually it turned out that we were all on vacation this week. The best of all bad

solutions was to record a show in advance. So we're recording it with a more timeless topic.

We are, think of us as being like an issue of the New Yorker from the mid-1950s.

It doesn't concern itself with the picayune quotidian events.

Even an issue of New Yorker from the mid-1990s could fit that bill.

Possibly so, yes.

...