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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for November 23rd, the Will You Sign My Pledge Edition?

I am David Plotz, the editor of Slate.

We are taping early this week because of the Thanksgiving holiday.

So I am in a pre-gluttonous fever of anticipation, as I am sure you guys are too.

But yours is particular.

It's for pie.

Mine is for pie.

I'm like anticipating the pie, the pie of Thursday.

That was Emily Bazelon in New Haven.

Emily, you're the Miles Standish of the Gab Fest.

Hello? How are you doing? Huh. Interesting.

Hello. And yet not standoffish. And John Dickerson slates chief political correspondent. Who are you if you were a pilgrim, John? I'm trying to remember the various characters.

The upstanding one who writes the diary. I can't remember any of the actual. Surely someone is named John and someone

else is named Abigail. Goody Dickerson. You don't know which one who you'd be? Which one I'd be?

Which of us is the Indian maiden? Emily, you're the Indian Maiden actually. You're not Miles Standish.

I guess I'm Miles Standish. Okay, you could be Miles Stadish. You're the Indian Maiden. Yeah. Hello, John. Hi, David. So our topics this week, let us do three of them. First, we'll talk about taxes and the fiscal cliff and in particular the Republican pledge to Grover Norquist, the pledge that many Republicans have signed not to raise taxes and how that relates to the reality of the fiscal cliff.

Second, we will talk about the very depressing conflict in Israel, which is, as we are taping, is sort of lurching toward a ceasefire, but who knows?

Maybe not.

Yeah, maybe not.

Seriously.

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