Hello, this is Ann and Blandon Pennsylvania. I am busy slicing up 25 pounds of cucumbers.

This podcast was recorded at 1.12 pm on Friday, August 7th.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Hopefully I'll have a couple dozen

jars of home canned dill pickles to admire on my counter. Here's the show. Delicious!

That's a wild number of cucumbers and I'm very impressed. This has got to be like a year's

worth of pickles, right? Where do you find so many cucumbers? Amazing. Who knows.

But I love hearing from listeners as they're doing like the same things that I do when I

listen to our podcast and not that I make pickles, but cooking. Right? Like I feel like that's

the most frequent time that I actually listen to podcasts. Indeed. Well hey there, it's

the NPR Politics Podcast. I must m'challet I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Tamer

Keith, I cover the White House. And I'm Kelsey Snell, I cover Congress. So Kelsey, you

were on the show earlier this week to give us the latest on the negotiations or I should

say lack of negotiations on another round of coronavirus economic aid. There are millions

of people who are out of work because of the pandemic and you know, yet it sounded like

when you were last on the podcast that any hope of a congressional plan was essentially

stuck. Is that still the case? What's the latest? Well, they are stuck, but I guess sort

of differently stuck than they were earlier this week. We have now seen them meet 10 times.

And as we are taping right now, they are about to go in for their 11th meeting. The

day in that is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, who's the Democratic leader

in the Senate, Mark Meadows, who's the White House Chief of Staff and Treasury Secretary

Stephen Mnuchin, at 10 meetings, which is an extraordinary number of meetings for a small

group of people on something like this. Does that mean that they're making progress?

...