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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for May Day, May Day, May 1st.

I'm John Dickerson with David Plotz, and Emily Bazelon is in New Haven in her normal post.

Today we're going to talk about the swine flu and all the really exciting and

interesting things about the swine flu and our knowledge will be bolstered by actual facts

given to us by a fabulous Gab Fest listener who actually also happens to be right at the heart

of all of this. Then we're going to talk about Arlen Specter, who jumped from the Republican to

the Democratic Party. Then we'll talk about 100 days of Obama and his presidency, and then we'll go into cocktail chatter. But before we

begin on any of that, David has an announcement. Like a bad penny, I'm back to tell you about the

live Gab Fest, which we're going to do in Washington at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue,

which was where we did our first live Gab Fest over inauguration.

It's going to be on Wednesday, May 13th. That's just less than two weeks away, if you can believe it.

It will be a swine flu free synagogue. We guarantee it. And it's going to be a live show. It's going to be at 7 o'clock on May 13th, and we hope that

all of you can come. You can go to the slate.com slash gabfest page to reserve your tickets.

And that's it. All right. Okay. All right. So let's now go into the swine flu. I could just

read you the pages of notes here I have from the interview, or we could just jump in.

Do either of you have a question about this that you want answered?

Because I've now done this long interview about it, and it was incredibly cool.

Well, I want to know how worried we should be.

And is this – I understand that it's spreading across the globe. What I don't understand is whether it's really going to kill very many people. Right. I hate to be so blunt. But. Well, right. And whether the people that it's killing in Mexico are the result of a variety of factors or whether it's the specific new virus or whether, well, it's a combination and they don't know yet.

I think there are a couple of things.

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