Free Republic

Fired FBI Director James Comey is now in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify about his interactions with President Trump as they relate to the federal government's Russia probe — and there's been some significant revelations thus far. A big thing: Comey refused to state whether he believed that President Trump's request to shut down the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn amounted to obstruction of justice — saying it was a question for the investigation's special counsel Bob Mueller — but he called it "a very disturbing thing, very concerning." Another big thing: After his...

 Image from spiegel.com The number of animals that die from lead poisoning because of lead projectiles or lead sinkers on fishing tackle, is highly disputed. The high end estimates are about 10-20 million a year in the United States. Let us put that into perspective. Cats kill birds and small animals. Lead poisoning kills some birds and animals. Animals are killed in collisions with vehicles on our roads.  All animals die. How significant are these numbers?  In Internet wanderings I came across some numbers that show that estimates of the deaths by these various means are pretty wild. The...

Lead dust discharged from firearms at gun ranges may be posing a significant health risk, a new analysis has concluded. The review analysis of 36 studies conducted between 1975 and 2016, published recently in the journal Environmental Health, looked at the ways gun range lead exposure affected patrons, employees and family members. For the analysis, the authors used the search engines Google Scholar, Pubmed and Science Direct to access studies related to blood lead levels (BLL) and firearms. From that search, 36 related articles were found from 15 countries around the world. Over half the articles were from the...

Thousands of Flint, Mich., residents have been warned that they could lose their homes if they don’t pay outstanding water bills — even as the city has just begun replacing lead-tainted pipes after a contamination crisis linked to a dozen deaths. Warning letters were mailed to 8,002 residents in April, according to the city, a few weeks after state officials ended a program that was paying the majority of their water bills. But many Flint residents still don’t trust their taps — lining up for free bottled water or installing city-recommended filters after revelations in 2014 and 2015 that dangerous...

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2016/11/05/iowa-poll-trump-opens-7-point-lead-over-clinton/93347134/?hootPostID=244ad51ae6af519614281eb8c6904b90

A second poll from the Tar Heel state in as many days confirms that Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump is in fact leading his Democratic counterpart Hillary Rodham Clinton. This poll, from The Trafalgar Group (TFG), shows Trump up by about five percent over Clinton—specifically, a lead of 4.97 percent—outside the survey’s 2.88 percent margin of error. Trump, at 49.13 percent, leads Clinton at 44.16 percent. Libertarian Gary Johnson gets 3.59 percent and the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein gets 0.49 percent, while 2.63 percent are undecided. The survey was conducted from Oct. 27 through Nov. 1, with a...

With less than one week to go before Election Day, Donald Trump expanded his lead over Hillary Clinton in the key battleground state of Florida. The People’s Pundit Daily (PPD) Sunshine State Battelground Poll finds Mr. Trump leading Mrs. Clinton in a four-way matchup by 3 points, 48% to 45%, with both Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein flat at 4% and 2%, respectively. The latest results represent a 2-point uptick in support for the Republican and just a 1-point increase for the Democrat compared to last week.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has taken the lead in the latest poll out of the battleground state of Virginia, with his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton slipping 15 points in a month. The Hampton University Center for Public Policy (CPP) poll out on Wednesday afternoon shows that Trump has taken a three-point lead over Clinton in the Old Dominion, inside the poll’s margin of error of 4.57 percent. The survey of 802 Virginians, taken from Oct. 26 through Oct. 30—meaning it was conducted both before and after the FBI announced its reopening of the criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s illicit...

(TWEET-AT-LINK) A model from election-forecasting whiz Nate Silver shows Donald Trump once again closing in on Hillary Clinton, as he did right after the party conventions in July, and warned that Clinton's lead is "a lot less safe" than President Obama's lead in the polls in 2012. Silver's FiveThirtyEight website currently gives Clinton a 58.1 percent chance and Trump a 41.9 percent chance of becoming president. That's not the closest the two candidates have been, as Silver's widely-respected projection showed them neck-and-neck on July 30. Clinton opened a wider lead over Trump in August in Silver's model, but Trump has...

Who’s Winning? Daily track of Clinton and Trump’s support

With two months to go before the November general election, Republican Donald Trump (44 percent) leads Democrat Hillary Clinton (41 percent), by 3 points in North Carolina, according to a Suffolk University poll of likely voters in the Tar Heel State. The poll is a statistical dead heat and is within the survey’s margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points. When asked who they think will win the November presidential election, 49 percent said Clinton and 33 percent Trump, with 17 percent undecided. Libertarian Gary Johnson was the choice of 4 percent of voters, with 8 percent...

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's lead over Republican rival Donald Trump has narrowed to less than 3 percentage points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Friday. Polls released just at the beginning of the week found that Clinton had a larger lead, ranging from 7% in a CBS poll to as high as 9% in CNN/ORC's poll. Friday's poll found that about 42 percent of likely voters favored Clinton, to Trump's 39 percent. The poll, taken between July 31 and August 4 had a credibility interval of plus or minus 3 percentage points, meaning that the results suggest...

Warning: House office water tainted with lead By Rachael Bade and Jake Sherman 06/28/16 07:37 PM EDT A House office’s water supply has been tainted by high lead levels and may be unsafe, according to a warning blasted out to congressional offices Tuesday night. In a “dear colleagues” letter, House office buildings superintendent William Weidemeyer told members and staff that the Cannon House Office Building was experiencing lead levels above normal, according to a recent water test. “This week, the AOC received results within the Cannon House Office Building that indicate lead levels in drinking water sources are slightly above...

The federal government says filtered tap water is safe for everyone in Flint, Michigan, lifting a recommendation that pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under 6 drink only bottled water to avoid lead exposure. The announcement Thursday is based on tests of filters that have been distributed for months for free by the state of Michigan and the federal government. The Environmental Protection Agency says the filters remove or reduce lead to well below the action level of 15 parts per billion. …

The state of Michigan is “fundamentally accountable” for Flint’s lead-contaminated water crisis because of decisions made by its environmental regulators and state-appointed emergency managers who controlled the city, an investigatory task force concluded Wednesday. The panel, appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder to review the disaster, said in a withering report that what happened in Flint is “a story of government failure, intransigence, unpreparedness, delay, inaction, and environmental injustice.” …

Burton never burdened their taxpayers for the switch over to PVC pipe, and in fact is saving local taxpayers $651,000 by switching over to water delivered by lead-free PVC pipes Purposely held back from the good residents of Flint, Michigan by Democratic Party politicians landing like crows to carrion on their city before Tuesday’s Michigan primary seeking to turn public anger to Democrat votes, this little gem: it’s not the water that’s the problem, but the archaic, rusted, lead-letting iron pipes carrying water into Flint homes that is. Nor did any rumpled-coat Detective Columbo have to go all the way...

As the nation rightly focuses on Flint’s ongoing water crisis, other cities in the state of Michigan face even higher levels of lead contamination. The alarming pervasiveness of potentially toxic drinking water extends across the United States.The Detroit News reports that “Elevated blood-lead levels are seen in a higher percentage of children in parts of Grand Rapids, Jackson, Detroit, Saginaw, Muskegon, Holland and several other cities, proof that the scourge of lead has not been eradicated despite decades of public health campaigns and hundreds of millions of dollars spent to find and eliminate it.”Of over 7,000 children tested in the Highland Park...

You may recall that reporters finally caught up with EPA chief Gina McCarthy in DC the other day and asked her about the situation in Flint, Michigan and the dismal (if not criminal) response of her agency. She informed everyone that, “we did our job.” That’s an interesting perspective, particularly in light of the fact that she just accepted the resignation of the Region 5 administrator who sat on reports of toxic water in Flint for months without telling anyone. (The Hill) The regional Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief responsible for Michigan is resigning amid charges that she did not...

I’m one of those masochists who signs up for daily email alerts from several news services just to keep tabs on the stories I might miss on cable news. I get a couple of them from the Washington Post, one of which is the “Five Minute Fix.” These breaking news alerts provide not only a quick glance at the news of the day, but frequently a good look at how reporters at one of the nation’s largest newspapers view the news and choose to project it to the public. Last night’s Fix was a great example of the latter...

What we learned from Hurricane Katrina: No matter what happens, it's never the governor's fault. What we've learned from the contaminated drinking water in Flint, Mich.: It's always the governor's fault. A bit of background first. Flint has relatively high levels of lead in its drinking water, a cause for legitimate concern. This is a result not so much of the source of its drinking water, the Flint River, as of the city's failure to treat the water, which, without the proper additives, leaches lead and other contaminants from pipes. Prior to and separate from the current water crisis, Flint...