When will Hillary Clinton give up her candidacy ?

It was discovered that the high levels of lead were due to orthophosphate being omitted from the water treatment process, whilst using a pH of 7.4 and that the orange water was due to the high concentration of chloride in the Flint River water, which caused excessive corrosion of the cast iron mains pipes [34].

A look at the chemistry behind the Flint water crisis.

phosphate was added to the Detroit Water but not to the treated Flint River water.

Certain chemicals help to speed up the rate at which a metal is attacked or corroded and one of these is chloride. Metals such as iron and steels corrode particularly well in the presence of high concentrations of chloride. The treated Flint Water contained up to eight times as much chloride as the Detroit Water making it more corrosive to the cast iron water pipes in the distribution system. You can predict how corrosive a tap water will be by calculating the Larson Ratio, which is the ratio of chloride and sulphate to bicarbonate, Detroit Water has a Larson Ratio of 0.5, which is acceptable, whereas treated Flint River water has a Larson ratio of 2.6. Anything above 1.5 is regarded as being high and would be expected to greatly increase the rate of corrosion.

“Marco, the thing is this,” Christie thundered. “When you’re president of the United States, when you’re a governor of a state, the memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great America is at the end of it doesn’t solve one problem for one person. They expect you to plow the snow. They expect you to get the schools open. And when the worst natural disaster in your state’s history hits you, they expect you to rebuild their state, which is what I’ve done. None of that stuff happens on the floor of the United States Senate.”

Ah, yes, governing is about running a government, even if Republicans aren’t supposed to like government.

...It’s not clear what Christie did for his own candidacy, but he performed a service by reminding his party that running a government is serious work and ought to be respected. That this was revelatory shows how far contemporary conservatism has strayed from the essential tasks of politics.

My question would be who paid for the cake. Snyder or the state.

It’s been one scary horror movie. But now, at last, the happy ending. The slasher is dead. The aliens have been defeated. The flesh-eating zombies have been disposed of once and for all. The vampires will never suck blood again. You exhale. You relax. You heave a sigh of relief.

Big mistake! As even the most casual observer of cinematic conventions knows, this is the moment of maximum peril. The moment when, suddenly, the slasher's not really dead. The aliens aren't all gone. The zombies haven't been disposed of. The vampires are stirring. They're BACK!!!!

Donald Trump lost Iowa. But he's far from politically dead and decisively defeated. Yet large parts of the Republican party and the conservative coalition remain as foolishly complacent as they were during his ascendancy. And some of the anti-Trump forces are now heaving sighs of relief and letting down their guard.

Don't! It's not as if he's fallen all that far. Trump lost Iowa by 3 percentage points. As we write on February 4, he seems to be maintaining a comfortable lead in New Hampshire. And who's doing much to persuade voters to abandon him? Not Chris Christie and Jeb Bush's super-PAC, who are desperately and irresponsibly focusing their attacks on Marco Rubio. Not elements of the Republican establishment, who agree with Jimmy Carter in preferring Trump to Ted Cruz.

And if Trump wins New Hampshire, what then? Winning New Hampshire after losing Iowa is a pretty good recipe for winning the nomination, as the examples of Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1988, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012 suggest. In fact, since the modern primary system really came into being in 1972, the eventual GOP nominee has always run first or second in New Hampshire. So it's dispiriting that more of an effort isn't being made to decisively knock Trump down and out.

Maybe the voters of New Hampshire will rise to the occasion on their own, deal Trump a death blow, and end the horror show. Or perhaps New Hampshire will be Trump's last gasp, and the voters of subsequent states will decisively reject him. But complacency at this point is unwarranted and could be disastrous. And hope is not enough, either. Republicans and conservatives—elected officials, donors, activists, and citizens—are going to have to finish the job that the Republicans of Iowa so creditably began.

I stand corrected on the State manager of the city. However the choice of water source was not the likely source of the lead contamination. Instead the suspension of the phosphate treatment (by whom and for what purpose I don't know) was the likely cause

That source is independent of where the city gets it's water, though that may have been an additional factor in this case. The phosphate treatment is a standard continuous procedure in almost all municipal water treatment plants all the time.Why it was interrupted in this case is inexplicable to me.

"just looks like" is euphemistic. Does anyone see any reason at all to conclude he gives a damn about the citizens for which he is responsible?

Let me add... his moves to speak to and address this situation come only after it became evident he had a PR problem that might threaten his position of power and his ideology. In other words, it became a problem for him only when it became a problem for HIM.

Secretart Hillary Clinton's excuses about the State Department underlings who she said were responsible for failing to respond to the repeated tequests for added security measeues from our now dead ambassador to Libya.

Let’s look more particularly at what Rubio said, after saying that Obama knows what he’s doing. “Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world,” Rubio said. “That’s why he passed Obamacare and the stimulus and Dodd-Frank and the deal with Iran. It is a systematic effort to change America.” He repeated the line about Obama wanting America to be like the rest of the world, and summed up at one point: “All this damage that he’s done to America is deliberate.”

Just to be clear, when a Republican talks about “the rest of the world,” he doesn’t mean it in a good way. So when Rubio says Obama “wants America to become more like the rest of the world,” he’s saying that Obama is trying to harm America, to bring it down, to weaken it, to punish it, to make it less than it has been and should be.

Let’s pause before we proceed to acknowledge how positively insane this idea is. The fact that it has been espoused by untold numbers of supposedly mainstream conservatives in recent years makes it no less so. It’s one thing to say that your political opponents are wrong, that their plans will fail, that they are unconcerned about problems that you believe demand immediate action, or even that their values are misguided. But it’s quite another to think that they are intentionally seeking the destruction of the country.

Yet that is just what Rubio argues. In his bizarre telling, Obama didn’t pass the Affordable Care Act because he wanted to provide health insurance to the millions of Americans who lack it and rein in runaway costs; he passed the ACA because he wanted to ruin the American health care system. He didn’t pass Dodd-Frank to avoid a repeat of the Great Recession; he passed it in the hopes of sabotaging the American economy. Obama, in short, wants his presidency to be such a catastrophe that we can never recover, because he is so driven by his hatred of America.

If you’re saying, “That’s ridiculous, nobody really thinks that,” or if you’re reminded of General Jack T. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove ranting about the communists sapping and impurifying our precious bodily fluids, it means that you’ve never watched Fox News or listened to conservative talk radio. Because these ideas have been staples of right-wing media for Obama’s entire presidency. The audiences for those programs have been told constantly that whatever problem Obama claims to be trying to solve, his actual intention is not to solve problems but to create them, so that out of the chaos will come a twisted, unrecognizable version of the country we once knew.

As Glenn Beck said, “Changing America into something other than it always has been is the goal, always has been the goal of this administration. There are enemies inside and outside the gates of our country.”

...as Newt Gingrich said in 2010, “What if he is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

I believe you know all that, and this is just a strangely self-righteous atempt at bullying.