Benghazi? Seriously? It is admirable to see you so furiously trying to spin up a fake controversy, but nobody outside your right-wing epistemic bubble is going to fall for that.

As for the emails investigation, let me know when you decide to be outraged over the most recent Republican Secretary of State and National Security Advisor doing exactly the same thing that you're ranting about from HRC.

Maybe the "corrupt DoJ" is also shielding Condi Rice and Colin Powell from indictment?

Oh, I forget -- IOKIYAR! Duh.

"It's kind of amusing that you believe the information is scant. People have been convicted on less. But, not, admittedly, Democrats, when a Democrat controls the DoJ. "

Actually, you have that backwards, Brett. Democrats are routinely hounded by investigations into things that Republicans can do without anyone in the FBI or the DoJ even blinking an eye.

"I get that conservatives have claimed for years that they smell smoke. But none have ever shown any evidence at all that anything is on fire [...]"

Insofar as they're smelling smoke, it's probably from their own burning pants.

"Even if Olympics visitors bring it to the US, and an epidemic gets started here, it would barely have time to start being a problem before the election"

Except Ebola never did "get started here" and that didn't hinder your buddies in the Republican Noise Machine from acting like the sky was falling, right up until the 2014 election, at which point "concern" about Ebola spontaneously evaporated.

Everyone else here understands the point. Zika is of course a much more serious threat to the US than Ebola ever was. But Fox et al managed to weaponize the panic over Ebola in the runup to the last election.

The hypothesis as I understand it is that lead exposure explains much (most) of the dramatic increase and decrease in violent crime over the past century (and possibly past century, in the case of lead paint) but that other factors explain the baseline rate of violence upon which that rise-and-fall was superimposed.

So it will still take a lot of work to identify and address those *other* factors if we want to reduce crime much further (lead abatement efforts may still produce some improvement but even eliminating 100% of lead exposure wouldn't completely stop violent crime).

If people misinterpret the past few decades' rise-and-fall of crime as being due to their preferred factor X when it was actually due to lead exposure, then that will distort future efforts to reduce violence. We need to understand what happened in the past to have a realistic sense of what can be achieved in the future. This is not exactly "pessimistic" since there is still hope to reduce violence by other means. But it is "realistic" because it doesn't attribute to those other means the brilliant success of the 1990s-2000s crime decrease.