Lettuce grown in central Mexico that was used by multiple Taco Bell locations has been identified as the source of a Cyclospora outbreak that has sickened Americans across the country.
A recall of the lettuce was announced by Taylor Farms, which posted a notice on the website of the Food and Drug Administration.
“The company has stopped receiving product from the implicated lot, suspended distribution of the iceberg lettuce from Central Mexico, notified our customers, and we are continuing to work with the FDA, CDC, and state authorities,” Taylor Farms wrote in its notice.
True Value hardware stores are, and have been, an American institution. They are scattered across the land, often run as small mom and pop shops; our tiny hardware store just up the road here in the Susitna Valley is a True Value. They're everywhere.
And, for almost 80 years, they have maintained a primary company headquarters in Chicago. No longer. Now they are fleeing for greener pastures, and those more verdant habitats are right next door, in Indiana, a much lower-tax and more business-friendly environment.
Illinois state Sen. Chris Balkema said True Value’s decision to move its headquarters from Chicago to Fort Wayne, Indiana, is another example of businesses seeking relief from what he described as Illinois’ costly regulatory and tax environment.
True Value, which had maintained a Chicago headquarters for 78 years, announced plans to relocate after being acquired by Indiana-based Do it Best Group. The companies said the move would bring their operations together under one headquarters location.
Now, some (in Illinois) will point this out as simply combining headquarters after an acquisition, which isn't at all uncommon. But Sen. Chris Balkema isn't buying it.
Balkema, R-Channahon, said the relocation shows Illinois needs to rethink its approach to economic policy.“I’m happy that that is occurring, but I also understand it,” Balkema said. “As I tour businesses throughout the district and the state, the top two things that businesses fear about Illinois and need help in is rules and regulations is absolutely the number one.”
Balkema also pointed to energy policy as a major concern for businesses, specifically citing the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, which sets a goal for Illinois to transition to carbon-free electricity by 2045.
“The CEJA Act that requires all gas and coal-fired power plants to be shut down 19 short years from now, which means people start scaling back sooner and not doing overhauls, is absolutely having a dramatic effect,” he said.
To put it simply, True Value is splitting, because the regulatory environment, not to mention taxes, in Indiana is much more attractive.
The fact is that this is a primary driver of the Great Sorting. So many Democrat-controlled states are seemingly doing everything they can to drive business investment and employment out of their states, and Illinois is for sure and for certain among that number. It's a weird kind of governmental suicide, almost; businesses and entrepreneurs are heading to red states over blue ones, and it's accelerating.
It's not just the businesses themselves and their tax revenues that are leaving. The people who work in the current True Value headquarters, or at least the ones that are being retained, now have a choice: Stay in the Chicago area, with itshigh taxes and crime rate, or move to smaller, more affordable Fort Wayne, Indiana. That might be more appealing, since Fort Wayne has never had aMayor Pete Buttigiegscrewing up the roads with his inattention.
Sadly, this exodus will probably continue until Chicago voters figure out what's causing it - and bear in mind, the people who may well understand this are the ones who are leaving.
And thus, the Great Sorting continues.
The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.
California city chief arrested on a yacht just three weeks after taking over top job
Sausalito’s new city manager was arrested early Saturday on suspicion of felony burglary after Marin County sheriff’s deputies responding to a noise complaint found her aboard a yacht that authorities say belonged to someone else.
Elaine Forbes told deputies she was having “a bad morning” and insisted they leave what she claimed was her boat, the Marin Independent Journal reported.
Forbes, 53, was taken into custody less than three weeks after starting as Sausalito’s top administrative official.
Elaine Forbes, who had been on the job for less than three weeks, was taken into custody by Marin County sheriff’s deputies on Humboldt Avenue near Johnson Street.
The arrest came two days after the Sausalito City Council placed her on administrative leave following a closed-session meeting.
Deputies responded to the Sausalito Yacht Harbor shortly before 7 a.m. Saturday, where they said Forbes was found aboard a vessel she did not have permission to board.
Nick Shirley, the young man who has been putting “professional” journalists to shame with his on-site reporting on rampant Medicaid fraud, released another video exposing schemes in New York, these involving senior centers for elderly Koreans and Chinese.
One that he visited, an adult day care in Flushing, claims to have nearly 8,000 members, for which it bills Medicaid $1,600 each. But even an employee admits that the number is wildly inflated. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz joined Shirley.
“We uncovered over $190,000,000 in fraud,” Shirley says, “through adult and personal home care scams in NYC. Your tax dollars are paying for elderly Koreans and Chinese to play ping pong and do tai chi, while the fraudsters give $ kickbacks to those who enroll.”
The mainstream media has pooh-poohed Shirley’s work (no doubt while lounging at their desks), but he continues to show them up with the kind of shoe-leather, public-service reporting that journalists used to do.
While Shirley’s work is important, he’s looking at only part of the problem. There is no question that outright fraud against federal entitlement programs is rampant. And we hope the fraudsters face swift and sure judgment and that laws are changed to stop fraud at the source. (See “The Fraud Industry Is Thriving, And Guess Who’s Happy About It.”)
But not all government fraud is illegal. In fact, we’d say that legal fraud is an even bigger scam than what Shirley is uncovering.
This fraud involves lawmakers opening the spending floodgates for projects that line the pockets of unions and politically connected businesses, while doing nothing to improve the lives of the taxpayers who foot the bill. And this is a decidedly bipartisan scam. And it needs just as much attention as the schemes Shirley is documenting.
For example, Bess Byers, a digital marketing specialist at Reason magazine, took viewers to a slab of sidewalk that taxpayers spent just under $1 million to repave — in the name of climate change.
She goes through the numbers in the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2021 and finds that among the multitude of spending programs was $6.5 billion for “carbon reduction” projects. One of these was $961,000 to replace what looks like 5 square feet of concrete in San Bernardino, Calif. How would that reduce carbon emissions, you ask? Because it would allegedly improve walkability.
But Byers goes there and finds that not only is there a giant telephone pole in the middle of the slab, the “repaired” sidewalk ends right past the point where it was repaired.
As if that weren’t bad enough, “in 2025, the city dug it up again,” she notes. In another, she takes viewers to the Ivanpah Solar Power facility, a 3,500-acre boondoggle in California built with a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee that is shutting down just 12 years after it opened.
These are small potatoes compared to the billions wasted on EV charging stations that were never built, or the $42 billion for a broadband program that connected zero homes, or the countless other spending programs that are little more than legalized graft.
But what matters is that these reporters are on the scene. They are providing viewers with direct evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse. People knew about the fraud in Minnesota for years, but it wasn’t until Shirley brought his camera to the “Learing” centers and confronted the employees who were defrauding Medicaid that the public took notice. Likewise, everyone knows about government waste. But there’s nothing like seeing it firsthand to make you appreciate how pernicious it is.
We need much, much more of this kind of journalism, and much less of the preening blowhards who spend their days sitting at their desks regurgitating Democratic talking points.
In a recent counterpoint posed by Michael Smerconish against his own interests at CNN, ABC and NBC, the pundit was refreshingly honest, albeit maintaining pretense.
Smerconish noted it would be “unfair to the office of the President” to present rebuttal dialogue to a speech they refused to air. He posed the issue as one of intellectual hypocrisy, which it is; however, in reality, that was a feature of the media approach, not a flaw within it.
For several years CTH has noted there is no such thing as mis-dis or mal-information, there is only information. The purpose of our emphasis is highlighted in this example.
The leftist media did not want to allow information to reach their sheeple viewers. So, they awaited the conclusion of President Trump’s remarks and then summarized what he said for the audience along with their rebuttal. By blocking the information from Trump, they limit and control the information to only that which they present. This is by design.
We are seeing this approach in the USA for the same reason we are noting it in Canada. The audience for both messaging systems is the same, blind sheeple leftists. If the source information is never displayed or heard, the only reference is the rebuttal information. This is the same pattern within domestic abuse situations.
A domestic abuser often tries to isolate their victim from family and friends to cut off sources of information or support that could counter the abuse. If the victim maintained contact, it would be harder for the abuser to manipulate them. Some people draw a parallel between this dynamic and the way they perceive leftist media influencing its audience, casting the media in the role of abuser and the audience as willing participants.
The Smerconish segment highlights how wrong it is for any argument to start by isolating, blocking, or censoring the source of information, then spinning their own version of it and offering counterpoints aimed at eliminating the perceived threat of the information itself.
You may have heard me say, “the need for control is a reaction to fear.” This is evident in this dynamic as well. The media have built their brand around a single, fragile narrative that depends on maintaining falsehoods. That brand could crumble if ever challenged by the original source or an opposing viewpoint.
Unless and until people are willing to engage with intellectual honesty, communists are comprehensively incapable of this consideration, there is no hope within the debate. This is a serious problem made worse by the severity of the media’s financial position in retaining lies. WATCH:
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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