Matias
Been here much more than a while
- Location
- Silicon Valley
I would have done it for $13mil, AND I would have done a better job.
Fu*%face Von Clownstick
- Thread starter Nish
- Start date
Firm Tied to Trump Donor Got No-Bid Contract to Clean Reflecting Pool
A White House spokeswoman said the president was not involved in selecting Greenwater Services, the business owned by a trust led by John J. Cafaro.
A business tied to a longtime supporter of President Trump was given a no-bid contract to install a water-purification system in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool earlier this spring.
The contract shows that the National Park Service bypassed the competitive-bidding process that is typically required, and gave a $1.7 million contract to the firm, Greenwater Services of Brookfield, Ohio.
John J. Cafaro
Federal contracting records show that firm’s ultimate owner is the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by John J. Cafaro, a donor to Mr. Trump and a neighbor to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club in Florida. The water treatment company also listed Mr. Cafaro’s Palm Beach mansion as its address in Florida corporate records, and listed his investment trust’s phone number and email in Ohio lobbying records.
Mr. Cafaro, a longtime Republican donor whom Mr. Trump has described as a “fantastic man,” was once involved in a high-profile bribery scandal. He has also donated to Democrats in the past, and his daughter Capri Cafaro served in the Ohio State Senate as a Democrat from 2007 to 2016.
In a public filing, the Park Service said that multiple firms had expressed interest in providing such a system. But in April, it gave the work directly to Greenwater Services, a company that federal records show had received only one other federal contract.
The Park Service justified its decision to bypass competition by citing an exemption meant for urgent situations: It said there was no time to consider other offers because the system had to be installed in time for events celebrating the country’s 250th birthday. That document did not give a specific date by which the system had to be installed.
- Location
- Retired in Minneapolis
Mr Rushmore is crooning
www.facebook.com
292K views · 9.6K reactions | Not sure where this came from, but I like it. | George Rizor
Not sure where this came from, but I like it.
www.facebook.com
Matias
Been here much more than a while
- Location
- Silicon Valley
I hate ai art, but that one may get a bit of a pass for the lyrical content
Fair to say 'you can't make this stuff up':
"In a Truth Social post, President Trump said on Friday that he would call Prime Minister Mark Carney to learn what Canada is doing about the wildfires and threatened to impose steeper tariffs on the U.S.’s northern neighbor.
“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump said"
Is there a pro-trump counter-argument to be made here?
A large part of me feels 'why bother posting this' but I guess I posted bc the level of idiocy seems worthy of note.
"In a Truth Social post, President Trump said on Friday that he would call Prime Minister Mark Carney to learn what Canada is doing about the wildfires and threatened to impose steeper tariffs on the U.S.’s northern neighbor.
“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump said"
Is there a pro-trump counter-argument to be made here?
A large part of me feels 'why bother posting this' but I guess I posted bc the level of idiocy seems worthy of note.
- Location
- Retired in Minneapolis
So….you’ve ‘splained the smoke
Now…what do mirrors have to do with anything
Now…what do mirrors have to do with anything
Cuts to the Food Safety System Threaten Americans’ Health
Sept. 10, 2025
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly and drastically scaled back the country’s most comprehensive system for tracking the food-borne illnesses estimated to sicken millions of Americans each year.
Public health experts consider the program, called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (or FoodNet), to be one of the most critical ways to protect against the dangerous pathogens, such as listeria and vibrio, that cause food-borne illnesses. For years, it tracked eight of them. As of this summer, it will only track two.
The sprawling effort involves three federal agencies and 10 state governments, which work together to root out food-borne illnesses early and study their origins. The government has other systems for tracking pathogens, meaning people will likely continue to learn about outbreaks. But public health experts said they worried that scaling back FoodNet could present long-term health risks.
“You will clearly miss cases,” said Dr. Glenn Morris, a physician and epidemiologist in Florida who helped establish FoodNet at the Department of Agriculture.
“We’re really gutting one of the cornerstones of food safety,” said Elaine Scallan Walter, a professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health and one of the lead scientists for the FoodNet program in Colorado.
The cuts come as Americans are losing confidence in the safety of the U.S. food supply. One survey this year of 3,000 Americans found that only around half of people were “very confident” or “somewhat confident” in the safety of the food supply, down from roughly three-fourths in 2012.
What is FoodNet?
The program was launched in 1995, following an E. coli outbreak linked to contaminated meat at Jack in the Box restaurants, which sickened hundreds and killed four children.
The idea was to monitor the burden of food-borne illness in a wide swath of the country that closely mirror national demographics, Dr. Kowalcyk said. Today, the program operates in 10 states: Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, California and New York.
The states’ public health departments work with the C.D.C., as well as the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S.D.A., to conduct surveys and studies and put out an annual food-borne illness “report card.”
These materials can reveal trends and sources of disease. Recently, for example, the report showed that cases of vibrio, a rare but serious illness associated with eating raw seafood, had more than doubled over 15 years. And in 2007, FoodNet surveys showed that melon could carry listeria. Four years later, the finding helped identify the source of a deadly outbreak.
Without FoodNet, public health officials and clinicians may not have known to ask sick people early on whether they’d eaten melon, Dr. Scallan Walter said. Contaminated melon could have been left on store shelves.
A proactive approach
The tracking of food-borne illness typically relies on people visiting their doctors when they become ill and doctors sending stool samples to laboratories for testing.
Once a sample tests positive for a pathogen that’s on a designated list, a lab worker must inform state or local health authorities, who must then report the case to the C.D.C. This is called passive surveillance, and the country’s other food-borne illness tracking systems, including the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System and a separate C.D.C. program dedicated to listeria, work this way.
It’s an imperfect process. Laboratory workers may not immediately know which pathogens to look out for or recognize that it’s their responsibility to quickly inform authorities. Most food-borne illnesses go unreported, said Matthew Moore, an associate professor in the department of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
FoodNet is distinctive in that it conducts active surveillance. Its employees don’t “just sit back and wait” for food-borne illness cases to be reported, Dr. Kowalcyk said.
Instead, they regularly connect with more than 700 laboratories across the 10 selected states to ask if they’ve seen positive cases of any of the pathogens the program tracks.
Most state and local public health programs are funded by the C.D.C., which is facing a proposed budget reduction of $3.5 billion next year. In the case of California, for example, the pathogens the state will track next year depends on the amount of funding it receives from the C.D.C., said a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Public Health.
“The public health system is getting dismantled,” Dr. Morris said. “Food-borne disease is one component of that.”
Sept. 10, 2025
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly and drastically scaled back the country’s most comprehensive system for tracking the food-borne illnesses estimated to sicken millions of Americans each year.
Public health experts consider the program, called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (or FoodNet), to be one of the most critical ways to protect against the dangerous pathogens, such as listeria and vibrio, that cause food-borne illnesses. For years, it tracked eight of them. As of this summer, it will only track two.
The sprawling effort involves three federal agencies and 10 state governments, which work together to root out food-borne illnesses early and study their origins. The government has other systems for tracking pathogens, meaning people will likely continue to learn about outbreaks. But public health experts said they worried that scaling back FoodNet could present long-term health risks.
“You will clearly miss cases,” said Dr. Glenn Morris, a physician and epidemiologist in Florida who helped establish FoodNet at the Department of Agriculture.
“We’re really gutting one of the cornerstones of food safety,” said Elaine Scallan Walter, a professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health and one of the lead scientists for the FoodNet program in Colorado.
The cuts come as Americans are losing confidence in the safety of the U.S. food supply. One survey this year of 3,000 Americans found that only around half of people were “very confident” or “somewhat confident” in the safety of the food supply, down from roughly three-fourths in 2012.
What is FoodNet?
The program was launched in 1995, following an E. coli outbreak linked to contaminated meat at Jack in the Box restaurants, which sickened hundreds and killed four children.
The idea was to monitor the burden of food-borne illness in a wide swath of the country that closely mirror national demographics, Dr. Kowalcyk said. Today, the program operates in 10 states: Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, California and New York.
The states’ public health departments work with the C.D.C., as well as the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S.D.A., to conduct surveys and studies and put out an annual food-borne illness “report card.”
These materials can reveal trends and sources of disease. Recently, for example, the report showed that cases of vibrio, a rare but serious illness associated with eating raw seafood, had more than doubled over 15 years. And in 2007, FoodNet surveys showed that melon could carry listeria. Four years later, the finding helped identify the source of a deadly outbreak.
Without FoodNet, public health officials and clinicians may not have known to ask sick people early on whether they’d eaten melon, Dr. Scallan Walter said. Contaminated melon could have been left on store shelves.
A proactive approach
The tracking of food-borne illness typically relies on people visiting their doctors when they become ill and doctors sending stool samples to laboratories for testing.
Once a sample tests positive for a pathogen that’s on a designated list, a lab worker must inform state or local health authorities, who must then report the case to the C.D.C. This is called passive surveillance, and the country’s other food-borne illness tracking systems, including the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System and a separate C.D.C. program dedicated to listeria, work this way.
It’s an imperfect process. Laboratory workers may not immediately know which pathogens to look out for or recognize that it’s their responsibility to quickly inform authorities. Most food-borne illnesses go unreported, said Matthew Moore, an associate professor in the department of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
FoodNet is distinctive in that it conducts active surveillance. Its employees don’t “just sit back and wait” for food-borne illness cases to be reported, Dr. Kowalcyk said.
Instead, they regularly connect with more than 700 laboratories across the 10 selected states to ask if they’ve seen positive cases of any of the pathogens the program tracks.
Most state and local public health programs are funded by the C.D.C., which is facing a proposed budget reduction of $3.5 billion next year. In the case of California, for example, the pathogens the state will track next year depends on the amount of funding it receives from the C.D.C., said a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Public Health.
“The public health system is getting dismantled,” Dr. Morris said. “Food-borne disease is one component of that.”
Daniel
Carpal tunnel level member
- Location
- Suburban Philadelphia (Wayne)
Daniel
Carpal tunnel level member
- Location
- Suburban Philadelphia (Wayne)
Voice of reason
