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Taking us for a ride

Taking us for a ride

Ira Stoll

Pretty much everything that's wrong with government is encapsulated in the recent announcement of what the New York Times described as a "$2.45 billion loan" to Amtrak to buy new Acela trains to replace the ones that currently ride the rails between Washington, New York, and Boston.

To start with, there is the lack of humility. The Times reports that "Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a longtime Amtrak supporter who frequently travels by train between Washington and his home in Delaware, announced the loan at the station in Wilmington that is named in his honor." Sure enough, Amtrak in 2011 renamed the Wilmington Delaware station the Joseph R. Biden Jr. train station. Biden, in attendance at that event, reportedly protested, "the truth is, I don't deserve this."

HoJo’s end and boomer nostalgia
Commentary

HoJo’s end and boomer nostalgia

James P. Freeman
"There's many a king on a gilded throne
But there's only one king on an ice-cream cone.
So we crown him today with friendly acclaim,
All over the country we'll blazen his name.
With hot dogs barking in approbation,
He's the man who believes he can feed the nation."
                                      — Howard Johnson's, 1940

Like many like-minded entrepreneurs, his dream was built on a simple idea with blazing clarity: "I figured that America really preferred good food nicely served," and if it was made "as attractive as I knew how, easy to look at and hard to forget," it would surely be successful, reasoned the founder of the eponymous restaurant, Howard Johnson, during The Great Depression.

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