It took just six years for men working with their hands to build the nearly 3,000-km-long first U.S. transcontinental railway in the 1860s, notes Rich Lowry in Jewish World Review. In Democrat-run 21st century California, US$15 billion and 17 years have been consumed without laying a single mile of track for the state’s high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The latest cost estimate: US$100 billion.
Toppling a Communist Empire for $2.7 Million
Though widely thought of as focused on waterboarding terrorists or poisoning foreign potentates, it was by smuggling paper that the CIA achieved its most monumental triumph. R.M. Gerecht in a book review for The Washington Free Beacon charts how the late Cold War-era operation to flood Poland with Western books, magazines, printing supplies and audio recordings fatally weakened the country’s Communist dictatorship, setting the stage for the downfall of the entire Soviet empire. Total cost: US$2.7 million.
