I can only hope that Elon and his twinkie cream boy crew at DOGE don't stumble upon this bit of quirky trivia.
This morning, while just putzing around the internet, I happened upon this tidbit article talking about an April Fool's joke that Taco Bell pulled on the country back in 1996. In awesome April Fool's fashion, Taco Bell took out newspaper ads and issued press releases declaring that it had just purchased the Liberty Bell. Taco Bell reasoned that it would not only be a great way of solidifying its brand image, but that it would also help to reduce the national debt. Here's some of the Wikipedia article about this:
The Taco Liberty Bell was an April Fool's Day joke played by fast food restaurant chain Taco Bell on April 1, 1996. Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in six leading U.S. newspapers (The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, and USA Today) announcing that the company had purchased the Liberty Bell to "reduce the country's debt" and renamed it the "Taco Liberty Bell". The ad was created by Jon Parkinson and Harvey Hoffenberg who worked at Bozell, the Taco Bell advertising agency at the time, and went on to win several industry awards. Thousands of people had called Taco Bell headquarters and the National Park Service before it was revealed at noon the same day that the story was a joke. White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry responded that the federal government was also "selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Co. and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial".
I love the part where the then White House Press Secretary jokes that the Lincoln Memorial was being sold to Ford so they could rename it to the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial.
In today’s whirlwind climate of WTF news hitting our news feeds daily, I probably wouldn’t even bat an eye if Karoline Leavitt hopped up on her podium and declared that the US just sold the rights to something like Yellowstone National Park to ExxonMobil and would now be Yellowstone Drill Baby Drill Fields, or maybe all the liberal hippies of Portland, Oregon would be relocated to “somewhere nice” and it could become International Paper Company Processing Yards where all the forests of the Pacific Northwest could be strip-felled and reduced to pulp in a massive, city-scale manufacturing powerhouse facility or West Virginia could be sold to Peabody Energy and after all the hillbillies are “temporarily” relocated, the whole state could become one vast open-pit coal mine.
Now that’s how to finally knock down the deficit in a biggly way and you bring money in like nobody’s ever seen.
WTF! I hope the government doesn’t read this blog. I’d hate to be the one to give them any ideas!