• • • Now apparently it’s a “slam” to say Paul Ryan likes Ayn Rand 
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Altruism  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Image  | It looks like [...] Rand is back to being an embarrassment. Which is fine with me! It’s not all that shocking that Ryan would want to back off from openly admiring a stringent atheist radical right-winger around the time that his party is trying to paint the president as anti-religion. What’s funny [...] is how incredibly suddenly Rand worship went from something proudly stated to something described as a liberal slander. (“Rand-related slams,” in Robert Costa’s words.) When will the cruel liberal media stop accusing conservatives of admiring the people they throw birthday parties for and repeatedly praise?      View blog reactions

• Ron Paul and his racist newsletters 
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To drastically oversimplify, guys like Hayek made pragmatic economic arguments (and left room for a “limited” state to provide some measure of assistance to the needy) and [Murray] Rothbard made Randian philosophical arguments (and was radically anti-state). And Rothbard went full-on neo-Confederate in order to win over the “rednecks.”      View blog reactions

• • • Bad week for right-wing TV and movies 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Egoism  |Image  | Did you, like most Americans, run out to your local Cato Institute gift shop and buy a DVD copy of “Atlas Shrugged: Part I” the second it was released? If you did, I’m afraid you’ve bought a defective product. Unfortunately, these DVDs all came from the factory loaded with a turgid, impenetrable, morally indefensible and wholly incoherent film about railroads and fancy steel. Also the copy on the back of the case is misleading.      View blog reactions

• • Right-wing billionaires purchasing own professors - War Room 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | If you’re going to spend a lot of money endowing a professorship, it’s only rational to ensure that the professor whose salary you’re paying advances your interests, right? After all, when the Kochs invested millions in George Mason University, they got the incredibly influential anti-environmental regulation nonprofit Mercatus Center out of the deal. The least FSU can do for its cash is teach “Atlas Shrugged” in a business ethics class. (Which is something that Randian-run bank BB&T has made happen, also at Florida State University.) (Yes, BB&T received billions of dollars of TARP money.)      View blog reactions

• • Rand Paul, America’s dumbest senator, will not be enslaved by your “right” to basic healthcare 
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Offensive, insulting, infused with the self-pitying victimology of the very privileged, and so self-evidently dumb that a college freshman who just discovered Ayn Rand would be embarrassed to have said it. It’s a Rand Paul argument, all right! [....] The nice thing about Paul is that he makes many Randian arguments sound precisely as stupid as they are.      View blog reactions

• • • Atlas sucks: Failing film producer vows to give up 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | Despite the objective fact that Ayn Rand is the finest philosopher in history and the greatest novelist ever born, “Atlas Shrugged,” the film version of her magnum opus, is not doing very well at the box office. After a very good opening weekend in limited release, “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1” quickly sank upon opening in more theaters.      View blog reactions

• Tea Partyers don’t actually care about “liberty” 
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The Tea Party movement was largely embraced by institutional libertarians -- a small group, numerically, but a well-funded and influential one in Washington -- as proof of popular endorsement of their ideas about the federal government. The formerly fringey Ron Paul “outsider” shtick was suddenly much more marketable than traditional pious Republicanism, so it seemed, perhaps, that America had moved in a Randian direction.      View blog reactions

• Glenn Beck denounces those who seek to “reconstruct” our “system” 
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We The Living  | [Glenn Beck’s] open letter [...] points out Jared Loughner "cited the Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books" but fails to mention the Ayn Rand book.      View blog reactions

• No. 15: Mort Zuckerman 
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While [Mort ] Zuckerman has always randomly switched back and forth between the parties, his peers have lately decided themselves Democrats. These billionaires allow the Democratic Party to compete, monetarily, with the Republicans (who win the support of the coldly ideological wealthy -- the ones who’ve read Ayn Rand or who make their living raping the earth).      View blog reactions

• Politico’s hot new opinion columnists debut! 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Essay Contests  | [Joe] Scarborough is not now and has never been a professional writer. His paragraphs have a USA Today-like brevity. [....] His argument, such as it is, rests on questionable assumptions, false equivalencies, and a facile understanding of history and the political process. It’s like someone challenged a high school student to write a David Broder column. (Michael Bloomberg should sponsor some sort of “Reasonable Centrist Essay Contest,” like the stupid Ayn Rand Institute thing. Morning Joe could win a scholarship!)      View blog reactions

• Koch beats Bloomberg in richest New Yorker contest 
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The Forbes Sexiest Plutocrat list is out! Big news in New York: Reasonable moderate centrist billionaire Republican mayor-for-life Michael Bloomberg lost his “richest man in town” award to shadowy puppet-master far-right Randian climate change denialist front group-funding second-generation oil-and-gas billionaire David Koch. This says something or other about the state of our nation, right?      View blog reactions

• Tucker Carlson will keep releasing, misrepresenting Journolist emails 
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The Fountainhead  | Jonah Goldberg just thinks this is all funny, because lol liberals. “So much of it reads like dorm room b.s. from the student-government crowd,” he writes. Unlike his published work on THE Corner, which reads more like dorm room b.s. from the crowd that kept babbling about “The Fountainhead” every time they got high.      View blog reactions

• Rand Paul, dorm room libertarian 
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Rand Paul: He quotes Ayn Rand, Milan Kundera and the band Rush, and he’s obviously never thought through the things he argues beyond the most superficial levels. Rand Paul is a dorm room pothead.      View blog reactions

• • Glenn Beck’s novel title revealed! 
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Glenn Beck naming his Ayn Rand (another radical fringe lunatic who's been successfully made mainstream over the last 40 years) ripoff novel after the political science theory that made his success possible is just a lovely thought, isn't it?      View blog reactions

• • John Mackey: Enlightened, annoying capitalist 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Mackey] is a global warming-denying [...] right-wing old businessman like any other, only worse, because his adolescent love affair with the Ayn Rand books that convince teenage boys that they're secretly the masters of the universe happened after he made his first million.      View blog reactions

• Budd Schulberg, writer 
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Atlas Shrugged  | In 1941, [Schulberger] wrote What Makes Sammy Run, his brilliant depiction of "the spirit of Horatio Alger gone mad." Lower East Side kid Sammy Glick goes from copy boy to powerful screenwriter/producer on the strength of his relentless ambition and conniving. It's the story of America's habit of rewarding the most sociopathic tendencies the country breeds into those unfortunate enough to be born without shit. It's Atlas Shrugged in reverse—Glick steals everything he "produces," and takes the money, and recognition for himself.      View blog reactions