• Chill, bro. $50B swindle ain’t no thang 
Foster Kamer, Village Voice - Runnin’ Scared (New York) [A] banker said [Lehman Brothers’ masking of $50 billion in debt] just wasn't "that big of an event," and then compared the supposedly unnecessary outrage at Lehman to the leadup to the American invasion of Iraq. [....] If you're intelligent enough to understand why the outrage building up to Iraq was so ridiculous, why're you still working at a bank making the world worse? The answer, obviously, is cash, and because "worse" is a very subjective term in this context, and probably invokes Ayn Rand at some point.     Share on Facebook

• Health care, Dennis Kucinich, and being a decent country 
Zaid Jilani, True/Slant Atlas Shrugged  What this [health care] bill would declare — other than our government is far too beholden to the very industries it’s supposed to be standing up to while making legislation — is that we aren’t going to let people die anymore because they literally can’t afford to live. It’s a gigantic blow against the idea that we’re on our own, that we aren’t our brother’s keepers, and that we should all pick up copies of Atlas Shrugged and simply look out for ourselves.     Share on Facebook

• Duncan Campbell and the Bruce High Quality Foundation take a bumpy ride to Utopia 
Martha Schwendener, Village Voice (New York) There's a kind of utopian/dystopian strain running through South Soho right now. I use those terms sparingly, since Thomas More, 16th-century author of Utopia, didn't mean what we think of by a good society (slaves: no problem), and if you consult a selective bibliography of Utopian Lit compiled by the New York Public Library—a good read in itself—everyone from William Morris and Martin Buber to Ayn Rand is included.     Share on Facebook

• More attacks from Richard Spencer 
Alex Knepper, FrumForum I find Richard Spencer’s latest attack on me [...] be rather odd. Below a two-year-old picture of me in a gender-bending outfit at a concert, he lists a slew of my sins: opposition to religion, admiration for Ayn Rand and tongue-in-cheek Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, support for voluntary, non-racial eugenics — and, most of all, my age, which is an endless obsession of his.     Share on Facebook

• Epix inks deal with Larry Charles 
Cynthia Littleton, Variety [Pay cable network Epix is] developing a mini based on Ayn Rand's epic novel "The Fountainhead."     Share on Facebook

• The value of a [sunshine] dollar 
Todd Greene, Huffington Post When I was in my early twenties and living in Philadelphia for the better part of a year, I read many books by Ayn Rand and Paulo Coelho, and allowed all of them to become very significant in my life.     Share on Facebook

• While you were away: Economic issues that bite while we’re distracted by Tiger 
Jon Talton, Seattle Times The Great American Freak Show continues with all the media oxygen being sucked up by Tiger Woods and the estate of the late Michael Jackson. It's almost as if certain interests didn't want the American people paying attention to things that mattered. Financial reform, to be sure, can't compete with the Jersey Housewives. The proposal by Sen. Dodd, D-Financial Services, does include some kind of consumer protection agency -- a plus. But no new Glass-Steagall, no meaningful derivative oversight, etc. etc. And regulators must regulate, after all, rather than have their heads in Ayn Rand novels.     Share on Facebook

• College Tea Party groups boost campus conservative ranks 
Matt Vasilogambros, Politics Daily Senior Courtney Hunter attended the tea party that was not organized by College Republicans because she did not agree with bringing in party candidates to speak. She said that the Tea Party movement isn't just for Republicans, but for a wide range of political backgrounds. [....] Hunter said that because Texas A&M has so many conservative organizations -- including the Aggie Libertarian Club, Aggie Objectivists Club, College Republicans and Young Conservatives of Texas -- they would not have to look to an outside source like Campus Tea Parties to organize events.     Share on Facebook

• Tax time number crunching adds up to columns of confusion 
Neil Crone, durhamregion.com (ON) Atlas Shrugged  I'm going through a bit of an insane dance with my accountants right now. We're faxing and e-mailing back and forth, trying to get my books and theirs to some kind of resemblance to one another. We're still a little ways apart. And by 'a little ways' I they're reading Atlas Shrugged and I'm looking at Goodnight Moon.     Share on Facebook

• Craving legitimacy: Just shut up and play! 
Leigh Alexander, PC World Magazine Those raised on the original Super Mario Bros. never thought about who the Princess “was” or why the mushrooms made you big — back then, gamers would never have guessed they might one day discuss Randian Objectivism in BioShock.     Share on Facebook

• Reading Tea Party leaves 
Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times The tea partyers certainly aren't "dropping out" of the system; if they were, we wouldn't be talking about them. And they aren't reading Marxist tracts in a desire to "tear down the system" either. They're reading Thomas Paine, the founders and Friedrich Hayek in the perhaps naive hope that they'll be able to restore the principles that are supposed to be guiding the system [....] The restorationists have any number of hero intellectuals (from Buckley and Thomas Sowell to Hayek and Ayn Rand).     Share on Facebook

• Borderland Speakeasy #5: Mirror image murders 
Oliver Ho, PopMatters Despite their individual passions for expanding the possibilities of comic book storytelling, [Steve] Ditko and [Bernard] Krigstein each eventually left the industry (or vice-versa) over their storytelling philosophies. Ditko developed an infamous fondness for Ayn Rand and Objectivism, which distanced him from audiences and publishers, while Krigstein’s insistence on pursuing his vision for a comic, in spite of the script, led to his exit from EC Comics.     Share on Facebook

• The Glenn Beck insanity watch 
Oliver Miller, The Faster Times It’s pretty crazy of Mr. Beck to attack Christians, since about 50% of Fox News’s audience is made up of fundamentalist Christians. (The other 50% is made up of people who think that Ayn Rand was the greatest writerever.)     Share on Facebook

• Killing off rational Judaism: The Maimonidean controversy 
David Shasha, Huffington Post The spread of a popular New-Age version of Jewish Kabbalah has brought political and religious extremism to the larger religious world in the guise of an Ayn Rand-style self-help philosophy.     Share on Facebook

• The ultimate contradiction-in-terms: Right-wing christianity 
Huffington Post Egoism  The point [Glenn Beck] makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.     Share on Facebook

• Rules of the game 
Dean Baker, Counterpunch Banks such as J.P. Morgan and Citigroup were arguably too big to fail even three decades ago, before growth and mergers expanded their size several-fold. In the last decade they grew so big that their collapse would undoubtedly have jeopardized the health of the financial system. Everyone knew that, so creditors could lend them money without concern for the banks’ soundness: The government, ultimately, would stand behind their debts. This has nothing to do with Ayn Rand’s libertarianism. Huge financial institutions simply took advantage of taxpayers by getting insurance without having to pay for it.     Share on Facebook

• Avoiding a new great recession 
Bob Williams, Record Searchlight (Redding, CA) Capitalism  Alan Greenspan, an admirer of libertarian novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, favored little or no regulation. After not one, but two financial bubbles burst, and complex derivatives became too complex, no bank knew where they stood; all credit froze.     Share on Facebook

• From the storyteller 
Mike Danahey, The Courier News (Elgin, IL) [YouTube video maker Jim Koko] remains a perpetually perky in pink mix of Ayn Rand by way of Wayne Dyer, Michael Scott from "The Office," Glenn Beck and The Great Gazoo from "The Flintstones." Sure, that might annoy some people. But doesn't the self-help industry promote being eternally optimistic and doggedly going after what you want?     Share on Facebook

• True freedom 
Elizabeth Dawson, San Francisco Chronicle Re: "No one owes you health care" (Letters, March 8): The writer should try reading the Declaration of Independence instead of Ayn Rand. According to our founding fathers, government was instituted "to secure" our "unalienable rights." How can you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if you get sick and your options are bankruptcy or death? I'm sick of hearing that providing a basic standard of health care to all our citizens is somehow un-American.     Share on Facebook

• Google CEO says company doesn’t care about profits 
Jackson West, NBC Capitalism  Jackson West wonders how a company full of libertarian engineers who love Ayn Rand could be interested in anything but money.     Share on Facebook