• • HUFFPOST HILL: Correspondents’ Dinner: Important & Self-Important To Meet, Mingle 

Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  | Paul Ryan is distancing himself from tea party favorite Ayn Rand (something he should’ve done after that godawful “Atlas Shrugged” movie, if you ask us).  

• • • Paul Ryan Suddenly Does Not Embrace Ayn Rand’s Teachings 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Image  | UPDATE: […] Ryan spokesman Kevin Seifert downplayed the lawmaker’s apparent change of tune on Rand. “I wouldn’t make too much of this one way or another. Congressman Ryan was not ‘distancing himself’ from Rand, merely correcting several false storylines that are out there, such as the myth that he requires all of his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. Saying he ‘rejects Ayn Rand’s philosophy’ was simply meant to correct a popular falsehood that Congressman Ryan is an Objectivist -- he isn’t now and never claimed to be,” Seifert said in a statement to The Huffington Post.  

• Health Care Economics 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | If the economy were a person, here’s how I’d describe his travails in recent years. For far too long, he binged on junk food, with no regard for the impact of such dietary habits on his system. He gorged on sub-prime cuts of real estate and paid for it with cheap credit whose price failed to reflect the damage he was doing to his internal organs. He visited his doctor, a guy named Greenspan who’d studied medicine with Ayn Rand herself, but the doctor just slapped him on the back and told him he must be fine because he wasn’t sick... yet.  

• Paul Ryan Challenged On Budget By Georgetown Faculty 

“I am afraid that Chairman Ryan’s budget reflects the values of his favorite philosopher Ayn Rand rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ,” said Father Reese. “Survival of the fittest may be okay for Social Darwinists but not for followers of the gospel of compassion and love.”  

• PBS Frontline Investigation Into Financial Crisis Suggests Another Disaster On Horizon 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | “The regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary,” rasped the Ayn Rand acolyte [Alan Greenspan], who seems to grow more monstrous with hindsight. “It hinders the efficiency of markets.”  

• • Sure You're Gifted and Talented… But Are You Also Annoying? 
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Personal life  |Inaccurate  | Unfortunately, the “Philosopher Impostor” is common. Many well-known figures have adopted this mask, including acclaimed novelists J.D. Salinger and Ayn Rand. Both isolated themselves during their childhood, preferring to be alone with their thoughts. As adults, these two celebrated writers, despite their contributions, led lives of isolation. That’s because when the “Philosopher” is present and dominant, it often results in repelling others, even if the individual has insightful or profound ideas.  

• Ryan-Romney Budget Killing Republicans 
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When Ayn Rand, Gordon Gekko, and Rush Limbaugh are your side’s philosophers, it makes it very easy to tell a morality tale and have it hit home. When the other side wants to cut health care for Grandma, along with school lunches, Head Start and classroom teachers for your kids, in order to give even more tax cuts for millionaires, it is pretty easy to make the case that the other side is morally bankrupt. You don’t have to go to your Bible, as I sometimes like to do, for quotes about right and wrong to know how deeply wrong the Ryan budget is.  

• Origins of 4/20 as a Day of Celebration & Protests 
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Capitalism  | “What do you mean?” I asked, “You mean we should go over and smoke in the park at 4:20 on April 20 because that’s the 4th month, 20th day?” “No,” replied Danna, “ I mean we should party over there all day on April 20, not just at 4:20 in the afternoon.” “My God, no, that’s decadent, we can’t party all day” I said, being very much of the Ayn Rand school of cannabis liberation, and thinking a day-long party was unthinkable to my capitalist work ethic.  

• • The Politically Treacherous Landscape Confronting President Obama's Re-Election 
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The centuries-old religious precept of we are all our brothers’ keeper has been become suspect and obsolete. A new alliteration of the doctrine of Ayn Rand social Darwinism of the survival of the fittest and the strongest is being advocated and celebrated.  

• Peter and the Starcatcher: Splash in the Pan 
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What’s different and exciting about this show is how lightly it takes itself. Everyone’s self-awareness and frequent modern cultural references lead the hysterics. And it targets both young and old audiences with Kelis lyrics and Ayn Rand jokes.  

• • Stories From the Frontline: Don't Drink the Yellow Kool-Aid 
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Capitalism  | Bankers not only have a fiduciary responsibility to uphold, but also a moral responsibility. Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand would be rolling in their graves if they were reading this. Although in all certainty, Judas has them plenty busy these days checking on the status of Greece’s demise, America’s credit rating, and the major coup d’état; considering the icy weather conditions -- and given Mr. Judas predilection for warmer climates -- licking their chops over Iceland’s’ bankruptcy.  

• Christopher Cocca: Pluralism, Democracy and Dominion: Do We Need Pluralistic Politics Deeply Informe 
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If religion shouldn’t inform the abortion debate at any point, it shouldn’t inform our conversations about poverty or other kinds of injustice. It’s often said that religion can or even should influence personal beliefs about abortion, but that those beliefs cannot be legislated onto others. It’s seldom said, outside of Objectivist circles, that religious beliefs about our duty to each other ought not be forced on taxpayers who might not share them. Interesting, that.  

• • Most Conservative Congress in How Long? 
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Egoism  | The Robber Barons were hiring the Pinkertons to (literally) murder union leaders, and were (literally) buying off elected officials to get whatever they wanted out of the government: money for bribery was openly allocated in yearly corporate budgets. These huge corporate trusts were working hand in hand with their worshipful friends in the Social Darwinist world, the 1800s version of Ayn Rand, who taught that if you were rich, it was because that was the way nature meant things to be -- and if you were poor, you deserved to be.  

• • TCM Fest 2012:Liza Minnelli, Kim Novak, Robert Wagner, Debbie Reynolds Walk ... 
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The Fountainhead  |The Fountainhead movie  |Image  | Liza Minnelli, Kim Novak, Robert Wagner, Tippi Hedren and Debbie Reynolds in person. Black Narcissus, Vertigo, Cabaret, and The Fountainhead projected on gigantic screens at Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian Theatres. Could any classic film fan wish for more?  

• The Carnival of Catastrophism and Its Critics 
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Capitalism  | OK, we know of Republican aversion to unions and big government. But does that make them all a bunch of dynamic exporters and global competitors? Is Ayn Rand the soul of the Republican Party, which tends to be older, more rural, more Southern, more religious than Democrats?  

• Rick Warren's Dependency 
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Whether poor people are helped by government or individual charity, wouldn’t it be promoting dependency all the same according to conservatives? (Right-wing hero Ayn Rand sure thought so.)  

• • James Peron: If That's Love, How Bad Is Their Hate? 
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Fundamentalists have long evaded reality. Their faith relies upon it. Ayn Rand warned, “We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”  

• • Darwin: Scientist but Not Economist 
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On the one hand, [voters] need to understand just what the Republicans are offering: a Social Darwinist, Ayn Randish future where all the benefits go to the wealthiest, who got that way because they are the "fittest" -- where only the wealthy "job producers" get any benefits at all from government. On the other, they need to see Democratic candidates from the presidential level on down who they believe will fight without pause or fear for the middle class and those trying to climb the ladder up into it.  

• • Dreamscapes—The Stunning Photographic Art of Jenny Okun! 
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The Fountainhead  | I think that if I had not become a movie producer & journalist, I would have been an architect. Ever since as a youngster reading Ayn Rand’s iconic novel, The Fountainhead, about rebellious architect Howard Rourk, who destroyed his finest creation rather than let it be bastardized, I have been a keen student of epic buildings and architectural wonders. Which may explain why I have been a huge fan of Jenny Okun’s architectural photography ever since I first saw her poster for the J. Paul Getty Museum many years ago.  

• • Michael Brenner: The "Common Man"—R.I.P. 
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Individualism  | It’s their own fault. This Victorian ethic grounded in Social Darwinism has now been restored as part of the national creed. Fitted out in the post-modern fancy dress of market fundamentalist economics, Ayn Rand-ish homilies of narcissistic individualism, and a parade of revivalist Christian sects that mix New Age Salvation with balm for anxious egos, this beggar thy neighbor ideology dominates our public discourse.