• GOP Race: So Far, A Lot Of Sound And Fury Signifying Very Little 
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The Tea Party faction would view an innovative idea with liberal values that solves a problem as even worse than the problem itself -- it is that callous, reckless, and irresponsible -- which is why it hasn’t made Gingrich the 2012 nomination front-runner. The faction is scared of him: Space-age, technologically interested Newt might implement counter-coalition policies that solve problems and throw sunlight on long-discredited conservative attitudes, ideas, and beliefs -- to the consternation of the faction, and other Ayn Rand followers.  

• • Where are the Real Entrepreneurs? 
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Capitalism  | Even supporters of the market economy often think of taxes and regulations only as something that government does to business, and they miss the deeper problem of the things government does for business. The result of this sort of thinking is that people adopt the mistaken idea (propounded by writers such as Ayn Rand) that businessmen are a persecuted minority, when in fact certain groups of businessmen are the very people agitating against new entrepreneurial endeavors.  

• • lululemon Responds to reddit Racism Accusation: We Do Not Select Models Based ... 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | More recently, lululemon got customers and pedestrians scratching their heads when the retailer unveiled shopping bags bearing the message, “Who is John Galt?” John Galt is the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s objectivist novel “Atlas Shrugged,” which promoted unregulated capitalism and radically reduced government. “You might be wondering why a company that makes yoga clothing has chosen a legendary literary character’s name to adorn the side of our bags,” a lululemon employee wrote on the company blog. “lululemon’s founder, Chip Wilson, first read this book when he was eighteen years old working away from home. Only later, looking back, did he realize the impact the book’s ideology had on his quest to elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness (it is not coincidental that this is lululemon’s company vision).”  

• • Tea Party Nation Blogger: US Small Businesses Should Not Hire, In Order to ... 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Melissa Brookstone, a blogger for the Tea Party Nation, gained notoriety this week after a post titled “Call For a Strike of American Small Businesses Against The Movement For Global Socialism” went viral, earning the scorn of liberal commentators and even landing her on commentator Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” list on his “Current TV’ show. [....] However, in an interview with the International Business Times, Brookstone emphasized that her directive was never meant to be taken as a way to improve the economy. Instead, she said it was inspired by the premise of the Ayn Rand novel “Atlas Shrugged” and its main character, John Galt’s, decision to abandon his progressive socialist society and create his own community among people who Brookstone said “still appreciated productive achievement, which the greater society no longer did.”  

• • Tea Party Group Says Small Businesses Should Stop Hiring to Hurt Obama 

In a letter titled “Call For a Strike of American Small Businesses Against The Movement For Global Socialism,” on the Tea Party Nation Web site -- one of the largest Tea Party groups in the nation -- that was subsequently e-mailed to its members, contributor Melissa Brookstone urges small businesses owners to cease hiring new employees in order to protest the “progressive socialist” policies of the Obama administration. Brookstone, who writes in a subsequent post that she is not a conservative, but Libertarian-turned-Objectivist (the philosophy touted by author/novelist Ayn Rand), claims that Obama and the Democratic Party-controlled Senate are participating in a “globalist socialist agenda of redistribution of wealth, and the waging of class warfare against our constitutional republic’s heritage of individual rights, free market capitalism, and indeed our Constitution itself, with the ultimate goal of collapsing the U.S. economy and globalizing us into socialism.”  

• • An Architect in 140 characters or less 
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The Fountainhead  | I’m an Architect, like Howard Roark from the Fountainhead, only fatter, and underemployed.  

• ‘Death of 4th Amendment’ Judge Blames GPS, Cellphones, Users 
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Atlas Shrugged  | “With so little left private,” Kozinski [says Chief Justice for the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals Alex], “the Fourth Amendment is all but obsolete. Where police officers once needed a warrant to search your bookshelf for ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ they can now simply ask Amazon.com if you bought it.”  

• • Gabrielle Giffords shooting case: Killer Jared Lee Loughner mentally unfit to stand trial 
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Atlas Shrugged  |We The Living  | [Mark] Potok says inferences can be made about [Loughner’s] intellectual leanings from his reading list that includes books that run a theme of "individual versus the totalitarian state". Some of his favorites were Ayn Rand’s 'We the Living' and 'Atlas Shrugged' and George Orwell’s '1984' and 'Animal Farm' as well as Hitler's 'Mein Kampf.'  

• • FX Trading - All together now: GLO-BAL-IS-M 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  | Rather than further complicate the responsibility of the IMF and formal interconnectedness of national economies, just do away with the whole idea. Let all economies operate with their own interests in mind. And if you think that’s a recipe for chaos, consider this from Ayn Rand: “When a man trades with others, he is counting -- explicitly or implicitly -- on their rationality, that is: on their ability to recognize the objective value of his work. (A trade based on any other premise is a con game or a fraud.) Thus, when a rational man pursues a goal in a free society, he does not place himself at the mercy of whims, the favors or the prejudices of others; he depends on nothing but his own effort: directly, by doing objectively valuable work -- indirectly, through the objective evaluation of his own work by others.” If only wishing could make it so! It seems this mindset would help to flush away the complexities - restrictions, corruption, waste, risk, etc. - of a tightly-coupled global economic system; but it won’t happen in the real world. Instead we are stuck with a whole lot of messiness of self-interests defined by those who don’t have the market’s best interests in mind.  

• Saver nation 
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FreedomFest 2009, scheduled for July 9-11 [...] in Las Vegas, will smash all records, with over 1,000 expected to attend, including dozens of experts, authors, think tanks, and media. [....] See Missouri history professor Steven Watts on “Fantasyland, Walt Disney, and the American Dream,” followed by “Playboy, Hugh Hefner, and the American Dream”…..plus Don Hauptman on Ayn Rand's Playboy interview.