• • John Yoo to Rand Paul: Leave Barack Obama Alone on Targeted Killing! 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Rand Paul  | John Yoo, the author of the Bush administration legal memos justifying the use of torture, thinks President Obama is really getting too much grief over targeted killing. [....] Referring to Paul's marathon filibuster, an attempt to force the Obama administration to clarify its views on the use of military force against terror suspects in the United States, Yoo said "It sort of reminds me of young kids when they first read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged and they suddenly think that federal taxation equals slavery and they're not going to pay any federal taxes anymore."      View blog reactions

• • Jim DeMint: 47 Percenter 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Paul Ryan  | The libertarian Cato Institute [...] settled on former BB&T CEO John Allison, a self-identified objectivist, to lead the organization after a bitter internal battle. In case you've been frozen in carbonite for a while and missed tea partiers holding signs praising John Galt, objectivism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose vision of heroic entrepreneurs held back by a the needs of a parasitic underclass that contributes nothing to society sounds a lot like the America Romney described in Boca Raton.      View blog reactions

• The Growing Racial Wealth Gap 
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Atlas Shrugged  | To paraphrase something Matthew Yglesias once said, the numbers look more like a white racist conspiracy to deprive minorities of what little wealth they’ve attained than a ruthless plan for gouging John Galt.      View blog reactions

• • Welcome to Rapture 
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Atlas Shrugged  | In case you haven't played BioShock, I'll summarize: In 1960, a plane crashes into the ocean, and you are the only survivor. You swim to a nearby lighthouse. Inside, there's a submarine-like device called a "bathysphere" that brings you to the bottom of the ocean, where an Ayn Rand-inspired billionaire named Andrew Ryan has constructed an underwater libertarian metropolis called Rapture, where millions of people have "gone Galt." Unrestrained by any kind of government regulation, the people of Rapture develop a method of genetically modifying themselves ("splicing") that drives all of them insane, and the entire city collapses into civil war. [....] Everything about the fall of Rapture reinforces the folly and tragedy of Andrew Ryan's Randian-inspired extremism (although to be fair, Ryan is more Catholic than the Pope here).      View blog reactions