• • • Sen. Ron Johnson: We’re Living in Atlas Shrugged 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Paul Ryan  |Ron Johnson  |Video  | Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican best known for sparring with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at last week's Benghazi hearings, says the United States is currently living out the plot of the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged. In an interview with the Rand-inspired Atlas Society, Johnson said he "absolutely" sees parallels between the American economy today and the novel in which government regulations drive prominent businessmen to retreat into a secluded gulch in protest.       View blog reactions

• • Glenn Beck Building Ayn Rand-Inspired Utopia in Texas 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Glenn Beck has a dream. On Thursday, the former Fox News host, gold bug, survival-seed guru, movie star, and bestselling author unveiled plans for a new planned community—inspired by the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged—to be built at an undisclosed location somewhere in the United States. No, really.      View blog reactions

• • • Ayn Rand in Space 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Going Galt  |Image  | At the Atlas Summit, a conference for libertarian devotees of Ayn Rand, the question is inescapable. It is scrawled in black magic marker on the plain white T-shirt of the white-haired man I pass on the way into the ballroom. It is printed on the green button on the corduroy blazer of the man who wants to share his thoughts on "the envy-driven wizards at NASA." It is emblazoned on the limited-edition gold coins advertised in the special three-ring binder given to all attendees. It is hanging, really, over the heads of all of us who have convened at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown DC in early July to celebrate Ayn Rand's sacred scroll of objectivism. The question, parroting the catchphrase of Atlas Shrugged, is "Who is John Galt?" The answer, apparently, is Elon Musk, the billionaire cofounder of the California-based galactic transport company SpaceX.      View blog reactions

• ESPN scribe to Haiti: Drop dead 
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Inaccurate  | [Paul Shirley’s] argument [is] simply a more immediately jarring version of the argument made by CNBC's Rick Santelli and, most recently, South Carolina's Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer. Specifically, that people ("stray animals," in Bauer parlance) who have hit a rough patch, or were simply born into a tough situation, should be shunned by their neighbors lest we encourage them to continue being poor. It's a worldview ripped straight out of the pages of Ayn Rand—of whom Shirley has written glowingly in the past.      View blog reactions