• • Paul Ryan knows how good things could have been if only Mitt had won 
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Paul Ryan  |Rand Paul  | Paul Ryan rambles forth on what could have been if only the American public had been wise enough to elect the Romney-Ryan ticket [...]. [....] Aw, how sad. They were working on a transition plan, and they never got to use it. And hearing all this stuff that they would have already accomplished is enough to bring tears to Ayn Rand Paul Ryan's eyes. They would have already been on the path not just to get rid of Medicare and make chained CPI look like something FDR would have proposed, but also towards giving Exxon a drilling permit for every damn back yard in America.  

• Ten signs Paul Ryan is dropping acid 
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Paul Ryan  | Here are 10 signs that suggest Paul Ryan is now following Timothy Leary as well as Ayn Rand.  

• New, dead-eyed Children of the Corn group plans to cater to hep Republican youngfolk 
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There is nothing on this earth sadder than "young Republicans." If your entire political consciousness has been crafted from Ayn Rand novels and the selfish pigheadedness of youth, fine, but don't make the rest of us watch.  

• Cheers and Jeers: Tuesday 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Thanks to the miracle of time travel (thank you, host wormhole!), we got a preview of tonight’s State of the Union address. [....] “I’m mooning you on behalf of JOHN GALT!”  

• Cantor’s big relaunch of the GOP on health care a lead balloon 
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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s big speech is done, the fourth or fifth slathering of lipstick in recent months on his porcine party. As promised, there’s a lot of the same on policy, but made to sound just a little less Ayn Randian. That’s particularly true on Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid.  

• • Midday open thread 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Ron Johnson  | Sen. Ron Johnson says America is pretty much Atlas Shrugged now, which shows that he, like most wingnuts who like to invoke The Lord God Ayn Rand, has definitely never read the book. [....] Johnson also claims he’s just like Hank Rearden, and since we know he didn’t invent some awesome new metal, I guess that means he’s cheating on his wife. Or something.  

• Daily Kos: Sunday Talk: Good to the last drop 
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Paul Ryan  | I'm not a psychiatrist, but if I were one, I'd say that the GOP's problems are rooted in stupidity, psychopathy, vaginaphilia, racism, objectivism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, and stuff.  

• • Glenn Beck wants to open a Glenn Beck town and theme park 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Personal life  | [T]here's nothing Ayn Rand about a multi-denominational church, and I think even most of Glenn Beck's fanbase would probably wig out at the multi-denominational part. There's nothing particularly Ayn Rand about any of it, for that matter, unless one of the theme park attractions will be lessons on how to collect welfare checks and commit adultery.  

• • Daily Kos: Cheers and Jeers: Rum and Coke FRIDAY! 

Paul Ryan  | I believe Ayn Rand's first love poem went: Roses are red/ violets are blue/ finish this poem yourself / you dependent parasite ---Stephen Colbert (via twitter)  

• • The so very charitable Ari Fleischer 
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Egoism  |Paul Ryan  | The fact that a Republican expresses an opinion thoroughly devoid of compassion shouldn't be surprising. The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, requires his staff to read the writings of a woman who developed the philosophy of objectivism, which decries compassion as a moral evil.  

• • Union Work and Activism is Holy Work 
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Capitalism  | This whole bunch of Radical Rightwing Republican politicians are either directly or indirectly influenced by Russian anti-democratic bad novelist Ayn Rand who divided our country and the world into makers and takers – remember the 47 percent. They believe economics is a zero sum game – you either win or lose, beat your opponent or be beaten.  

• Romney surrogate Sununu: Democrats won by appealing to those 'dependent' on government 
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Mitt surrogate and all-around terrible person John Sununu remains fully on board with the post-election Republican notion that those nasty Democrats only won the election because: ‘“They aggressively got out the base of their base, the base of their base that’s dependent, to a great extent economically, on government policy and government programs,” Sununu said during a forum with two other Republican former governors, Steve Merrill and Craig Benson, at Concord’s Grappone Conference Center.’ [....] It [...] is part and parcel of the continuing self-congratulatory Republican (well, Randian) thinking that anyone who wants government to do something is a parasite [...].  

• Daily Kos: Cheers and Jeers: Rum and Coke FRIDAY! 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Going Galt  | This is an abbreviated C&J, but in the comments I’ll be happy to unleash a torrent of knowledge and wisdom upon you by answering any questions you might have about anything. Home repair, food, relationships, going Galt, mole people living under your house, blogger etiquette, booger etiquette, molecular biology (i.e. sticking things in the microwave oven and seeing what happens)…eh, I know most everything and tonight I’m willing to prove it.  

• • This Is Not A Test 
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Capitalism  |Paul Ryan  |Video  | You can further prepare and ride out the storm by reading Ayn Rand's Guide to Disaster Assistance and Squirrel Cuisine.  

• • • Why do objectivists run for office? 
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Altruism  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Egoism  | The problem with implementing objectivist policy at any level of government [...] is that it requires people who believe in objectivism to make the sacrifice to run for office. But if those individuals who would push to implement objectivist policy actually believed in it, why would they run for office in the first place?  

• • • Paul Ryan rejects ‘sorely needed’ moral hero Ayn Rand to suck up to bishops 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | Now that Paul Ryan has been schooled repeatedly by the Catholic bishops, theologians, and faculty from the Jesuit Georgetown University for claiming his Screw The Poor budget is inspired by his Catholic faith, he’s awfully desperate to claw his way back into the good graces of his Church, isn’t he? Heck, he’ll even reject that evil atheist Ayn Rand if the Church will just please, pretty please, stop telling him how immoral he is. Funny thing about Ayn Rand. She’s been dead for a while now, which means she didn’t become an atheist last week. She always was one, including back in 2009 when Paul Ryan thought she was the voice of morality.  

• • Romney, Santorum, and Goldman Sachs: Their Values Are the Same 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  |Inaccurate  | The conservatives who are such fans of Wall Street and so worshipful of free markets say that they are the ones who are for traditional morality. The problem is that the kind of greed they defend gets its morality from a very untraditional place: Ayn Rand, who argued that selfishness was not only a virtue, but really the only one that mattered, and that generosity was immoral because it helped society’s leeches. When a company like Goldman encourages its executives to, as Smith put it, “callously talk about ripping their clients off,” they are simply following Rand’s twisted version of a morality based on greed and selfishness.  

• • Outrage fatigue: Or, accepting that the Republicans just are that bad 
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Mitt Romney has consistently presented a different vision. It’s an ideology that professes that if only plutocrats like him were less restrained by consumer protections, labor, and regulations, that they could produce all the jobs America needs through trickle-down economics, even as the stepladders to the middle class that government has already provided continue to be gutted in the name of personal responsibility. It is a vision born of a decades-long effort to rehabilitate the principles of Ayn Rand and transform them into a socially acceptable philosophy on governance while interweaving a theocratic social agenda thought unthinkable only a few years ago.  

• • Sunday Talk: Oops! He did it again 

Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  |Image  | Buyers of the DVD “Atlas Shrugged: Part One” were shocked to discover that Ayn Rand appeared to not share their self-centered ideology.  

• • Eric Cantor does not like the EPA 
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Inaccurate  | This is the fundamental flaw with any Libertarianesque philosophy, especially of the Ayn Rand sort. The general premise of “I should be allowed do whatever I want, and screw the rest of you” makes good sense up until the exact moment you realize the implications if everyone around you were held only to that same sociopathic standard. Some people have the capacity to recognize that rather obvious flaw immediately; others, like Eric Cantor, never seem to puzzle it out, no matter how long they ponder on it.