• A Zombie Eye On The Future 
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Paul Ryan  | For all his Randian rhetoric, and the endless head-fakes he makes in the general direction of Opportunity For All — Pro Tip, Paul. For a head fake to work, sooner or later, you have to take a shot. — Ryan is fundamentally a creature of the high-end businessmen who finance his party.  

• • Buffett Rule Obama Speech 
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Paul Ryan  | Of course, [Pope John Paul II’s view of our obligations to the poor] is the kind of thing about religion that drove Ayn Rand, the oversexed yahoo who is Paul Ryan’s personal glow-girl, crazy. The irony, she is truly rich in this one.)  

• Wisconsin, Where the Romney Pushback Begins 
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Now, in Wisconsin, where almost nobody is in the middle — wherever that is — anymore, [Mitt Romney] has had to choose the company of an Ayn Rand fanboi, a Koch Brothers rentboy, and a rookie senator who thinks the Affordable Care Act was drawn up at Nuremberg in 1935.  

• How to Really Fix the Next Debt Crisis 
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It’s not a “tax increase” when you allow a “temporary” tax cut to terminate under its own statutory terms. It is a resumption of the status quo before the failure of the “supply-side” experiment. Even Ayn Rand would understand that.  

• Raj Chetty: Economist 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | Milton Friedman’s sciatica has been more influential [in economics] in the past than hard data. Ditto Alan Greenspan’s devotion to hack novelist Ayn Rand. And Arthur Laffer’s napkin doodles.  

• • Beyond Glee: A video tour of the ultimate fictional education 
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Video  | Revolutionary Pre-K Student Body: The Ayn Rand School for Tots, The Simpsons. The episode "A Streetcar Named Marge" is best known for Maggie tossing the pacifier and breaking her silence (by way of Jodie Foster's vocal chords, no less). But the buildup is just as memorable: Marge enrolls her baby in a fascist daycare center, the proprietor of which forbids any use of pacifiers or bottles ("our aim here is to develop the 'bottle within'").  

• The prison letters of Timothy McVeigh 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Along with [an April 1998] letter, [McVeigh] sent a newspaper clipping with the headline SWISS BANK VOWS TO FIGHT NAZI GOLD SUIT: U. S. LAWYER PLANNING NEW CLASS-ACTION CLAIM. He underlined a passage noting that most of the gold that the Swiss National Bank bought from Nazi Germany during World War II had been looted from occupied countries. In the margin, McVeigh added in his small, left-leaning scrawl: "Have you ever read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? That's what comes to mind when I read things like this; the 'tobacco settlement'; Microsoft anti-trust charges; etc. And while we're at it, why stop here in remembering what is, essentially, 'spoils of war'?! (I don't have adequate space to list examples!) This is ridiculous! (but you can't say that because it's non-P.C.)"  

• • Since when did we start making such great movies based on… books? 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | In a weird way, the perpetual stalling of Atlas Shrugged — which has seen Angelina Jolie attached for years — suggests a rare attack of conscience telling Hollywood how unfilmable Ayn Rand's epic really is.  

• • The ‘socialist’ American reform that worked long before health care 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | I'm still shaking my head over Governor Mark Sanford's book review of Atlas Shrugged, that ridiculous Ayn Rand novel in which rich and powerful capitalists go on strike to avoid being exploited by the working class. "What strikes me as still relevant," Sanford writes, "is the central insight — that it isn't 'collective action' that makes this nation prosperous and secure; it's the initiative and creativity of the individual." [....] But Sanford's sentence contradicts itself. Collective action is exactly what makes the nation secure, thanks to that gigantic collective known as the American military.  

• The new American religion behind the growing American rage 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Mike Austin’s] apartment is a one-bedroom unit on the ground floor of a rambling development — a lot of books like Patton, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Atlas Shrugged on cheap Ikea shelves, posters of John Wayne and Gladiator, a couple of giant speakers, two crucifixes, one statue of the Virgin Mary, and one incense burner "because Martin Luther said incense drives away the devil."  

• Why Tiger Woods is the opposite of hope 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Tiger Woods] Day-Timered the most contested individual event in sports. Sunday: Roll in a twenty-footer to gut Mediate. Monday: Win eighteen-hole playoff. Tuesday: Meet the press, discuss the "drama." Wednesday: Announce surgery. Thursday: No food after 7:00 p.m.! Friday: Hospital. Bring Atlas Shrugged to read in recovery.  

• The demise of the overconfident jackass 
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Capitalism  | Spencer from The Hills, Barney on How I Met Your Mother, the expense-account-abusing, bottle-service-ordering, Ayn Rand-quoting embarrassments of the American banking sector: Your relevance is dwindling, your presence no longer required.  

• I am buried in plastic instruments 
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For a while there, games seem poised to break out of their extended adolescence and veer towards something more decidedly adult. BioShock’s Ayn Randian eugenics journey to the bottom of the sea felt as atmospheric as Blade Runner.  

•Wikiworld: The experiment 
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Profile of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, before and after editing by the online encyclopedia's contributors.
Wales is an admirer of Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism, which influenced his adopting a neutral-point-of-view policy. It forces editors to replace opinions with facts or their changes will be wiped out.