• • How Not to Make America Great 
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[M]any Americans, especially older Tea Party Americans, believe that the government is a machine for taking their hard-earned money and turning it over to undeserving, slothful Americans, the "moochers" in Ayn Rand's fervid imagery. This must seem like some kind of joke to the down-and-out Americans who receive ample evidence every day of the year that there is no way that America has much care at all for their fate, much less a system for channeling money their way! Let me put it this way: The federal welfare program (now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF) spends all of 0.2 percent of national income. Even if we add in Medicaid, food stamps, and the earned income tax credit, we're still at 3 percent of GDP, less than a seventh of the budget.  

• • If Rand Paul Really Loved Freedom, He’d Filibuster Bank of America 
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Individualism  | One of the paradoxes of life in the age of Randian individualism is that while any measure of government control is seen as suspect, private industry almost always gets a pass, even though employers exert a greater hold on the lives of their employees than the government (at least for the law-abiding).  

• Paul Ryan Will Not Be Saving the Romney Campaign 
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Paul Ryan  | We have dealt previously with the utter hilarity of the notion that the path to glory for Willard Romney is to unleash the neo-Randian policy genius that is his running mate, Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin. But there is further evidence to the effect that, given the relative vacancy at the top of the ticket, a quasi-mutiny may be brewing below decks.  

• Paul Ryan, Republican Sadist of the Future 
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Paul Ryan  | Is there anyone in the House Republican Caucus who doesn’t follow one cult or another? Ryan himself makes his aides read Ayn Rand.  

• Bill Keller and the American Sandwich 
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Paul Ryan  | Recently, [Paul] Krugman made a fine dinner out of the notion of “centrism” as perceived by people who are not necessarily David Brooks, but who likely look very much like him and are wearing their underwear. The theme of Krugman’s piece was the self-evident fact that, if you consider Paul Ryan’s zombie-eyed granny-starving budget as anything more than a campaign document crossed with a Penthouse Forum letter addressed to Ayn Rand, you are not a “centrist.” You reside very much on the right. You are also a sap.  

• Paul Ryan’s Budget Is a Cowardly Political Joke 
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Paul Ryan  | The only reason that the zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan gets to present his own federal budget, as though he were the shadow president and not a guy elected by roughly 180,000 people in and around Janesville, Wisconsin, is that he managed early on to convince people that he was not your run-of-the-mill zombie-eyed, granny-starving, trickle-down Randian snake-oil salesman of the kind that have been running Republican economic policy since half-past Ronald Reagan’s lucidity.  

• • The New Rights of Paul Ryan, CPAC’s Public Intellectual 
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Paul Ryan  | That zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan is the wonk every wingnut woman wants and every wingnut man wants to be. He thinks Serious Thoughts about The Big Issues Facing The Nation, and they truly dig him the most. If Ayn Rand, that randy old crackpot, were still alive, she’d whack him over the head, stuff him in a sack, and drag him off to her apartment, where they would make hot Objectivist monkey-love until the rafters knocked and the angels wept. Paul Ryan is also a remarkably accomplished bullshit artist.  

• Paul Ryan, Salesman 
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Paul Ryan  | Trotting out Ayn Rand’s Brycreem’d doppelganger to raise money based on his party’s obvious concern for “the safety net” is dangerously close to the working Jewish law-school definition of chutzpah.  

• • Paul Ryan Heritage Foundation Speech 
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Paul Ryan  | Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you today’s worst paragraph in political rhetoric, courtesy of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Dickens), in an appearance at the Heritage Foundation [....]. “We’re coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers in society and that could become very dangerous if it sets in as a permanent condition. [....]” Sentence No. 1: pure Ayn Rand. “Makers vs. takers.” Moochers and leeches. You and Them. But especially Them. But not in a divisive way. Oh, no. The Congressman doesn’t believe in divisive class rhetoric.  

• • Obama’s budget speech: Federalism vs. Dickensian dystopia 
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From a president who has taken the right-wing critique of his presidency far too much to heart, it was both welcome and long overdue to hear him talk in terms of the responsibilities that we have to one another in this country, and to hear him reminding those who may not have been paying much attention that those who built this country — from across the political spectrum — had a belief that we are all connected, and that in spite of the current vogue in Ayn Rand’s insufferable and despicable (also un-American, but mostly just insufferable and despicable) master-race prose stylings, there are some things that we can only do together.  

• • Paul Ryan and the new politics of sadism 

Paul Ryan  | Make no mistake: Ryan is a thoroughgoing nutball [...]. He is a lifelong adherent to the doctrines of Ayn Rand, which ought to disqualify anyone from ever being taken seriously enough to park cars by anyone over the age of fifteen. In terms of their connection to actual human reality, the difference between the doctrines of Ayn Rand and the doctrines of L. Ron Hubbard is not substantial, and the fervor of their acolytes is almost exactly the same. Picking Paul Ryan to handle your political economy is tantamount to electing Tom Cruise to be pope.  

• State of the Union: Winning the future, or losing our mind? 

Paul Ryan  | Michele Bachmann is a howling loon — a woman with no compunction at all about lying through her not inconsiderable teeth about virtually everything — but [Representative Paul] Ryan, no matter what his reputation elsewhere as a “serious” economic thinker, is no less radical, if somewhat less nutty. Where Bachmann has her devotion to the Constitution written by the voices in her head, Ryan has his economic “roadmap,” a Randian fever dream he produced a while back that so alarmed his fellow Republicans that they ran away as though Ryan had proposed the Affordable Cholera Act of 2009.  

• The year we let lunacy go mainstream 

Paul Ryan  | Already, [Barack Obama is] taking people like Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin — one of those pathetic souls who believes that Ayn Rand wrote erotica, and whose vaunted deficit “road map” would cut taxes on the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of Americans an average of $1.7 million a year on top of the Bush tax cuts that Obama agreed to extend — far too seriously.