• • Election Rigging Requires Professional 

Atlas Shrugged  | To the person who thought that tagging your rant with “Who is John Galt?” identifies you with a secret club or makes you seem smart [Rant & Rave, Nov. 21]: It doesn’t. It just lets all of us reasonable people know that you’re a short-sighted, sad little moron with terrible taste in books.  

• Dump Secessionists in Syria 

Atlas Shrugged  | Go Hostess! Finally, the coddling is over. You want your union? Go ahead. I will shut down this company if you vote for a union. I support Hostess’ owner. Who is John Galt?  

• • Puppy Dies, Jackass Drives 

Two questions: Why are so many advocates of Ayn Rand so remarkably unaccomplished? Just wondering. And why does talking to my Tea Party relatives feel like talking to someone with A.D.D.? (They never stick to a discussion point long enough to make a reasoned argument, they just jump from one Fox News talking point and change the subject to another. With some apocalyptic language thrown in for good measure.)  

• • Super Opens 

Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | Having read Ayn Rand’s 1957 manifesto, I can attest to the faithfulness of director Paul Johansson’s adaptation: Like the source material, it exists entirely for the robotic recitation of a thesis.  

• • Gambling with democracy 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  | The nation’s largest voting machine maker, ES&S was sued last September by the U.S. Justice Department over anti-competition concerns that gave it a near monopoly after it purchased the second-largest maker, Premier (formerly Diebold Election Systems). Adding to the intrigue about the company, its Omaha headquarters are located on John Galt Boulevard, named after the main character in the popular Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged, a favorite of libertarian types and some tea partiers. In the book, Galt is a heroic capitalist inventor fighting against a society that stifles individualism in favor of bureaucracy and egalitarianism.