• At CPAC 2013, FreedomWorks Is Nowhere to Be Found 
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Ayn Rand Center  | FreedomWorks is nowhere to be found at CPAC 2013, housed this year at the spacious Gaylord Convention Center at Maryland’s National Harbor. No staffers are scheduled to speak. No events bear FreedomWorks’ name as sponsor. FreedomWorks doesn’t even have a booth in the vast exhibition hall here (nearly everyone else does, from the NRA and Citizens United to the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and the author of the book WTF? How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost…Again).  

• • John Yoo to Rand Paul: Leave Barack Obama Alone on Targeted Killing! 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Rand Paul  | John Yoo, the author of the Bush administration legal memos justifying the use of torture, thinks President Obama is really getting too much grief over targeted killing. [....] Referring to Paul's marathon filibuster, an attempt to force the Obama administration to clarify its views on the use of military force against terror suspects in the United States, Yoo said "It sort of reminds me of young kids when they first read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged and they suddenly think that federal taxation equals slavery and they're not going to pay any federal taxes anymore."  

• • • 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.   

• • 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.  

• • Jim DeMint: 47 Percenter 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Paul Ryan  | The libertarian Cato Institute [...] settled on former BB&T CEO John Allison, a self-identified objectivist, to lead the organization after a bitter internal battle. In case you've been frozen in carbonite for a while and missed tea partiers holding signs praising John Galt, objectivism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose vision of heroic entrepreneurs held back by a the needs of a parasitic underclass that contributes nothing to society sounds a lot like the America Romney described in Boca Raton.