• • Mike Daisey returns to Seattle, 2 new shows in tow 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Rand Paul  | [N]ext week, Daisey orates “F**cking F**cking F**cking Ayn Rand,” about the Russian-born author and her cult philosophical novels, admired by such politicians as Republican congressmen Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan. [....] Ayn Rand has fascinated him since he read her books in high school, and after the tea party “co-opted her work.” “The basic format of my piece is a pocket biography of Rand, who had a fascinating life we never hear about because her work looms up larger than her own story. I also examine her books ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and her theory of objectivism. Her idea of people becoming so perfectly realized that they have no human faults or weaknesses sounds great. If we found any people like that, it might actually work out!”  

• Republicans blew this election with insults, immature behavior 
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You have to be in some kind of Ayn Rand fantasy bubble to not get it's political suicide to denigrate half the voters you're trying to woo.  

• Racing toward the fiscal cliff 
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Today's conservatives are really pushing forward a revolution, believe in it or not, without precedent in American history outside the imaginations of the likes of Ayn Rand. And as Mao said, "A revolution is not a dinner party."  

• • Did W. save the economy from total collapse? 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | Mr. Bush presided over eight years of captured regulators and risky banking, especially made possible by the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. That was engineered by Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican Sen. Phil Gramm. There was the easy bubble money from Alan Greenspan, disciple of Ayn Rand (the “free market” did not police itself).  

• • ‘Industrial policy’? America already has one (that’s not working) 
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Capitalism  | Those who hold the superstition that an Ayn Rand “free market” is the cure to all ills -- despite its disastrous results in 2008, etc. -- meet every constructive idea to get the American economy out of the ditch with: “That’s industrial policy!” Industrial policy, you see, is always some failed commie central planning nightmare from the Soviet Union and eastern Europe circa 1980. And that’s been swept into the dust-bin of history.  

• Shooting ourselves in the foot and reloading on cutting tourism funds 
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Capitalism  | The decision by Olympia to completely eliminate the Washington State Tourism Office is the kind of purblind “austerity” that ensures more economic pain. It may not be as damaging as cutting funding for K-12 education and universities, but it makes the point with even less complexity, which we need in a world dominated by talk-radio screamers, Ayn Rand acolytes pushing to turn American into no-tax/no-regulation Somalia and armies of Internet trolls cutting and pasting talking points.  

• The president and the unions: The community organizer isn’t a labor organizer 
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Your weekends off, eight-hour work day, end of child labor, workplace safety and a host of other goods came thanks to unions, especially in the private sector. Not from the beneficence of moguls. Not from Ayn Rand’s fevered imagination. Not from “the free market.” But from the hard work and often the blood shed by union members over many decades.  

• • • “Atlas Shrugged,” the movie 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | “Atlas Shrugged, Part I” comes to the big screen April 15. I’ve seen the picture on an advance DVD, and for fans of Ayn Rand--and she was one of the heroes of my youth--it is well worth seeing. They will like it, mostly. It is Rand’s world, and remains true to the book. The movie falls short of the book, but given what sort of book it is, and that the movie was financed by a fan, and done in a hurry by a less-experienced director with non-famous actors on a limited budget, it is a creditable effort.  

• • Muffuletta sandwiches are the Big Easy’s best 
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Individualism  |Personal life  | Most people who’ve heard of [Ruth Beebe] Hill know her as the author of “Hanta Yo,” a controversial novel about the Plains Indians, which she researched for 30 years, going so far as to learn the archaic language of the Lakota Sioux. Criticism of her work stemmed from her depiction of the Sioux as radical individualists, a characterization that probably had more to do with Hill’s fascination with her friend and mentor, Ayn Rand, than it did with the Lakota.  

• After Arizona attack, strong political rhetoric, hate speech condemned 
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[Jared] Loughner’s favorite books are not only examples of thought control, they are also political tracts concerning the state. Other books he has read — “Mein Kampf” and Ayn Rand books — are also political tracts concerning the state. To be sure, Loughner’s psychosis is a belief in thought control, but at the same time he is very interested in anti-state and pro-state arguments.  

• Sharp ideological contrasts in state Supreme Court race 
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“I’m without a doubt conservative, libertarian conservative,” said [James] Johnson, who boasted of meeting libertarian author Ayn Rand. He has been endorsed by Joe Fuiten, a prominent Christian conservative pastor.  

• Matchmaker Christian Sinderman gets voters to like what he likes 
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After an "awkward Ayn Rand stage" at Kalamazoo College, [Christian Sinderman] committed himself to environmental causes, moving to Washington, D.C., to lobby for endangered species, a "naive hippie" with hair halfway down his back.  

• Crisis committee: Rubin shows what comes out of the mouths of (very well paid) boobs 
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Along with Alan Greenspan, he of Ayn Rand and conservative market religion purity, Democrat [Robert Rubin is most responsible for the Great Recession.  

• While you were away: Economic issues that bite while we’re distracted by Tiger 
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The Great American Freak Show continues with all the media oxygen being sucked up by Tiger Woods and the estate of the late Michael Jackson. It's almost as if certain interests didn't want the American people paying attention to things that mattered. Financial reform, to be sure, can't compete with the Jersey Housewives. The proposal by Sen. Dodd, D-Financial Services, does include some kind of consumer protection agency -- a plus. But no new Glass-Steagall, no meaningful derivative oversight, etc. etc. And regulators must regulate, after all, rather than have their heads in Ayn Rand novels.  

• • What Washington state does about its budget deficit is a taxing mess 
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Americans face a future where even the basic government services they long took for granted are in doubt. This may be heaven for some acolytes of Ayn Rand. But she wrote fiction.  

• WTO protesters were right 
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Capitalism  | Alan Greenspan, an acolyte of Ayn Rand, personified the worship of the "free market" that remains our guiding ideology yet it is actually a market of bubbles, costly bursts, a casino on Wall Street and America deep in the hole.  

• • • Ayn Rand: Goddess of the market, gateway to the American right 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Personal life  |Image  | Reviews of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.
Two biographies are being published this fall of Ayn Rand. Both are remarkably evenhanded, given that opinions about the author of “The Fountainhead” (1943) and “Atlas Shrugged” (1957) rarely run lukewarm. Critics hated her rejection of the duty to be one's brother's keeper and the unabashed heroism of her fiction. Legions of readers come away from her books feeling awakened and transformed. Those who knew her said they never met anyone so brilliant, or so intellectually aggressive.  

• Initiative 1033 would cut into already lean budgets 
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I finally met [Tim Eyman] a few weeks ago when he came to The Seattle Times to peddle — oops meant push — his latest budget-wrecking effort, Initiative 1033. The measure is a stab at property tax relief by slowing government revenues and requiring voter approval for tax collections beyond his unrealistic limit. [....] Eyman earns a nice living framing government into the perennial loafer living large off the sweat of others. He fancies himself a character out of an Ayn Rand novel — brilliant, hardworking and in perpetual battle to keep government's mitts out of his pocket.  

• • Too much Ayn Rand from elite Americans 
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Robert J. Herbold’s and Scott S. Powell’s commentary in The Seattle Times sounds like it was written by a couple of guys who read Ayn Rand and suffered a -- dare I say it -- collective attack of foolishness. They purvey myth after myth about government and the citizenry’s relation to it in a democracy as well as the ultimate fantasy -- that the unfettered will of capital defines freedom. [....] The authors retail the myth, a Rand favorite, of government action as collectivism. In this myth, all government action is created equal. The Soviet Union and China are no different from Great Britain, France and Germany, or indeed from an America that finally seems willing to extend health-care coverage to all its citizens.  

• Talking with Rem Koolhaas, the architect behind the Central Library 

The Fountainhead  | A: Some architects are seen as kind of almost bullfighters who somehow have to kill an animal, but you're part of a much larger enterprise. Q: I think there's a reason for that: too many people have read “The Fountainhead” and it's ruined them for life. A: Yeah, exactly, exactly.