Right-Wingers Believe Ayn Rand's Every Word, But They Forget She Wrote Fiction
October 12, 2009 7:43 pm

Colin Greer

Ayn Rand is popular again. Her most popular novels Atlas Shrugged from 1957 and The Fountainhead from 1943 are still being bought in large numbers. While it's plainly fashionable for right wing activists and pundits to bandy about her ideas to discredit the Obama administration, it's worth remembering one thing...

The American right sees Atlas Shrugged as an almost prophetic masterpiece that describes "the economic lunacy" of the bailout and economic stimulus plan. As Stephen Moore (formerly of the CATO institute) explains in the Wall Street Journal, the warning of Atlas Shrugged is clear - the more government tries to fix things, the more they break. "When profits and wealth and creativity are denigrated in society, they start to disappear -- leaving everyone the poorer," he says, concluding that the abolition of income tax would be a much better policy idea.

Two new biographies of Rand and maybe even a new film, are in the works. The cult of Ayn Rand has inspired think tanks like the Ayn Rand Institute, and The Atlas Society, and she has numerous followers in high places, notably including Alan Greenspan (former chairman of the Federal Reserve and soloist for the out-of-tune hymn to the inexorable free market). A copy of Atlas Shrugged may have been one of the more popular accessories at recent TEA parties.

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An Incredible Story
October 12, 2009 7:45 pm

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Student Loans are the New Indentured Servitude
October 12, 2009 7:47 pm

Mike Konczal, the Atlantic

The Wall Street Journal ran a post over the weekend about a new credit crunch among low income borrowers, noting it is now 'payback time.' What they didn't go into is that their primary interviewee is drowning not on expensive cars loans but student loans. This former student's debt is far from extraordinary. It is, in fact, tragically ordinary, as student loans have become the 21st century version of indentured servitude.

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My Senators Voted Wrong
October 13, 2009 7:48 pm

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was an employee for a private contractor in Iraq. She was drugged and brutally raped by her co-workers.

When she reported the crime to her employer, she was imprisoned in a shipping container. Given no food, water, or medical treatment. 24 hours later, US Embassy agents rescued her.

Her employer destroyed evidence so that she could not file criminal charges. They claimed that the contract she signed with them meant that she couldn't even take them to civil court.

In 2009, the Senate voted to not fund companies which force their employees to forfeit their rights to sue for sexual assault or harassment.

Thirty Senators voted against this amendment. All of them republican.

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The travesty of the proposed "health care reform"
October 14, 2009 7:50 pm

Matt Taibbi doesn't pull punches in this Rolling Stone piece:

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose...

The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers...

It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players — from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus — found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on...

The crucial sentence in the article:

Fully $350 billion a year could be saved on paperwork alone if the U.S. went to a single-payer system — more than enough to pay for the whole goddamned thing, if anyone had the balls to stand up and say so.

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Jon Stewart Takes On 30 Republicans Who Voted Against Franken Rape Amendment
October 15, 2009 7:52 pm

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rape-Nuts
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

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New Application for Your Smart Phone: There's a Rep For That
October 16, 2009 7:54 pm

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Senator Franken Nails KBR Lawyer
October 17, 2009 7:56 pm

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