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Jul 28, 2010

Comments

Ford Peterson

The DFL is trying to demonize this group. It comes clear as to why.

http://www.minnesotademocratsexposed.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/MN-Forward-Press-Release_061610.pdf

From the press release:

"MN Forward is a new organization established to ensure that private-sector job creation and economic growth are at the top of the agenda during the 2010 campaign. The organization is working with a broad coalition of Minnesota job creators to elect candidate FROM BOTH PARTIES (emphasis mine) who support policies that enhance job growth in Minnesota."

All a DFL candidate needs to do to get on the MN Forward gravy train is to be a candidate who actually has ideas on how to create jobs. MAK wants to borrow billions and hand it to the Unions endorsing her campaign. Entenza wants us all to be in the propeller making business. And Dayton simply remains clueless as to where money comes from.

Phoenix Woman

Sounds like a pitch for the Republican Party of Minnesota to me.

Phoenix Woman

Can anyone find any functional differences between the MN Forward platform and that of the Republican Party of Minnesota, whose candidates MN Forward so happily supports? http://phoenixwoman.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/if-it-walks-like-a-republican-talks-like-a-republican-acts-like-a-republican/

For that matter, shall we stop with the pretense that the racist haven known as the Tea Party is anything beside the GOP's base? Tea Party candidates must pledge to back the Republican platform in order to get funding: http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/02/08/the-tea-party-just-another-rnc-adjunct/

Dagny

Is this supposed to show some deep conspiracy? Why is it that groups can support liberal causes and make gifts consistently to DFL candidates and no one says "draw your own conclusions," but a group has the gall to say, "We like business and profits," and make gifts to Republican candidates, and we're invited to speculate on the evil conspiracy that must be at the back of their fund raising letter?

It's called politics. Get over it.

Phoenix Woman

Ms. Taggart, this is for you:

"... the U.S. is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the U.S.

One reason most countries don't find the time to embrace Ayn Rand's thinking is that she is a textbook sociopath. In her notebooks Ayn Rand worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of 'ideal man' she promoted in her more famous books. These ideas were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

[...]

"The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much [http://www.slate.com/id/2233966] about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: 'Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,' she wrote, gushing that Hickman had 'no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel "other people."'

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: 'He was born without the ability to consider others.' (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.)"

===========

There follows a gruesome description of Hickman's sadistic taunting of the girl and her father -- including his delivery of her dead body to her father (Hickman pretended the girl was still alive, so he could get the ransom money and have the sick thrill of killing another human being -- his version of having your cake and eating it, too).

This was the hero, the Howard Roark schoolgirl crush, and role model of the person who is the intellectual guru of the far right, folks.

This is why they feel justified in screwing over everyone -- because they don't care about anyone but themselves. Not only that, they try to paint caring and compassion and community as evil, and up as down, in order to justify their sociopathy.

http://www.alternet.org/books/145819/ayn_rand,_hugely_popular_author_and_inspiration_to_right-wing_leaders,_was_a_big_admirer_of_serial_killer

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