Atlas Shrugged: Part I Rubs Capitalism in Hollywood's Face

by Jarrett Stepman

April 15 is a miserable day for American taxpayers, but it’s the perfect release date for the film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s classic novel Atlas Shrugged.

The ultimate taxpayer’s revolt movie, which has been in production for nearly two decades, will capitalize on the confluence of current issues that strike at the heart of the book’s message.

The marketing campaign has been small because the movie didn’t have a big budget. One of the producers, Harmon Kaslow, said at a Heritage Foundation prescreening of Atlas Shrugged: Part I—the movie is only the first part of an ongoing saga—that he wanted the marketing effort to be “grassroots,” The other producer, John Aglialoro, has been the CEO of several large companies and is a former U.S. poker champion. Both are complete neophytes in the movie-making industry.

Unlike the typical Hollywood story line of scientists, environmentalists, and government officials fighting against greedy, profit-seeking corporations, Atlas Shrugged: Part I turns the formula on its head.

The villains are instead members of society who try to leech off the hard work of others. Their only skill is in using government machinations to plunder from their fellow man. The list of villains includes incompetent CEOs, government bureaucrats, and altruistic pinheads.

The storyline of Atlas Shrugged: Part I generally follows two main protagonists.

The first is Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), who is the vice president of the railroad company Taggart Continental. She deftly handles the day-to-day business of the company while her brother, James Taggart, is the incompetent CEO whose only real skill is using political influence to gain governmental favors.

The other main protagonist is a brilliant metal inventor, Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler). He is a hardworking entrepreneur who has created the world's strongest, but untested, metal. Unfortunately he is married to a cold and decadent wife who ungratefully spends all of his money on herself.

The plot of Atlas Shrugged: Part I revolves around the complex partnership between Hank and Dagny. Both need each other professionally. Dagny needs Hank's revolutionary new metal to revive her families company, and Hank needs the contract with Taggart Continental to build his budding young company. As the story moves along, however, their relationship extends far beyond the professional.

The subplot of talented workers, entrepreneurs, and businessmen disappearing eventually becomes the focus of the movie. A phrase used sarcastically over and over again, usually before someone disappears, is “Who is John Galt?” This is the character who symbolizes the power and the glory of the human mind. As the world is falling apart, the only people who can save it are either being attacked for being successful, or are simply leaving.

While the theme and message of Atlas Shrugged: Part I are sure to resonate with Tea Partiers, libertarians, and conservatives, some elements of the film remain noticeably lacking.

Despite an impressive first scene of a roaring locomotive racing toward its spectacular doom, there is a definite lack of visuals. The set design could have certainly used a bit more artistic flair.

Another problem is that many of the characters' performances are wooden and stiff. Because the film is not visually spectacular, there was an even greater need for powerful character performance, and it really just isn’t there. Some individual performances stand out, including Taylor Schilling's portrayal of Dagny Taggart, but many of the characters simply don’t mesh well.

So Atlas Shrugged: Part I doesn’t have the best visuals or character performances, but it does have a number of memorable scenes. The portrayals of the government bureaucrats, in their brief time on screen, are well-done and humorous. And there is no lack of particularly detestable characters, such as super lobbyist Wesley Mouch.

Atlas Shrugged: Part I certainly has its flaws, and the lack of a major marketing campaign will probably hurt its chances of success, but it is a movie that goes against everything Hollywood is known for. That alone makes it worth seeing.

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Jarrett Stepman is a graduate of UC Davis, where he studied Political Science. He is currently an intern for HUMAN EVENTS through the National Journalism Center.

Holder ignores demands for NAACP-influence data

LAW OF THE LAND

'Who is running Justice Department? That is what we're trying to find out'

By Bob Unruh

A lawsuit has been filed against President Obama's Justice Department fNew Black Panther Partyor refusing to release details about how agency officials decided to abandon a voter intimidation case that staff members had brought – and won – against members of the .

The lawsuit was filed by Judicial Watch, the public interest organization that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, over a refusal by the federal agency to provide information about the decision.

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At issue in the case is whether the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People "improperly influenced" the Justice Department, the nation's highest law enforcement agency, "to drop a lawsuit against members of the Black Panthers who allegedly threatened and intimidated white voters outside a polling station during the 2008 election."

Because Kristen Clark, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, reportedly met with Justice Department officials to discuss the case just before the agency announced plans to dismiss the action, questions arose about the influence that may have been exerted. Judicial Watch in November 2010 filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records of communications between the agency's Civil Rights Division and the NAACP. Under federal requirements, Attorney General Eric Holder's agency was supposed to have responded by Dec. 3, 2010.

"However, to date, no documents have been produced," the Judicial Watch announcement said.

"Who is running the Justice Department? That is what we're trying to find out with this lawsuit. I find it outrageous that leftist special interest groups seem to be directing the activities of the nation’s top law enforcement agency," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a prepared statement about the case.

"The Obama Justice Department has made a mess of the Black Panther lawsuit. We already know the Justice Department's decision to drop the case was tainted by politics and racism. There is something amiss in the Holder Justice Department. And its casual violations of the freedom of information law highlight this administration's contempt for transparency and the rule of law."

According to the lawsuit, "As of the date of this complaint, defendant has failed to produce any records responsive to the request or demonstrate that responsive records are exempt from production. Nor has it indicated whether or when any responsive records will be produced. In fact, defendant has failed to respond to the request in any manner."

WND previously reported on the Philadelphia case, which was documented on video.

The Justice Department originally brought the case against the organization and several individuals who witnesses say derided voters with catcalls of "white devil" and "cracker" and told voters they should prepare to be "ruled by the black man."

One poll watcher called police after he reportedly saw one of the men brandishing a nightstick to threaten voters.

"As I walked up, they closed ranks, next to each other," the witness told Fox News at the time. "So I walked directly in between them, went inside and found the poll watchers. They said they'd been here for about an hour. And they told us not to come outside because a black man is going to win this election no matter what."

He said the man with a nightstick told him, "'We're tired of white supremacy,' and he starts tapping the nightstick in his hand. At which point I said, 'OK, we're not going to get in a fistfight right here,' and I called the police."

Subsequently, former DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams testified before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that the Voting Section of Holder's organization is dominated by a "culture of hostility" toward bringing cases against blacks and other minorities who violate voting-rights laws.

Further, two other former U.S. Department of Justice attorneys later corroborated key elements of the explosive allegations by Adams.

One of Adams' DOJ colleagues, former Voting Section trial attorney Hans A. von Spakovsky, told WND he saw Adams was being attacked in the media for lack of corroboration. He said he knew Adams was telling the truth, so he decided on his own to step forward.

It was Adams who had been ordered by his superiors to drop a case prosecutors already had won against the New Black Panthers. When they were ordered to stop prosecution, Adams and the team of DOJ lawyers had already won the case by default because the New Black Panthers declined to defend themselves in court. At that point in the proceedings, the DOJ team was simply waiting for the judge to assign penalties against the New Black Panthers.

The latest FOIA action is part of Judicial Watch's comprehensive investigation of the New Black Panther Party scandal. It previously found information that top political appointees played key roles in the decision to dismiss the case.

That information "directly contradict[s] sworn testimony by Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, who testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that no political leadership was involved in the decision," Judicial Watch said.

Is it America’s duty to intervene wherever regime change is needed?

George F. Will
Opinion Writer

Is it America’s duty to intervene wherever regime change is needed?
By George F. Will

The missile strikes that inaugurated America’s latest attempt at regime change were launched 29 days before the 50th anniversary of another such — the Bay of Pigs of April 17, 1961. Then the hubris of American planners was proportional to their ignorance of everything relevant, from Cuban sentiment to Cuba’s geography. The fiasco was a singularly feckless investment of American power.

Does practice make perfect? In today’s episode, America has intervened in a civil war in a tribal society, the dynamics of which America does not understand. And America is supporting one faction, the nature of which it does not know. “We are standing with the people of Libya,” says Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, evidently confident that “the” people are a harmonious unit. Many in the media call Moammar Gaddafi’s opponents “freedom fighters,” and perhaps they are, but no one calling them that really knows how the insurgents regard one another, or understand freedom, or if freedom, however understood, is their priority.

But, then, knowing is rarely required in the regime-change business. The Weekly Standard, a magazine for regime-change enthusiasts, serenely says: “The Libyan state is a one-man operation. Eliminate that man and the whole edifice may come tumbling down.” And then good things must sprout? The late Donald Westlake gave one of his comic novels the mordant title “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” People who do not find that darkly funny should not make foreign policy.

In Libya, mission creep began before the mission did. A no-fly zone would not accomplish what Barack Obama calls “a well-defined goal,” the “protection of civilians.” So the no-fly zone immediately became protection for aircraft conducting combat operations against Gaddafi’s ground forces.

America’s war aim is inseparable from — indeed, obviously is — destruction of that regime. So our purpose is to create a political vacuum, into which we hope — this is the “audacity of hope” as foreign policy — good things will spontaneously flow. But if Gaddafi cannot be beaten by the rebels, are we prepared to supply their military deficiencies? And if the decapitation of his regime produces what the removal of Saddam Hussein did — bloody chaos — what then are our responsibilities regarding the tribal vendettas we may have unleashed? How long are we prepared to police the partitioning of Libya?

Explaining his decision to wage war, Obama said Gaddafi has “lost the confidence of his own people and the legitimacy to lead.” Such meretricious boilerplate seems designed to anesthetize thought. When did Gaddafi lose his people’s confidence? When did he have legitimacy? American doctrine — check the Declaration of Independence — is that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So there are always many illegitimate governments. When is it America’s duty to scrub away these blemishes on the planet? Is there a limiting principle of humanitarian interventionism? If so, would Obama take a stab at stating it?

Congress’s power to declare war resembles a muscle that has atrophied from long abstention from proper exercise. This power was last exercised on June 5, 1942 (against Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary), almost 69 years, and many wars, ago. It thus may seem quaint, and certainly is quixotic, for Indiana’s Richard Lugar — ranking Republican on, and former chairman of, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — to say, correctly, that Congress should debate and vote on this.

There are those who think that if the United Nations gives the United States permission to wage war, the Constitution becomes irrelevant. Let us find out who in Congress supports this proposition, which should be resoundingly refuted, particularly by Republicans currently insisting that government, and especially the executive, should be on a short constitutional leash. If all Republican presidential aspirants are supine in the face of unfettered presidential war-making and humanitarian interventionism, the Republican field is radically insufficient.

On Dec. 29, 1962, in Miami’s Orange Bowl, President John Kennedy, who ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion, addressed a rally of survivors and supporters of that exercise in regime change. Presented with the invasion brigade’s flag, Kennedy vowed, “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.” Eleven months later, on Nov. 2, 1963, his administration was complicit in another attempt at violent regime change — the coup against, and murder of, South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem. The Saigon regime was indeed changed, so perhaps this episode counts as a success, even if Saigon is now Ho Chi Minh City.

Andrew Breitbart - Courts an Instrument of Leftist Thuggery

by Audrey Hudson

Politicians and their supporters use interesting tactics to intimidate and silence their critics, from rumor-mongering to editorial cartoons, even dueling pistols.

But the target of a high-profile lawsuit who is also a relentless investigator of the Obama administration says the judicial system is being used to retaliate against him.

“The President of the United States has an unprecedented and uncanny desire to silence those who report the truth about him,” says media mogul Andrew Breitbart.

Breitbart first came under fire last year after posting a video on one of his websites of a speech given by an Agriculture Department employee during an NAACP conference. The speech, Breitbart said, elicited racist responses from the audience. The speaker, Shirley Sherrod, says she was then fired at the behest of the White House, but when she was offered her job back days later, she declined.

Rather than targeting the administration for its actions, or accepting its peace offer of what appeared to be a better job, Sherrod is suing Breitbart in the District of Columbia Superior Court for defamation of character and emotional distress.

Breitbart concedes that Obama is “noticeably absent” from the lawsuit, but says it is part of a pattern of isolation and intimidation that is being orchestrated by the Obama White House that threatens to marginalize media critics through the courts.

Exhibit A, he says, is the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis that is representing Sherrod.

“All you have to do is look at who Kirkland Ellis is and where their money went in the 2008 election cycle,” Breitbart said.

Through employee donations, Kirkland Ellis was a top 20 contributor to Obama’s presidential campaign, with nearly $494,000 in donations, according to Wikipedia.

“This is a man who wants to shut out and silence his enemies,” Breitbart told HUMAN EVENTS.

“The courts are a lovely place to take away the energy and resources of the President’s critics,” Breitbart said. “He thinks he can use the courts as a war of attrition against his political enemies.”

Exhibit B, Breitbart says, is how the Left used the apparatus of the mainstream media to target other enemies, such as author David Freddoso and commentator Stanley Kurtz.

Freddoso, who wrote The Case Against Barack Obama, a New York Times best seller, “was called a hack, and whatever else they could think of,” Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at Capital Research Center tells HUMAN EVENTS.

In an American Spectator article Vadum penned during the campaign season, he outlined an Obama campaign memo he obtained urging followers to stir up trouble for Freddoso.

"The author of the latest anti-Barack hit book is appearing on WGN Radio in the Chicagoland market tonight, and your help is urgently needed to make sure his baseless lies don't gain credibility," the memo said.

"David Freddoso has made a career off dishonest, extreme hate-mongering. And WGN apparently thinks this card-carrying member of the right-wing smear machine needs a bigger platform for his lies and smears about Barack Obamao—n the public airwaves."

Kurtz says he was also the target of “Alinskyite tactics” during a Chicago radio show appearance in 2008.

“The Obama campaign tried to shut me down when I went onto a radio station,” Kurtz told a Hudson Institute audience that same year. “About half an hour before I got there, they had been called by 7,000 people demanding that I not be allowed on the air. So they called the Obama folks and invited them to have someone come on to debate me. They refused, demanded that I not be allowed on the radio, and then they asked for the name of the head of the station so they could call and demand that I not be allowed in the radio. They did the same thing to David Freddoso. These are Alinskyite tactics, and Obama is using them in the campaign,” Kurtz said.

Vadum told HUMAN EVENTS that “leftist radicals don’t really like free speech unless it goes their way.” The courts, it appears, are their final option to shut down the opposition.

“When they don’t like what you stand for, they want the police to harass you or they take you to court. That’s not supposed to happen in a constitutional Republic like the United States,” Vadum said.

“This is thug politics straight out of Chicago,” Vadum said. “Al Capone would have been pleased.”

Exhibit C is the so-called Pigford settlement. Breitbart says it is the most controversial story he has ever uncovered.

What initially started out as Breitbart’s mission to defend the Tea Party against attacks of racism by the NAACP has now evolved into a mission to expose how federal payments to black farmers for racial discrimination in farm aid has been hijacked as a reparations movement.

“This is about politics, this is about my continued attempts to expose the rotten-to-the-core alliances of the alleged objectivity of the mainstream media and organized groups like the NAACP who have gone to war against the Tea Party for its attempts to bring fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control government,” Breitbart said.

“And I am being attacked because of my effectiveness in exposing how the President’s propaganda is being created. And I am being attacked because I have been a relentless force in reporting and propagating narratives that show that hope and change have been nothing more than organized thuggery and false propaganda,” Breitbart said.

Audrey Hudson is an award-winning investigative journalist who specializes in homeland security.

Soros fingerprints on Libya bombing

WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS

Leftist mastermind puts up big bucks to erase borders

By Aaron Klein
© 2011 WorldNetDaily

Philanthropist billionaire George Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the global organization that promotes the military doctrine used by the Obama administration to justify the recent airstrikes targeting the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.

The activist who founded and coined the name of the doctrine, "Responsibility to Protect," sits on several key organizations alongside Soros.

Also, the Soros-funded global group that promotes Responsibility to Protect is closely tied to Samantha Power, the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights.

Power has been a champion of the doctrine and is, herself, deeply tied to the doctrine's founder.

According to reports, Power was instrumental in convincing Obama to act against Libya.

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine has been described by its founders and proponents, including Soros, as promoting global governance while allowing the international community to penetrate a nation state's borders under certain conditions.

Libya regarded as test of global doctrine

The joint U.S. and international air strikes targeting Libya are widely regarded as a test of Responsibility to Protect – which is a set of principles, now backed by the United Nations, based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege, but a responsibility.

According to the principle, any state's sovereignty can be overrun, including with the use of military force, if the international community decides it must act to halt what it determines to be genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing.

The term "war crimes" has at times been indiscriminately used by various U.N.-backed international bodies, including the International Criminal Court, or ICC, which applied it to Israeli anti-terror operations in the Gaza Strip. There has been fear the ICC could be used to prosecute U.S. troops.

An organization calling itself the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect is the world's leading champion of the doctrine.

Activist Gareth Evans, who sits on the global group's advisory board, is widely regarded as the founder of the Responsibility to Protect principle.

Soros' Open Society Institute is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Government sponsors include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda and the U.K.

Board members of the group include former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Ireland President Mary Robinson and South African activist Desmond Tutu. Robinson and Tutu have recently made solidarity visits to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as members of a group called The Elders, which includes former President Jimmy Carter.

Annan once famously stated, "State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined – not least by the forces of globalization and international co-operation. States are ... instruments at the service of their peoples and not vice versa."

During his tenure as Australia's foreign minister, Evans served as co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which invented the term "responsibility to protect."

In his capacity as co-chair, Evans also played a pivotal role in initiating the fundamental shift from sovereignty as a right to "sovereignty as responsibility."

Evans presented Responsibility to Protect at the July 23, 2009, United Nations General Assembly, which was convened to consider the principle.

Soros: Right to 'penetrate nation-states' borders'

Soros himself outlined the fundamentals of Responsibility to Protect in a 2004 Foreign Policy magazine article entitled "The People's Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World's Most Vulnerable Populations."

In the article, Soros said "true sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments."

"If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified," Soros wrote. "By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states' borders to protect the rights of citizens.

"In particular, the principle of the people's sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states, and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict."

Evans sits on multiple boards with Soros, including the Clinton Global Initiative.

Soros is on the executive board of the International Crisis Group, a "crisis management organization" for which Evans serves as president-emeritus.

WND previously reported how the group has been petitioning for the U.S. to normalize ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition in Egypt, where longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak was recently toppled.

Aside from Evans and Soros, the group includes on its board Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, as well as other personalities who champion dialogue with Hamas, a violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

WND also reported the crisis group has also petitioned for the Algerian government to cease "excessive" military activities against al-Qaida-linked groups and to allow organizations seeking to create an Islamic state to participate in the Algerian government.

Soros' own Open Society Institute has funded opposition groups across the Middle East and North Africa, including organizations involved in the current chaos.

Power pushes doctrine

Doctrine founder Evans, meanwhile, is closely tied to Obama aide Samantha Power, who reportedly heavily influenced Obama in consultations leading to the U.S. president's decision to bomb Libya.

Evans and Power have been joint keynote speakers at events in which they have championed the Responsibility to Protect principle together, such as the 2008 Global Philanthropy Forum, also attended by Tutu.

In November, at the International Symposium on Preventing Genocide and Mass Atrocities, Power, attending as a representative of the White House, argued for the use of Responsibility to Protect alongside Evans.

With research by Brenda J. Elliott

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Glenn Beck warns: 'The perfect storm' is beginning

MEDIA MATTERS

'These are not enemies of man. These are enemies of God'

By Joe Kovacs
© 2011 WorldNetDaily

Media giant Glenn Beck is warning that a "perfect storm" of problems in America and the world has begun, and he's urging people to turn to God to deal with it.

"These problems, as you are beginning to see," Beck said on his radio program this morning, "we are experiencing now the perfect storm, the beginnings of the perfect storm that I outlined to you years ago and now you can see how when I was talking about it and everybody was saying 'Shut up! Who cares? It's not going to happen.'

"You're beginning to see it now and you can know why I was crying all the time. Because I saw this in advance. It doesn't take a genius to do it. You can see it if you would just open your mind."

Islamic Antichrist'? Why Glenn Beck raves about it

Beck, who often invokes God in his commentary, continued, "It is an overwhelming force and it is global in nature and it is evil in nature. You must be as good and as light as the evil is evil, bad and dark. These are not enemies of man. These are enemies of God, and He will sort things out. You must stand in righteousness."

"Here is the most dangerous thing I could say on the radio or on television," Beck said. "God is the only answer. There is no hope, there is no victory without a people that understand light, goodness and God."

Beck then issued a call for listeners to take a stand against any kind of evil in their personal lives.

"If you don't say something now, it's only going to get harder and harder and harder," he said. "You think it's gonna get easier to talk to your friends about God? You think it's gonna be easier to talk to your spouse about, 'Hey, let's clean up our lives'? You think it's gonna get easier to talk to your kids and tell them, 'Hey, knock it off' or 'You don't need all of that stuff?' It's not going to get easier. It's going to get harder because the world is going down in the other direction. You gotta stop now. You've got to turn your life around now."

Beck played audio at times from Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan, and made reference to an end-times Muslim leader known as "the Mahdi."

"This [the uprising in the Middle East] is a sign that the great Mahdi that the Muslim world has been looking for is present in the world," Farrakhan noted.

Beck remarked, ""If you look at the Mahdi / the 12th Imam, he really is the biblical antichrist."