Ayn Rand’s libertarian “Groundhog Day”: Billionaire greed, deregulation and the myth that markets aren’t free enough, Thomas Frank, Salon, August 3, 2014

This summer will mark 13 years since the series of disclosures that led to the sudden bankruptcy of the Enron Corp. of Houston. The collapse of the gas-and-power leviathan, then one of the largest companies in the nation, was the starting gun for the modern age of neoliberal scandal, the corporate crime that set the pattern. It was not the first episode to feature grotesque bonuses for insiders, or a fawning press, or bought politicians, or average people being fleeced by scheming predators. But it was the first in recent memory to bring together all those elements in one glorious fireball of fraud.

This is the next Hobby Lobby, Irin Carmon, MSNBC, July 30, 2014

The Obama administration has a plan in place to cover women like Miller, who want access to effective but expensive forms of contraception like the IUD but who are insured through institutions that oppose it. The so-called “accommodation” allows religiously-affiliated nonprofits like Notre Dame to sign a form certifying their objection, after which the insurer will directly cover the cost of the contraception.

But in what promises to be the next big birth control fight after Hobby Lobby, that accommodation hasn’t satisfied Notre Dame – or over 100 other nonprofit institutions suing the administration. They claim that signing the opt-out form also violates their religious liberty, because eventually, contraception is dispensed.

New Curriculum Endorses Teaching Historical Facts – Horrify Conservatives, Hrafnkell Haraldsson, PoliticusUSA, August 4, 2014

This is the sort of thing conservatives hate. Taking the white hat away from the European Christians and handing out gray caps all around. Bartonian history can never be nuanced. There can be no shades of gray. History, for conservatives, is a struggle between good and evil, between their god’s will and those who oppose it.

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The thing about history is that the past informs the present. All we see and do and experience derives from the past. If the past is therefore going to be talked about, so that we can better understand our present, it only makes sense that we talk about it truthfully, warts and all.

But conservatives no more want to understand the past than they do participate in our shared reality. They prefer a fantasy America, built up around their ideology, to which the record of the past must be bent in subjugation, much like those blacks, Indians, women, and religious minorities they still despise.