Vin Suprynowicz

Back in January, Austan Goolsbee of the White House Council of Economic Advisers started chanting for public consumption that if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling this May the “impact on the economy would be catastrophic,” due to the fact the government would have to stop borrowing money and might default.

On Jan. 6, Bloomberg Business Week reported the Treasury might be able to shuffle funds in order to stave off the crisis for as much as an extra three months — till August– but cited Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner also saying lawmakers must raise the federal debt limit in the first quarter of 2011 or “risk a default on U.S. debt and a loss of access to global credit markets.”

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Scores of people responded to my column last week, reporting they, too, were told they “had the wrong name” when they went to renew their Nevada drivers licenses.

Perhaps the most moving was that of an 83-year-old woman who moved here from Colorado to help her brother, who’s in a wheelchair and often can’t drive.

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I was born in April, many years ago, at Grace New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Conn. Or so I am told, on good authority. That explains why I got a little postcard from the Nevada DMV a few weeks ago, reminding me it’s been eight years since I last had my picture taken, that this time I had to go renew in person.

So I headed over to the North Decatur DMV on Wednesday morning. Filled out the form. Passed the eye test. Then the Filipina lady pointed out to me I’d left off the zip code from my residential address.

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Yes, turning a didactic book with complex political, economic, and ethical themes into a fast-moving story was a challenge. “Atlas Shrugged The Movie Part I” looks sometimes rushed, and the necessity to push a lot of Rand’s secondary characters to the rear behind the foreground Hank Rearden-Dagny Taggart romance in order to pick up the pace and the level of coherence sometimes makes you wonder why the background of this film seems to be populated with such a revolving door of spiteful dwarves, none having received nearly as much directorial attention as the principals.

But face it, in real life, most “mainstream movie critics” believe rich industrialists need to be punished and taxed to curb their “greed,” so they’re offended by this movie’s themes. Are they forthright enough to say so? I’m waiting for the first socialist professional movie critic (voted for Obama, believes we need to “raise taxes on the rich to make them pay their fair share”) to admit they hate the political and economic THEME of this movie and therefore can’t render objective advice.

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Ayn Rand attempted something so massive in “Atlas Shrugged” that, for 50 years, no one could figure out how to film it. And I don’t mean just that it’s a thousand-page book.

Growing up in late Czarist Russia, Rand saw how socialism could destroy not just an economy, but the moral framework of a nation. She fled to America, the greatest capitalist success story in the history of the world … and promptly saw the same seductive culture of looting taking root here, in Roosevelt’s cynical “New Deal.”

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As Republicans, and especially Democrats, put on a show of brinksmanship last Friday, pretending to go “down to the wire” in a face-off to determine whether the federal budget would be slashed, slashed to a Draconian degree (in fact, not even Republicans were any longer holding out for a 1 percent cut, while spending reductions of 10 percent or more would be required to start paring down the debt and freeing up capital for private-sector expansion) the airwaves were full of instructive rhetoric.

Representatives who believe there’s no dream of the mendicant class that government is not required to service with ever greater fervor — primarily congresswomen from welfare-heavy urban districts, though even our own Sen. Harry Reid got into the act — brayed that even the minor nail-trimming now proposed would “kill women,” would “throw women and children under the bus,” was part of a long-term Republican “war on women,” etc. (Actual quotes.)

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Introduced by Republican Congressman Fred Upton of Michigan, a bill that would prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from placing limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and oil refineries passed the House of Representatives 255-172 on Thursday. Nineteen House Democrats joined in support.

The EPA is preparing to set limits on emissions of carbon dioxide from large sources, such as coal-fired power plants, under the Clean Air Act. The move is prompted by a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that held increasing carbon dioxide emissions from human activity is causing climate change and that, under terms of the Act, the EPA must thus regulate those emissions.

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What would people in Washington City be doing right now, if they were really preparing for the federal government to be “shut down” thanks to the refusal of Democrats to trim spending by even 1.5 percent — the pathetically inadequate goal held out by the supposed “radical, Tea-Party” GOP?

(And if you want to hear some wailing, just Google “proposed federal budget cuts 2011.” There, Online, you’ll learn “Proposed federal budget cuts could have ‘drastic’ impact on poor!”; “Proposed federal budget cuts threaten U.S. food supply!”; “Proposed Federal Budget Cuts Would Be Devastating to Public Health!” etc. How on earth did our grandparents ever survive?)

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The president went on TV Monday evening and explained to the American people why we had to bomb Libya to keep Mohamyar Quadaffy (editor: check this week’s AP spelling style, please) from using military force against his own people, the same way Libya bombed the hell out of Texas in the spring of 1983 to keep Janet Reno from using National Guard helicopters to strafe those civilian Branch Davidian Christians in their church near Waco. …

No, no, that’s not right. Where are my notes? Our fearless war leader, Barack Hussein Obama (editor: check for this week’s Political Correctness guidelines on use of the middle name, please) went on TV Monday evening and explained why we had to bomb the bejesus out of Libya to keep Myanmar Goathaffy from using military force against his own people, the same way the Pasha of Tripoli had to send his fleet of slave galleys up the Mississippi in 1863 to destroy the gunboats of Ulysses S. Grant, to keep said defrocked Ohio storekeeper from shelling his own civilian populace in Vickburg with military artillery for attempting to escape the rule of the tyrant Lincoln, who had already jailed newspaper editors (in the North!) and killed thousands of their countrymen. …

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So widespread is the outrage over the absurd federal ban of Americans’ familiar incandescent light bulbs, closing domestic factories and throwing Americans out of work while requiring consumers to buy less popular and more expensive Chinese-made bulbs full of toxic mercury vapor, that individual states are starting to act in defiance of the federal power grab.

Leading the way as they did in 1861, South Carolina lawmakers now propose an “Incandescent Light Bulb Freedom Act.”

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