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You know just how crazy Ann Coulter's worldview is getting when Bill O'Reilly serves as an honest-to-God voice of sanity in dealing with her proposals for how to reform health care, as she laid them out on The O'Reilly Factor on Thursday.

Coulter, who's evidently just wrapped up another genuflecting session before the altar of Ayn Rand, thinks the whole problem could be solved just by doing away with state regulations and "opening up competition," at which point "every problem would go away":

O'Reilly: But every problem wouldn't go away. The one thing that I would like to see the federal government do is strict oversight on the insurance companies when they hose people. I mean, I don't think they should be throwing you, Ann Coulter, off the rolls if, God forbid, you get MS or something.

Coulter: That will not happen. But Bill, that will not happen under competition. Look -- [Crosstalk] -- no, no, let me make this point. No it will not. The government was regulating, the SEC was closely watching Bernie Madoff. Government regulation doesn't stop that sort of thing. What stops it is, people knowing you're investing with this guy at your own risk, and then all these private organization develop. Competition is what enforces that.

O'Reilly: Yeah, well, I don't believe that. I think competition can drive the prices down, but it cannot make an insurance company honest. Only a federal oversight committee that says if you don't do it, we fine you.

Coulter: Yes it can. Yes it can. Otherwise, what about the SEC with Bernie Madoff?

O'Reilly: No, Bernie Madoff got away with it because the SEC, under a Republican, Christopher Cox, simply wouldn't investigate him. That's why he got away with it.

Coulter: That's the government regulation! Why do you keep thinking a different regulator will be better? Government regulation does not solve these problems, competition does.

Because if I belonged to a health-insurance company that threw me off when I got sick, people would hear about it. There would be magazine articles. And I don't mean to be me, I mean people --

She's really been drinking the Randian capitalist kool-aid, hasn't she? Hell, people get thrown off their insurance when they get sick all the freaking time and there sure as hell aren't magazine articles about it.

But the Madoff analogy really takes the cake. O'Reilly, as we noted, is sensible about this: The SEC failed in its regulatory capacity precisely because it was under the guidance of a Republican who didn't believe in regulatory oversight!

Coulter subscribes to a philosophy which argues that less government regulation makes for better competition which in turn enforces honesty and ethical behavior. But when in fact it's demonstrated that such governance produces outrageously (not to mention criminally) dishonest behavior, she blames not the practitioners who gutted that oversight for its then-predictable failures, but rather the entire concept of oversight itself.

It's a classic tautology: Let's gut government oversight so that when it fails, we can blame it, thereby creating an excuse to do away with it altogether.

It's also, of course, the kind of completely insane thinking that has dominated movement conservatism in recent years. And a large part of the reason we have Bernie Madoffs and AIGs in the first damned place.

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Beggars Can Be Choosers: GOP Politicians are okay with tax-funded health care - but only for themselves.

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SteveAudio: R.I.P. Bob Bogle.

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily e-mail tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com. Thanks!

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Stephen Colbert brings our attention to the latest manifestation in conservatives' ongoing embarrassing-fanboy thing about Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged -- the revolutionary notion of "going Galt":

Colbert: So, what happens is, all the successful people go on a strike. Now, the mastermind [screen script: "Hell no, we won't CEO!"] -- the mastermind behind the strike is John Galt, who bravely spends the last 60 pages of the book praising selfishness. He is a hero who tells the poor, quote, "You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you." Nation, this book is like the conservative Bible!

Now, Ayn Rand has some pretty powerful fans, including Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, and the author of The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey. And conservatives are using Atlas Shrugged to spur a movement:

[Michelle Malkin, to Neil Cavuto:] Going Galt -- and this of course is a reference to the famous Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged, where the protagonist, John Galt, called a general strike among the wealth producers in society --

Colbert: Well said, Attractive Humanoid Lifeform. Yes! Going Galt: Rich people scaling back their productivity so that the lower-downs can't get their grubby fingers on our stuff! There's even a website: GoingJohnGalt.org. Its creator is calling for "a calculated work slowdown."

It takes a brave man to call for a work slowdown. Particularly when his site prominently features an announcement that he's looking for work.

Colbert, perhaps in a better position, tries "going Galt." It works for about four seconds.

What'll be really funny is watching these Galt-goers come scrambling back from their U.S. of A-holes when the economy gets rumbling again. I plan to welcome them back by laughing in their faces.

Though by then, of course, they'll have moved on to fresh new phony right-wing issues to get all worked up about. And they'll still believe Ayn Rand had something important to say.

I will give Atlas Shrugged one bit of credit: It was maybe the first widely published work of true, unadulterated wankery.

I don't think that's his navel he's gazing at there.

TBogg has more.

Sometimes right-wingers' astonishing dearth of self-awareness is a real source of amusement. Take Stephen Moore's encomium to Ayn Rand in the Wall Street Journal:

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read "Atlas Shrugged" a "virgin." Being conversant in Ayn Rand's classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only "Atlas" were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

At first I had to check to make sure this wasn't a lame attempt at satire or parody. But no. He really is serious about this.

Moore's solution? Eliminate the income tax.

Seriously, that's what a typical Randian thinks would work.

But what's especially amusing is that the economic wreckage we see before us today is in fact the handiwork of the Randian dimwits who've become endemic to conservative economics.

Exhibit A: Longtime Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was a Big Randian from back in the day.

Of course, Greenspan now admits this approach may not have worked out so well. Especially the bit about letting the true economic geniuses/captains of industry have their unfettered way. In fact, it all turned out to be a big fat fraud, didn't it?

Greenspan wasn't alone, of course. George W. Bush's entire approach to governance, especially in the economic sector, was fundamentally Randian: Bush never met a tax cut for the wealthy or deregulation scheme he didn't chase like a fox after a chicken. Even the Democrats who succumbed to the "era of profound irresponsibility" did so because they were harkening to the siren song of the right-wing Randians.

Watching Randians at work trying to convince themselves of their essential rightness in the face of the global wreckage pile of evidence to the contrary would be funny were the consequences of their historical muckup not so devastating and so far-reaching for so many of the ordinary schlubs for whom the Randians have at best a guarded contempt. It all reminds me of a bit of wisdom my granddaddy passed along to me: "Watch out for ideologues. Ideas are more important to them than people."

Yaron Brook, from the Ayn Rand Institute was on The O'Reilly Factor Friday night and was so over the top that he even scared the bejesus out of Bill O'Reilly!

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Brook: I would like to see the United States turn Fallujah into dust [isn't it already?] ...if you are going to support the insurgents, you will not have schools, you will not have Mosques....

Bill: But then we would be Nazis...

Brook also defended the use of the Atom bomb on Japan:

Brook: We did not create more enemies we created more friends....We brought the Japanese people to their knees and it is the only way you can establish a democracy in a culture which is so opposed to freedom, is bring their culture to its knees.

As lunatic as some of the extremists are, Brook surpassed them all by implying that we should drop the bomb on civilians and level all of Iraq in the name of freedom. He made Ann Coulter's venom seem like raspberry Kool Aid. He reduced a usual Hannity vitriolic tirade into an annoying elevator music serenade. Now that's quite an achievement!