<sarcasm>That bastion of liberalism</sarcasm>, The Wall Street Journal, has the article House Elects Paul Ryan as New Speaker.

The most ambitious plans in Mr. Ryan’s idea chest are based on a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy that inflames Democrats as much as it energizes Republicans. In closed-door meetings with House Republicans, Mr. Ryan has said he wants to overhaul the tax code, replace President Barack Obama’s health law, and rewrite federal poverty programs—and in the process draw a contrast with Democrats heading into the 2016 presidential election.

It is easy to figure out where he got some of his cockamamie ideas.

The Conversation has the article What should we make of Paul Ryan’s fondness for Ayn Rand?

Paul Ryan, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin who was just elected speaker of the US House of Representatives, has acknowledged his admiration for novelist Ayn Rand.

As an older teenager, I was taken in by reading Ayn Rand’s books, so I understand how easy it was to be duped by her.

What Ayn Rand didn’t say, and Paul Ryan doesn’t seem to understand, is something I learned as a sophomore in college. Some people just don’t have bootstraps.

I wonder if Paul Ryan would consider it worthwhile to have government supplied bootstraps for those who don’t have them. What Republicans and Paul Ryan refuse to get is that the Head Start program was meant to do exactly that, give culturally deprived (as they used to say) children their first pair of bootstraps.

It’s not that these children don’t already have enough intelligence to figure out how to make it and perhaps survive in the environment in which they find themselves. The problem is that they have no way of knowing about the existence of another environment and the possibility of getting to it. That knowledge is the very bootstraps that Paul Ryan thinks people ought to use to pull themselves up.

So this brings me to a recent example that might have some relation to boot-straps. The New York Daily News has the article Life is even harder now for the South Carolina teen assaulted by ex-Deputy Ben Fields — she’s in foster care.

In an interview with the Daily News, Todd Rutherford, the respected Columbia, S.C., attorney representing the assault victim of the recently terminated Deputy Ben Fields, revealed that his client, in addition to suffering injuries on her face, neck, and arm, is living in foster care.

The “adults” in the school may not have had the time or inclination to learn that this girl may be so traumatized by the experiences she has already had, that she doesn’t even know she should be looking for her bootstraps.

While her identity, no doubt, will eventually be leaked to the media, it’s the goal of her foster mother to protect and care for her as well as she can considering the circumstances, according to her lawyers. She communicated to us that the young victim is devastated and emotionally traumatized by all that has happened to her.

It looks like her foster mother is trying to give this girl what she has been missing in her life. The “adults” at the school just don’t seem to be willing to help. In a way, these “adults” may also be considered culturally deprived – of any sympathy let alone empathy.