I'll be on the road again tomorrow - Atlanta, in a SWEET 620i convertable.  But until then, a little outside reading.

WHO’S DUMB NOW? Palin Mocked in 2008 for Warning Putin Might Invade Ukraine if Obama Elected.

FLASHBACK TO 2012: Dan Abrams: “uh oh. New Romney gaffe. He just called Russia the ‘number one geopolitical foe’ of the United States. @wolfblitzer called him out.”

FNC Shows Flashback to Obama Ridiculing Romney: ‘1980s Are Calling to Ask for Their Foreign Policy Back’

FLASHBACK VIDEO: Chris Matthews mocks Mitt Romney for calling Russia #1 Geopolitical Threat.

OUCH: Hurts so bad that Palin was right and Obama-Media Industrial Complex wrong: For Politico and others, “sorry” seems to be the hardest word.

AND YET WITH ALL THE SPYING, THEY COULDN’T STOP THE TSARNAEVS AND THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE WAS A SURPRISE: ACLU Report On Metadata Details Law Enforcement Abuse, Shows There’s No Clear Cutoff Between Content And Data.

TOO BUSY SPYING ON TEA PARTIERS? Intelligence Failure: Why Didn’t The United States Catch On To The Ukraine Invasion Sooner?

INTELLIGENCE FAILURE: Ex- CIA Chief: Why We Keep Getting Putin Wrong. Note that Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney both seem to have figured him out, only to have been mocked by the press as old-fashioned cold warriors. Like, you know, Putin.

 COULDN’T HE MOVE HIS TEE TIME? Obama Skips National Security Meeting on Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

and a taste of our future?  INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Documents Show Ignoring Terror Threats A Pattern With The Clintons.

With the help of a media much more interested in fact-checking cancer patients who oppose The State than they ever were in vetting ObamaCare or Obama's years-long lie promising you can keep your health insurance, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took to the floor of the Senate Wednesday to declaratively claim "all" ObamaCare horror stories are untrue.

"Despite all that good news, there's plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they're being told all over America," said Reid.

"The leukemia patient whose insurance policy was canceled [and] could die without her medication, Mr. President, that's an ad being paid for by two billionaire brothers. It's absolutely false. Or the woman whose insurance policy went up $700 a month--ads paid for around America by the multibillionaire Koch brothers, and the ad is false.

"We heard about the evils of Obamacare, about the lives it's ruining in Republicans' stump speeches and in ads paid for by oil magnates, the Koch brothers.

When it comes to our media, it is a beautiful thing being a Democrat and especially Harry Reid, who can pretty much get away with making any outrageous claim he likes. During the 2012 presidential election, the media never made Reid pay a political price for spreading the false rumor that for years Romney paid no taxes. In fact, with all kinds of phony tut-tutting, the media helped Reid spread that slander.

Now Reid is  claiming that there are no legitimate ObamaCare horror stories; "all" of them are fabricated by the dreaded Koch brothers. You can bet that the American media will not vet Reid's latest outrageous lie with anywhere near the ferocity they do cancer patients who dare speak out against ObamaCare.

Thanks to the fine Twitter work of Townhall's Guy Benson, on top of the 4 to 6 million who had their policies canceled by ObamaCare, we have endless examples of ObamaCare horror stories: Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here.

More?

MSNBC Guest Fantasizes About Oil Execs In Hell; Host Doesn’t Push Back

 note hate, just ignorance: Democrat Party Claims Reagan Served in Congress on Official Twitter Account

'Rolling Stone' on '12 Years a Slave': First Time 'African-American' Won Best Picture Oscar

and racial bigotry: Rutgers Faculty Upset at Condoleezza Rice Invitation to Graduation —Will They Oppose Barack Obama's Too?

[T]he government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently entered a critical policy debate on the right side — directing the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to conduct audits of several radical environmental groups accused of conducting political activity in violation of their tax-exempt status.

Among the groups being audited? The David Suzuki Foundation, Ecology Action Centre, Environmental Defence, Equiterre, the Pembina Foundation, Tides Canada and West Coast Environmental Law.

The far left in Canada is apoplectic, but the real targets of this action are the radical American billionaires funneling money through faux Canadian front groups — hoping to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline by exploiting the country's Aboriginal population. ...

Liberal elitist foundations — Rockefeller, Pew, Ford, Heinz, etc. — have hidden for years behind a labyrinth of carved-out rules and special protections, unfair advantages enabling them to pump billions of dollars into a far left agenda while donors claimed untold amounts of tax deductions.

Meanwhile, an IRS bent on protecting Obama and vulnerable Democrats in advance of the 2012 elections has effectively silenced groups with the words "Constitution," "Tea Party" or "Liberty" in their titles. Does that sound like equal protection under the law? Of course not.

Canada has shown it has the courage to stand up to these wealthy eco-radicals. It must be the policy of the next U.S. administration to follow suit.

She's doing everything the Greens advocate!  Florida City Threatens Woman For Living Off the Grid

Because in the Gubmint, if there's no paperwork, it didn't happen: Department of Veterans Affairs employees destroyed veterans’ medical records to cancel backlogged exam requests.

More Donk War on Science: FLOTUS Calls ‘Let’s Move’ a Success as Doctors See No Progress in Obesity

Who came up with THIS program's name?  The Nuclear Option: President Launches ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ — But What About George Hussein Onyango Obama?

I've avoided, so far, using the phrase.  But I keep comingcloser.  My father-in-laws parents came to the US in 1939.  If you've been reading my posts for more than a month you know what that means and do NOT need it explained.  The phrase I've avoided?  "You DO realize, of course, that your parents came to the US to escape JUST that kind of thinking."

Came close late last month when I suggested that those who ran were as bad as those who supported.   Notphilosophically sure that's the case, but I posited the thought.  Those who ran, after allowing the thing to be set in motion, are at fault as well.  I'm labeled as a former slave owner because my family came to Ohio from a former slave owning state.  That was over 150 years ago.  My family did not participate in the activity - they were hard scrabble subsitance farmers about three hollars over from the Hatfields and McCoys.  So why can't Germans be held to the same standard?

It was with that from of mind that I read The War Against Truth.  It begins 

February 22nd was the 71st anniversary of the murder of Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friend Christopher Probst. They were young people, in their early twenties, who lived in Munich, Germany. They, along with other members of a peaceful, anti-war group known as White Rose, published leaflets informing fellow-Germans of the wrongs being engaged in by the Nazi regime. The three were caught with such leaflets, quickly tried for the crime of “high-treason” and immediately executed by guillotine.

At her trial, Sophie testified: “Somebody, after all, had to make a start.” Her final words were: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause.” When, in 2003, a nation-wide poll asked Germans to select the most important people in the history of Germany, Sophie and Hans Scholl finished in fourth place. They came out ahead of such men as Bach, Goethe, Gutenberg, Bismarck, Brandt, and Einstein!

Go read it.  Twice.

but I kinda think this is heading in the right direction:

“If corporations can’t have religious beliefs, then it follows that they can’t believe in climate change, sustainable investment or any other beliefs embraced by the corporate social responsibility movement.”

Hate?  We got that.

NYT suggests ‘deniers’ should be stabbed through the heart – like vampires

Inaccuricies?   We got that.  And this one makes the ol' farm boy in me proud!

Farmers’ Almanac More Reliable Than Warming Climate Models. 

HEY, MAYBE WE SHOULD ADOPT POLICIES TO GET MORE PEOPLE TO WORK: “There are five times as many workers in the top 20 percent than there are in the bottom 20 percent.”

LIVING IN THE HUNGER GAMES: Florida Democrat Alex Sink: Without Immigration Reform, Where Will We Get Our Landscapers and Maids?

from Angelo Codevilla

While our ruling class is too busy to read history, China’s Communist Party — heir to the world’ oldest tyrannical tradition — is assigning its cadres to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution — a not-to-be-forgotten account of how France’s monarchy alienated itself from its subjects and drove them first to turn their backs on the system and, then, to hoist it on pitchforks. Although the details of today’s China, America, or the European Union differ from those of France’s Old Regime, attentive readers of Tocqueville discern the main factors that accredit or discredit ruling classes. Let us see.

In short, human collectivities are neither more nor less than networks of mutual obligations. Subjects feel obliged to follow rules and rulers, largely to the extent that the rulers themselves follow rules. Aristotle’ Politics is the primer. Regardless of whether the rulers are many, few, or one, the great divide between regimes is whether obligation runs in one direction only, or in both. Regardless of the rulers’ number, they forfeit voluntary obedience to their regimes insofar as they pursue their interests regardless of the rules by which people live.

Tocqueville’s history of the Old Regime’s decadence details how it overturned centuries of popular customs, imposed countless administrative burdens on the people, changed them constantly, and enforced them erratically. All the while, the Old Regime maintained a class of haughty beneficiaries bereft of real responsibilities. The regime lost respect, and became an object of fear. In this pervasive, intrusive, oppressive, unpredictable government of men, ordinary people found no shelter in custom or common sense, never mind rules. They were reduced to abasing themselves to the administrators, or to bribing them.

Eighteenth century France’s substantial and increasing economic prosperity was not enough to save the regime. The hate and contempt that it had stored up for itself by disrupting the people’s customs and dividing society between arbitrary rulers and powerless subjects extinguished the regime.

Today’s Chinese tyrants know that their country’s unprecedented prosperity will not suffice to keep them in power. Historically literate, they know that Chinese imperial dynasties, tyrannical though their laws were, lasted by administering those laws in ways that had the color of reason and propriety. But they know also that their own dynasty, built as it is on dividing society on the basis of privileged access to power, cannot do that. So, they worry and look for an out.

Historically innocent, our ruling class neither reads nor worries. Rather, it congratulates itself on having erased the distinction between law and administration, and supposes itself to be the measure of right. Indeed, it is eager to further imitate its European counterparts in reducing constitutions, laws, and elections to theoretical status. Europeans long ago noted that their way of life is marred by what they call a “democratic deficit,” but were sure that they could manage this deficit indefinitely. Recent evidence of massive popular disaffection has begun to shake this assurance. None of this however has yet reached America’s rulers.

The sooner it does, the better. While no one can foretell the consequences of the growing deficit of mutual obligations in American public life, we can be certain that Americans, having been raised on the maxim that “all men are created equal,” are far less tolerant of arbitrary rule than Europeans or Chinese.