This guy’s passion is what draws people to him.

- Education is key, and not just for our children. To that end, we will be conducting a series of conventions. These will be full-day experiences where you will be immersed in learning about topics ranging from self-reliance, community organizing, the economy and how to be a political force in your own neighborhood and country. The first one will be in Orlando at UCF Arena on March 27th…
- All of the above will culminate in The Plan, a book that will provide specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in this Refounding.

- On August 28, 2010, I ask you, your family and neighbors to join me at the feet of Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall for the unveiling of The Plan and the birthday of a new national movement to restore our great country.

I haven’t heard the plan, so I can’t comment on whether it will work or if it’s a Glenn Beck daydream, but taking action to fill this vacuum is commendable. I’m looking forward to hearing the details.

Update: Responding to some feedback…some capitalists don’t think it is cohesive to build a movement and try to sell a book in the same move. Would it help if Beck stated a certain portion of the proceeds would go towards promoting the movement?

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Meet Lavelle Stewart.

Hat tip: Hot Air

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Going Rogue is going gangbusters, and it looks like both Palin and her publisher, HarperCollins, are going to make some serious money off of it. According to industry insiders, Palin got a $7 million advance for her book. She’s earning a royalty rate of 15 percent, which means she makes $4.35 per book sold, and therefore needs to sell 1.6 million books to earn out her advance. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that HarperCollins had printed another 100,000 copies of Going Rogue, bringing the total in print to 1.6 million. Palin would need to sell all of those to earn out her advance, so it’s unlikely that’s going to happen.

But HarperCollins will be making money long before that. There’s a rule of thumb in the industry that publishers net about $10 per hardcover sold, after expenses, but before the cost of the advance. Once she’s sold 700,000 copies, then, HarperCollins is in the black. And what of that 1.6 million printed? An ideal “sell-through” rate is about 75 percent, which means HarperCollins thinks it’s going to sell about 1.2 million copies. At that level, Palin will have made $7 million and HarperCollins $5 million of its own.

A HarperCollins insider told The Daily Beast that the book sold a staggering 300,000 copies on the first day alone, which was Tuesday. “Sales are phenomenal, and we are convinced that the book will continue to sell phenomenally for some time to come,” says the insider. They’re not prevaricating: As of 2:30pm today, the book was #1 on Amazon, ahead of both Stephen King’s new novel, Under the Dome, and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. The latter sold 1 million copies on its first day, but that figure included the UK, and top fiction generally trumps non-fiction. Any way you carve it, Going Rogue looks to be a $12 million goldmine.

On top of that, her favorables are rising.

As Sarah Palin blankets the media on a whirlwind book promotion tour, the former vice-presidential contender is clearly back on America’s radar screen. Despite being characterized by many as a divisive force in her party and the nation, Americans are much more likely to give Palin a positive rating (47 percent favorable) than another prominent female leader — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (28 percent favorable). Moreover, about six in 10 Americans (61 percent) think Palin has been treated unfairly by the press, according to the latest Fox News poll.

Something tells me that the longer Democrats are in power, the more likeable Sarah Palin is going to be to Americans. Love her or hate her (and I love her), you cannot deny that she is on fire right now. 1500 people waited in the freezing cold to meet her. There’s even polling showing that, if the 2012 presidential race were held today, and Palin was running against Obama, they’d basically be in a dead heat among independents, the most important block of voters later. The mainstream media may try to demean and diminish her, but her star is clearly rising. And unless Obama suddenly turns into some kind of fiscal hawk overnight (not likely), she’s just going to keep looking better and better.

2012 is looking like a better and better year.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

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Byam Elementary School apparently has a gift shop they arrange every year during the holiday season. But in the interest of political correctness, religion must of course be promptly removed — we wouldn’t want to anger the atheists, after all — and Christmas is the holiday that’s most in the crosshairs.

After meeting with members of the Byam Elementary School PTO, two mothers asking to put the holidays back into the school’s annual holiday gift shop say Byam isn’t budging.

Kathryn McMillan and Kathleen Cullen, who both have children at Byam, asked school officials to allow all holiday items at the gift shop following a ban on Santa, candy canes, stockings, and all Christmas, Hanukkah and other “religious items.”

But a meeting with some PTO parents on Thursday night grew heated as emotions got in the way.

Red and green tissue paper to wrap presents was also crossed off the list because it looked too “Christmasy,” McMillan said.

“One of the parents said, ‘If we allow Santa, what do we say if a child brings in a swastika? Do we allow that too?’ ” McMillan said. “All I could think of was, are you kidding? You’re comparing a Christmas ornament to a swastika? It seems as if reason is lost somewhere and I just hope we can find it again.”

Superintendent Donald Yeoman told The Sun on Tuesday that the rules for the gift shop are under the authority of Byam Principal Jane Gilmore. Ultimately, said Yeoman, the policy for the gift shop was set so no child would feel left out.

“It’s operated under those same rules for a number of years with success and without complaint,” Yeoman said.

Until now.

Gilmore did not return a reporter’s phone call yesterday.

McMillan and Cullen have asked that if the children can’t celebrate their traditions – whatever they may be – at the holiday gift shop, then maybe the school should move the gift shop to another time of year.

Not all Chelmsford schools have adopted the same policy as Byam. The South Row Elementary School, and the former Westlands Elementary that closed last year, had no restrictions on gift-giving.

“It makes sense that the school probably makes the most money by holding the gift shop over the holidays,” McMillan added. “So all we’re asking is that if you’re letting kids buy gifts for the holidays, let them donate stuff that celebrates those traditions and use it as a teachable moment so these kids can learn.”

McMillan and Cullen will appear before the School Committee on Tuesday, Nov. 24.

It seems like these parents are the only ones who possess any reason whatsoever. But, as always, there is the one parent who gets OFFENDED!! for their children’s sake, and must ban Christmas, Santa, Christianity, and anything that might even resemble it. But going so far as to link Santa Claus to Nazi swastikas is taking it further than I think I’ve seen before. I mean, really, let’s see… we have Santa Claus, a saint who has grown into a myth, a man who believes in kindness and giving. And then there’s Nazis, who were responsible for the torture, starvation, slavery, and murders of over six million people. How does one’s mind link Santa Claus and Nazis? When someone mentions Christmas or Santa, how screwed up do you have to be to automatically think that letting a kid celebrate that in school means that you’re opening the door to celebrating Nazis? I mean, that’s one hell of a leap there. On top of that, the rules seem more than a little outrageous. You can’t even have red or green wrapping paper because it just might remind someone of Christmas? Good Lord, this takes worshipping at the altar of political correctness to a whole new level.

And for what it’s worth, I think the suggestion of McMillan and Cullen seem perfectly sound to me. If they won’t let children celebrate their respective holidays at the gift shop — Christmas, Hanukkah — then why not just move the gift shop to a different time of year and avoid the whole issue? Instead, the school has seemingly gone out of their way to deliberately snub religion. It’s simple, though. The school wants to capitalize on the holiday season without having to actually deal with those pesky holidays, and they know that having the gift shop in the middle of, say, September just wouldn’t be as profitable. I don’t begrudge them wanting to make money, but it seems hypocritical to want to make money off of the holiday season — and also by taking advantage of the festive, giving holiday spirit of parents — while being completely unwilling to include the holidays they’re capitalizing on.

And while surely if enough parents complain enough, the school will change the rules, it’s disturbing enough that this would even happen. This was a country built on faith-based principles, after all — and now, we have more and more schools trying to keep faith out of the public eye in any way, shape, or form.

Jane Gilmore, the religion hating principal of Byam Elementary School.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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The EPA has told two longtime agency veterans and outspoken critics of the administration’s cap-and-trade plan to remove any references to the agency in their critiques and to get approval for any future “outside writing projects.” That includes removing their critical video from You Tube.

Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, a married couple and EPA lawyers in San Francisco, have been railing against cap-and-trade proposals for a while. Most recently, they had a sharply-worded op-ed in the Washington Post that said current legislation would be ineffective and even counterproductive.

The couple stressed that the views they expressed were their own — not the agency’s. But they also stressed that their years of experience with the EPA, and specifically working on other cap-and-trade programs, informed their views.

Compliments of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the video our ecofascist rulers have tried to suppress can be seen here.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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BEIJING – President Barack Obama prodded China about Internet censorship and free speech, but the message was not widely heard in China where his words were blocked online and shown on only one regional television channel.

Irony? Serendipity? Coincidence? Or just plain pwned?

“I’m a big supporter of non-censorship,” Obama said. “I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.”

Hmm, we’ll see how that non-censoring thing will work out as Democrats put together plans to take down Conservative talk radio. Oh, and then there was that little spat with Fox News, initiated by the White House.

Obama may have been hoping to set a personal example for China’s leaders when he said he believes that free discussion, including criticism that may be annoying to him, makes him “a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

Spat. Fox News. Fight with Limbaugh. Fight with Hannity. Joe the Plumber. Kevin Miller. Barbara West. Hiring Cass Sunstein, a man who is all about censoring the Internet.

Look, I applaud Obama’s cajones in answering the question in that manner as he stands on Chinese soil. Kudos to him, in all seriousness. But, considering his own opinions and actions here in the US, he really does not have the moral authority to lecture the Chinese.

Just for reference, Pirate’s Cove is banned in China, along with my test site. Not sure about Stop The ACLU or Right Wing News, since the site designed to tell you if your site is blocked has been taken down. Unsurprisingly, The Huffington Post is now unblocked in China, though, the Huff Post’s opinions are farther left then the Chinese governments. But, they have blocked I Can Has Cheeseburger! That’s just mean. See here and here for lists of some who have been blocked.

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The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.

Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

“If the city requires this, we can’t do it,” Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. “The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that’s really a problem.”

Several D.C. Council members said the Catholic Church is trying to erode the city’s long-standing laws protecting gay men and lesbians from discrimination.

The clash escalates the dispute over the same-sex marriage proposal between the council and the archdiocese, which has generally stayed out of city politics.

Catholic Charities, the church’s social services arm, is one of dozens of nonprofit organizations that partner with the District. It serves 68,000 people in the city, including the one-third of Washington’s homeless people who go to city-owned shelters managed by the church. City leaders said the church is not the dominant provider of any particular social service, but the church pointed out that it supplements funding for city programs with $10 million from its own coffers.

“All of those services will be adversely impacted if the exemption language remains so narrow,” Jane G. Belford, chancellor of the Washington Archdiocese, wrote to the council this week.

The church’s influence seems limited. In separate interviews Wednesday, council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) referred to the church as “somewhat childish.” Another council member, David A. Catania (I-At Large), said he would rather end the city’s relationship with the church than give in to its demands.

“They don’t represent, in my mind, an indispensable component of our social services infrastructure,” said Catania, the sponsor of the same-sex marriage bill and the chairman of the Health Committee.

The standoff appears to be among the harshest between a government and a faith-based group over the rights of same-sex couples. Advocates for same-sex couples said they could not immediately think of other places where a same-sex marriage law had set off a break with a major faith-based provider of social services.

The council is expected to pass the same-sex marriage bill next month, but the measure continues to face strong opposition from a number of groups that are pushing for a referendum on the issue.

The archdiocese’s statement follows a vote Tuesday by the council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary to reject an amendment that would have allowed individuals, based on their religious beliefs, to decline to provide services for same-sex weddings.

How pathetic. D.C.’s stance is basically that the Catholic Church should abandon its principles if it wants to keep working with the city, because this is going to pass whether they like it or not, and they have to make this awful choice — but they, of course, are the bad guys. This is, of course, the liberal meme, because anyone who is against gay marriage is prejudiced and backward and wrong and might as well be the KKK. Check out this explanation from Feministing:

The closing of a major homeless shelter and budget cuts have worsened the situation in a city already struggling to serve its poor and homeless residents. As someone who organizes for access to abortion I have obvious problems with gaps in the services provided by Catholic Charities. But that does not discount the vital work they do for the 68,000 D.C. residents who rely on Catholic Charities for shelters, health care, and food programs.

The Archdiosese is making a clear statement: it considers keeping rights from same sex couples more important than the needs of this city’s most vulnerable. Their willingness to use the lives and health of 68,000 people in need as pawns in their fight for the right to discriminate is unconscionable. D.C. needs more social services, not less. I hope the Archdiosese can put aside the politics of hate for a moment to recognize what I would think they would consider a moral obligation to do vital life saving work.

With all due respect, this isn’t a choice the church can fairly make. They didn’t ask for this bill, and their input was completely ignored when it came to amendments in the bill. The passage of this bill puts Catholic Charities in the worst kind of situation. For the Catholic Church, this isn’t a political situation, which is what liberals want to make it into. For the Catholic Church, this is a religious issue, it’s a moral one. The church cannot just abandon its principles, and that’s what liberals are forcing the church to do. And if the church caves on this, it won’t stop here. Liberals will start putting the pressure on about abortion, and performing gay marriages, and who knows what else. Where will it stop? It’s disgusting that liberals are putting the blame on the church here, when they are the ones being forced between a rock and a hard place. The church is not the one using homeless people as pawns; the city is. And it is wrong for the government to be legislating religious beliefs, which is basically what has happened here. This is, at its core, a subtle attack on our rights to religious freedom. And apparently, there is no one who is going to stand up for religion in this case.

If this is the change you voted for, then I hope you’re happy.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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Obama’s purple shirted SEIU cronies are his favorite people. They’re his most frequent visitors, after all, and they stand ready and willing to do whatever Comrade Obama asks of them. If you want to know what direction this country is headed in, just look at the shenanigans the Service Employees International Union thugs are pulling.

For example, Obama is supposedly all about volunteering. He wants young people to be willing to devote their lives to service. He likes that idea so much, that he even floated the idea of instituting a Hitler youth brigade, and for all I know, is still keen on the idea. But Obama and his SEIU pals are only fans of volunteer service performed by young people if they toe the Obama line. Boy Scouts, for example, are far too traditional and they cling to such old, antiquated, conservative values — and therefore, they must be destroyed.

Starting with a seventeen-year-old boy who was doing volunteer work to try to earn his Eagle Scout badge.

In pursuit of an Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, 17, has toiled for more than 200 hours over several weeks to clear a walking path in an east Allentown park.

Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city’s largest municipal union.

Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.

“We’ll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails,” Balzano told the council.

Balzano said Saturday he isn’t targeting Boy Scouts. But given the city’s decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said “there’s to be no volunteers.” No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.

“We would hope that the well-intentioned efforts of an Eagle Scout candidate would not be challenged by the union,” said Mayor Ed Pawlowski in an e-mail Friday. “This young man is performing a great service to the community. His efforts should be recognized as such.”

Balzano said Saturday the union is still looking into the matter and might cut the city a break.

“We are probably going to let this one go,” Balzano said .

The possible entanglement of a local Boy Scout in a union dispute underscores the frustration and anger SEIU members feel after being the lone city union to suffer layoffs in the ongoing financial crisis. It may also serve as a preview of future labor battles as the city tries to outsource some necessary jobs as a result of the layoffs.

Anderson, a junior and varsity soccer player at Southern Lehigh High School, is a member of Boy Scout Troop 301 of Center Valley.

He got the idea for the trail while taking hikes along the partially complete, 165-mile Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor. He noticed there were a few missing connections to the trail in Kimmets Lock Park, which is on the Lehigh River near Dauphin Street. He already has logged 250 hours trying to carve out a walking and biking trail along the river.

“I decided to do my part in completing this part of the trail. In that way, others could enjoy walking along the river, without having to walk on the busy road,” Anderson said in an e-mail Friday.

Selfless service? Apparently, this poses some kind of imaginary threat to SEIU workers. And if Balzano isn’t targeting the Boy Scouts, then what is he targeting? People who just do things for the sake of others without asking anything in return? This is typical of liberals to attack the Boy Scouts and a teenage boy trying to do a good thing. And what comes next? Will SEIU members be the only people allowed to mow our lawns? Paint our walls? And then of course, if we do it ourselves rather than letting Obama’s crony pals do it, will Balzano threaten to come after us, too?

Balzano said that he would let this one go — because of the holiday spirit. It’s more likely that he let it go because of all the bad PR he’s getting. It’s sad, though, when you think about it. What would’ve happened if he hadn’t been threatened by bad press filled with the holiday spirit? We all know the answer — he happily would have persecuted a seventeen-year-old kid who was just trying to do a good thing, and Obama would just look the other way. And if we don’t stand up to their thuggery, then our capital could remain looking like this.

Hat Tips: Moonbattery and Michelle Malkin

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

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If President Obama happened to glance at “The Rachel Maddow Show” last Monday, he might have winced.

And Maddow would have been thrilled, since she is barely averaging in a week what Bill O’Reilly gets per night

Ms. Maddow pretended to celebrate the passage of a health care overhaul bill in the House, calling it “potentially a huge generational win for the Democratic Party” — but then halted the triumphant music and called it an “electoral defeat.”

The Stupak amendment, she said, was “the biggest restriction on abortion rights in a generation.” Then she wondered aloud about the consequences for Democrats “if they don’t get women or anybody who’s pro-choice to ever vote for them again.” She returned to the subject the next four evenings in a row.

This is how it looks to have a television network pressuring President Obama from the left.

This is what it looks like to have people who believe that federal funds should be used to pay for abortions, rather then practicing personal responsibility. Disgusting thought: Keith Olbermann and Rachael. Shiver!

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

Shocker! The hosts are far left Progressives. Now the funny part

MSNBC’s liberal points of view have made the channel an occasional thorn in the side of G.E., but the channel has also fostered a diversity of opinions that people like Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, say were lacking in the past.

Ms. Maddow, not surprisingly, agrees. “What looks like the middle of the country ought to look like the middle on TV,” she said in an interview this month.

MSNBC’s view of diversity, and the “middle of the country,” means they have liberals and progressives on! Reminds me of that line from The Blues Brothers: “what kind of music do you have here, Ma’am?” “Oh, we have both types. Country AND Western!”

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This is the final installment [of] my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Click for parts one and two)

After a break for lunch, Mark C. Henrie took up America’s Britishness. Henrie wrote the ISI’s A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum that explains the value of a traditional core of studies in Western civilization and his session reflected that study.

Capitalizing on Birzer’s citation of Edmund Burke who praised the colonist’s essential Britishness, Henrie made the point that America is best understood not as a break from tradition but as the culmination of a long series of continuous ideals that range back through Western history, specifically through England.

Henrie says that we get four essentials from England.

1. The English language and literature
2. The common law and a respect for the rule of law
3. A desire for self government
4. Manners and a social order

One of the questions that researchers have often wondered is why American English and British English are essentially the same? Why didn’t America reinvent English for its own purposes in the same way the Dutch altered German, for instance? Henrie says that the reason is that the focal point of language in the colonies was contained in the King James Bible and that pervasive reliance on a single source of language arrested any development of a widely diverging American version of English. We Americans inherited the English language through the Bible.

Next Henrie talked of our ideals of law. As an example of the American focus on the law, Henrie notes that Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Common Law was more popular per capita in the colonies than it was in England. He also said that it was likely that the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” came from Blackstone.

Our ideals of self-government are also a British idea. Accordingly, Officials in Parliament were initially elected from their own local areas and sent to Parliament to represent the nation just as we continued to do in Congress.

In the Q and A afterwards, though, I noted that one of the reasons that the Crown couldn’t understand our point of view on representation in Parliament was because we took our representation a tad farther than the British did.

In England, once elected to Parliament it was expected that those that took their seat were to stop worrying about representing their home turf and consider themselves as representatives of the whole of Britain. On the other hand, since we in America were so geographically isolated and since we did not initially have here a national body in which to sit, we had a higher expectation that our local representatives would go into colonial government to represent the views of those that elected them. In many cases, Americans bound their representatives to the voters and allowed them little room for maneuver while members of the House of Commons in Britain had no expectation at all that their constituents back home would control their efforts in Parliament in any way.

So, when Americans expected to have an actual seat at the table in Parliament where our own officials might sit to represent us, British officials deemed such a thing unnecessary because all of Parliament sat in virtual representation of the whole of the Empire. The Crown simply saw no reason for Americans to sit in Parliament but this was an abrogation of their right to self-government as far as the colonists were concerned.

As an outgrowth of this expectation of self-rule all the way down to the local community, federalism was born and this was an entirely new idea.

Finally, as Burke noted, America was bequeathed a particularly British sense of manners, comportment, and a social order that also saw us more like the British than unlike them. The Britishness that undergirded our entire culture in all parts of the colonies was strong enough to stave off the various other European influences (French, German, Spanish, what have you) and maintain our status as the true heirs to British sensibilities.

Once again we see that we are beholden to our traditions.

Finally we heard from E. Christian Kopff on The Philadelphia Miracle.

Reflecting the religious theme of the day’s events, Kopff recalls how nearly every founder termed our founding as a miracle born of divine intervention and that our efforts were not just efforts for us but for all mankind.

But he noted that Machiavelli said that every nation must be forced back to its first principles at some time or lose itself and that we are today at such a crossroads.

Here I think another Machiavelli quote is pertinent to the discussion:

Princes and republics who wish to maintain themselves free from corruption must above all things preserve the purity of all religions observances, and treat them with proper reverence; for there is no greater indication of the ruin of a country than to see religion condemned.
– Niccoló Machiavelli, The Discourses. 1517.

I might also stretch this to include civil institutions along with those religious. We are today in a state of eschewing our civil and religious traditions and this has led to our current discontent as far as I am concerned.

Kopff discussed how he thinks the conventional wisdom on the Constitutional debates states that there was some unknown shift during the debate of the Constitution from the one-state-one-vote plan to the current system of proportional representation. Kopff thinks that the delegates were actually persuaded by arguments of proportionalism as opposed to cajoled by some corrupt bargain as some historiography has led some to believe.

Kopff notes that during the debate, John Dickinson of Delaware said that experience should be “our only guide” because rationalism may “lead us astray.” (see the quote I started this piece out with above) Not only does Kopff think that the delegates were persuaded by Dickinson’s argument here, but he thinks there was a realization by the delegates that tradition and history should serve as their bedrock.

He rejects that the Enlightenment influence was as pervasive as many argue it was. He points out that rationalism — as espoused by Rousseau, for one — as a thing that is born free of past encumbrance is impossible. Kopff asserts that rationalism can only be built on tradition and past experience, he posits that tradition validates rationalism.

To my mind, he makes a good point. After all fans of rationalism seem to imagine that at its inception rationalism represented an anti-religious ideal and a breaking from tradition, a new way of thought. Yet, these same people accept that rational thought can be born of nothing, not based on past experience? Isn’t that the same thing as divine revelation? I mean, divine revelation insists that it is born of God’s word and not of earthly traditions and man’s efforts. And here comes rationalism divorced from man’s tradition to be born as if from a miraculous revelation? It seems to me that the rationalists merely exchanged the idea that God is divine with the idea that the individual human’s mind is divine.

Without experience and tradition, rationalism most certainly can lead us astray. We are seeing that today with a left-wing wishing of what could be if only…! With the left’s insistence that our traditions and systems are useless, corrupt, or need the panacea of “change” to “fix” them, we are truly seeing the “rational” going uninformed by tradition and experience in America today.

We are all too often rejecting our American principles as venal and broken. We have for fifty years told the world that we are wrong, even evil. And now we have a president that has made it his duty in nearly every single speech he’s given to say that we have been wrong on everything. Is it any wonder that we have an enemy in radical Islamists that have taken our word for it and decided to punish us accordingly?

The truth is, we are not a nation that needs to be remade. We are a nation that needs to get back to first principles. Are there some problems with our early ideas? Certainly. But to throw the baby out with the bathwater is a fool’s action. The fact is, we are a great nation because of our traditions and principles, not despite them and we need to retrain our citizenry in those principles.

I was glad to have gotten the chance to attend this ISI conference and look forward to its future efforts. In the mean time, if you’d like to see a whole series of video and audio lectures on American exceptionalism, history, and traditions some that stretch back some 40 years, visit ISI’s lecture series on its website. There you’ll see some great lecturers from folks like the four I met this weekend (and including them). ISI also has an interesting blog called First Principles that is worth visiting.

Part One: Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant?

ISI Conference Part Two: Christ in Our Soul

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