I received a call today from Chris Davis with KOTA about the ongoing civil war in the South Dakota Republican Party. I didn’t have time for a full interview, but was able to answer some of his questions over the phone. Even the best interview under ideal circumstances ends up leaving out 60-95% of what was discussed, so as soon as I could after the interview, I wrote down my best recollection of what he asked and what I said.

A lot of people, conservatives in particular, tend to idealize the past. We like to wax lyrical about simpler times, the “good old days.” Of course, if we are honest we have to admit that those good old days weren’t always so great. The passage of time and progress of society have brought many blessings – civil, cultural, and technological. Society today is freer, fairer, safer, and more comfortable. Unfortunately many of the blessings of progress come at a cost.

It’s nice to hear publicly stated what many of us have known for years: the “mainstream” media is an enemy of the American people. Former Jimmy Carter pollster Pat Caddell said recently that the “mainstream” media have set themselves up as the arbiters of what the American people should and should not know, and in doing so, have “made themselves the enemy of the American people.”

Dr. Michael Savage has won the almost-two-year legal battle with his syndicator, Talk Radio Network (TRN), and has taken complete ownership of his show. This is a bittersweet, good-news-bad-news deal. It is sweet for Dr. Savage, who was miserable with the terms of his syndication and wanted free of his tethers to TRN, but it is bitter for the millions of devoted listeners in the Savage Nation who woke up to the sudden loss of our favorite voice of political reason and sanity on terrestrial radio.

Historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee died OCTOBER 2, 1975. Providing foreign intelligence for the British during World Wars I and II, Toynbee was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conferences. His 12-volume Study Of History (1934-1961), described the rise, flowering, and decline of 26 cultures from Egypt, Greece and Rome to Polynesia and Peru.