Real Common Sense: Using America's Founding Values to Stop Glen Beck and the Tea Party Madness

"I listen to [Brian Kahn on Home Ground Radio] every Tuesday while I run a saw in a lumber mill. I usually find [his] interviews fascinating because they put a person into the story . . . when the program ends, I wish for another half hour."?Dan Kostelnik, mill worker, Belgrade, MT

Tom Paine’s 1776 book Common Sense galvanized America in support of national independence. Paine was a fierce champion of the political, social, and economic rights of the common man. Today, America’s extreme Right is trying to re-write our nation’s history, and deny our Founders’ commitment to social justice. As part of that effort, pundit Glenn Beck has gone so far as to steal
the legacy of Tom Paine, using Common Sense as the title for a book?and praising Paine. But the book itself attacks the very ideas in which Paine believed, and if the great patriot was alive today, Beck would label him a radical socialist or revolutionary Marxist.

In Real Common Sense, award-winning public radio host Brian Kahn faces up to America’s critical problems?and then shows how the principles and values of America’s Founders can provide the moral compass we need to turn things around. In easy-to-read, common sense language, he shows how we have gone off course as a country, emphasizing consumerism over citizenship, entertainment over education, ?me” over ?we”. By reconnecting with our founding American principles, he argues, we can create a future worthy of our grandchildren.

Brian Kahn is host of the award?winning public radio program Home Ground and is the recipient of the 2009 Montana Governor's Award for the Humanities and the Chevron Conservation Award. He has been published in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Field & Stream. He has worked as a ranch hand, boxing coach, lawyer, conservationist, and journalist, and lives in Montana.