President & Executive Director of ConSource |
GLENN: Is that what it is? They are on sale now, bitter white man T-shirts at GlennBeck.com. Also, while you're there I'm asking you to buy Fusion magazine. And normally I don't make a hard sell on Fusion magazine. I just tell you what's in the upcoming issue but I would really like you to be a subscriber to Fusion magazine and it is a great, great issue. We have been working longer on this issue of Fusion magazine than anything else. I'm not kidding you. I was in the hospital at 3:00 in the morning. The deadline for the final adjustment was supposed to be the next morning. I'm there in the hospital at 3:00 in the morning with Joe and his laptop and we were still working on it. The doctor said, you can't work in the emergency room. I'm like, we have a deadline, I have a deadline I have to have. So we postponed the deadline for a couple of days, doctors orders. But the reason why I was doing that is because this is such a critical issue. This is our comparing John McCain and Barack Obama's policies to the words of the founding fathers, and Lorianne Updike is on phone. She is from the constitutional sources project and Lorianne, you guys have been instrumental in helping us put this together, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate it and how great your service is. Tell me a little bit about what you guys do.
UPDIKE: Well, Glenn, we've created the first free fully annexed online library of constitutional sources. Essentially right now it's the founders' documents and how they relate to the Constitution. And we've done this so that everybody from the sixth grader to the Supreme Court justice can have access to our founders.
GLENN: Okay. And the amazing thing is if you are looking for -- because you can read and study the Constitution, you know, all you want but when you put it into context and you see the writings and the words of our founding fathers and what got them to write the actual words in the Constitution, it takes on a whole different flavor, doesn't it?
UPDIKE: That's right. You begin to see history unfolding before your eyes.
GLENN: So how do people use your service?
UPDIKE: Well, it's free. You go to www.consource.org. Anybody can get on. There's a couple of ways to get on. We've, of course, got a Google search. We've put things into collection for historians and we actually have a legal index for attorneys and those interested in making policy so that they can see every single clause of the Constitution and the documents that relate to it. Of course, you know, we have certain number of documents on the site and that's always growing.
GLENN: And your goal is to have everything the founding fathers ever did electronically available.
UPDIKE: Well, Glenn, it's not just the founding fathers. We're starting with article 1 and going all the way to amendment 27 which was passed in 1922. So our goal is to have all of the forces of the Constitution, reconstruction era amendments, you know, women's lib, right to vote, prohibition. But we also are starting to go back to antiquity. Some of our newest documents on this site are our constitutional precedents, things like the magna cart a, the may flower compact, the Articles of Confederation -- excuse me, the --
GLENN: Confederation?
UPDIKE: Confederation. One of the newest collections we're adding are drafts of the Constitution. Most people don't know but there was an internal publication of the Constitution on August 6th of 1787 during the Constitutional Convention and all of the delegates to the Constitution got drafts that they wrote their own notes on. There's one at the Library of Congress that Washington's written his own notes and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia has Benjamin Franklin's and that's one of the reason why I think some of the importantness of this day and age of the Internet and Web 2.0 is that these things are everywhere. We found articles and manuscripts in Europe. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of archives that have these documents and sometimes they're in attics. So it's only online that they can all be collected into one place.
GLENN: That's fantastic. Well, I so appreciate it, Lorianne. And you guys are actually writing kind of a summary of what each of these issues are for Fusion magazine, correct?
UPDIKE: That's correct, yes.
GLENN: And I can't tell you how much your staff and everybody involved in this month's Fusion has helped us out and how much it means to us and I think it really will make a difference and I thank you so much for it.
UPDIKE: Well, you're welcome. It's so wonderful to hear when I talk to your staff that they had already found consource on their own and it had been helpful.