Mr. Madison Writes a Letter to Mr. Jefferson

Prior to championing a Bill of Rights in the First Congress, James Madison wrote a revealing letter to Thomas Jefferson in October of 1788. Interestingly, much of the letter was written in a secret code only the two of them shared. The following extract from the letter gives insight into Madison's mindset and the thinking of many of the Founders.


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Western Fiction Review reviews The Shopkeeper

"With all the plot developments the story has a natural fast pace and before I knew it I had reached the end, leaving me wanting to read the next in the series."

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Saddle Up ! Denver Post article on resurgence of Westerns on TV

Joanne Ostrow writes a article summarizing television networks new fascination with the Western genre.

"The rugged individualism of myth, the challenge of uncharted territory, the bad sanitation and awful racial stereotypes ... the TV Western is back in the saddle."

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2nd Annual Avondale Writers Conference

I will be presenting at the 2nd Annual Avondale Writers Conference in Avondale, Arizona. The title of my talk is How to Get Your Book Published: No Nonsense Advice. The all-day conference is on Saturday October 29th, starting with registration at 8:00 AM. I'm refining my presentation during down moments on my road trip. We've driven from Las Vegas to Salt Lake. City. Great country, great company. Next stop, Butte, Mo.
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Road Trip!

On Tuesday, my wife and I fly to Las Vegas to meet friends with a diesel pusher. From there, we'll drive through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska, and then we'll fly home from Omaha at the end of the month. No agenda, no wake-up calls, and only occasional peeks at email. Good friends and the open road in my favorite part of the country. This is gonna be fun. Film at eleven.

The Founders’ Fear

We often hear laments that our politicians no longer honor their pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. This is backward. The Constitution was never written for politicians. Our political leaders have no motivation to abide by a two hundred year old restraining order. Americans must enforce the supreme law of the land. The first outsized words of the Constitution read We the People. It’s our document. It was always meant to be ours, not the government’s. It is each and every American’s obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

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Constitution Day -- Celebrated this year on Sept. 16

To commemorate Constitution Day, the blog What would the Founders think? is posting articles all week on the Constitution. 

Constitutional Speed Bumps, by James D. Best

“The powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” Thomas Jefferson

To a degree, each branch of the national government operates in slight fear that another branch will chastise or even overrule its actions. This was an intended consequence of the design. Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

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A Great Tribute to Westerns

Westerns Forever by MarkmBonner