State Chairman Sheill at the Sammies
This weekend I traveled with Chet Zarko of outsidelansing.com to the 2nd Annual Sam Adams Alliance Sammies in Chicago.
John Fund of the Wall Street Journal took aim at Susan Roesgen of CNN and told the audience not to worry about MSM’s efforts to discount the Taxpayer Tea Party Protests because MSM does so at their own risk. The Sam Adams Alliance was instrumental in organizing the main tea party in Chicago. Fund said that while the Democrats convince themselves that the age of Obama will bring a return of 1933 and 1965, he argued that next year’s mid-term elections could very well mirror Democratic defeats in 1978 and 1994.
I was really impressed by the diversity of talent among the young liberty-minded activists in attendance. This included Mary Katherine Ham of the Weekly Standard who presented the Best Video Award to Austin Bragg and Caleb Brown of the CATO Institute for their work parodying the inane liquor control regulations of the state of Virginia. For example, in Virginia, a bartender can sell you a pint of beer and a shot, but cannot sell you a shot inside of a pint of beer! Make sense? No Irish car-bombs in Virginia, but then again, Homeland Security might object to those as well. The video was the most entertaining part of the night.
But by far the moment of the night was when Paul Jacob received the Lifetime Award for his efforts to get TABOR on the ballot in Oklahoma, even in the face of potential prosecution at the hands of the attorney general. Jacob had just earlier presented the Modern-Day Sam Adams Award, and you could see him almost break down in tears as he explained to us all how Sam Adams sacrificed his father’s lucrative beer distillery in order to fight for the freedom (and beer, made by a different family now) that we all still enjoy to this day.
We also personally met Joe the Plumber before the show, who is surprisingly real & cool guy (he called McCain a socialist). All in all I met a lot of great people from across the county and in particular, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and of course, Illinois.
-Dan Sheill
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