-By Warner Todd Huston
Last night I had the pleasure to attend the 26th anniversary dinner for the Chicago-based Heartland Institute held in the resplendent Grand Ball Room of the Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago.
The Heartland Institute is one of the premiere think tanks in the country and has some great resources on the fallacies of Global Warming, free markets, healthcare, technology, taxes and education among others. If you are a blogger Heartland’s work on all sorts of conservative issues is a gold mine of information that can help you intelligently elucidate your points. If you are just an interested citizen, you should also check out Heartland’s great work. And the legislative work the institute has done these many years has been highly important for the conservative, free market side of the aisle. Please do check out Heartland’s extensive website and do donate if you can to help keep it all going.
In any case, the night started with some socializing, a well stocked open bar, and the opportunity to bid on all sorts of interesting auction items.
During the socializing I had the opportunity to talk to Steve Kim, the Republican candidate for Illinois Attorney General and Ed Rutledge the candidate for Lt. Governor from the Libertarian Party.
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I took the opportunity to ask Mr. Kim if he personally would have joined the anti-Obamacare lawsuit that many other states attorney generals had launched this year. He said that he personally is against many of the forced aspects of Obamacare but he would only have joined such an effort if the whole state establishment agreed that he should as a representative of the state.
But one thing he did say about Obamacare is that current Attorney General Lisa Madigan came out the very next day and said she accepted it as proper law and said she wouldn’t challenge it. Kim wondered how she could come out but hours after the law was passed and proclaim that it is was all perfectly well written when the bill was thousands of pages long. Kim asked how she could make such proclamations that the law did not negatively affect the state even as it was obvious that she and her staff had not had time to read and digest the legislation. It was purely a political move, Kim said of Madigan’s acceptance of Obamacare. She did not care how it affected the state she just agreed with it with a party line move.
As to Ed Rutledge, the Libertarian candidate for Lt. Governor, he was telling me how the Old Media all too often refuses to even mention his name and the name of his running mate (Lex Green for Governor) in its coverage of the race. The Libertarians are legally on the ballot, of course, yet the media seems to accidentally forget to mention them all the time. That is the typical failure of the Old Media’s coverage of our news.
We left the socializing area and headed for dinner after an hour or so and heard a few words from Heartland President Joe Bast. And then after dinner we got something different. This year the Heartland folks tried a new idea different from years past. Instead of having speeches from notables, newsmakers, and experts they invited a troupe of comics from Second City Chicago to try their hand at some improv for our entertainment.
At first I was sort of dubious that these folks could come into a conservative gathering and still be funny. Let’s face it comics have a reputation for being let-wingers so I was curious to see them work red instead of blue (that’s a double entendre, if there ever was one). I have to say, though, that the troupe did very well. They came up with some very funny lines that were pleasing to a right leaning audience. Good show.
One of the acts, for instance, was a sort of charades style game where half the troupe was trying to use silent body movements to tell the other half the words the audience had suggested for the game. The words were perspicacious, Democrats, and misunderstimate. Amusingly, neither of the troupe knew what perspicacious meant and I had to yell out from the back of the room “it basically means you’re very smart.”
In any case, it was a wonderful dinner. I had a chance to mingle and meet some great Chicago conservatives all there in support of a very worthy organization. Again, be sure and check out the good work of Heartland Institute.
Thanks to Zack Christenson for his hospitality.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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