Oregon Tea Party 2nd anniversary report
Brad Williams
On Saturday 2/28/2011, I attended the Oregon Tea Party second
anniversary at the Shilo Inn near PDX. I'm guessing 200-300 attended.
I set up a couple of OIR tables in the back, with about 100 free
pamphlets and about 20 books for sale. I got cleaned out, selling all
5 copies of Atlas that I brought and most everything else too.
Attached are "before" and "after" pictures. You'll notice one table I
completely filled with copies of "The Meaning of Money" (Francisco's
speech), and kept replenishing it, and still they took every last copy
I had of it.
The movers and shakers in the Oregon Tea Party have formed an official
Oregon Tea Party PAC (http://otppac.org), with John Kuzmanich as the
chair. John spoke at this event too, and although he is not an
Objectivist he loves AR and quotes her all the time and uses her
definition of liberty in speeches, etc. I saw the copy of CUI I gave
him more than a year ago, it is dog-earred and very marked up.
Between him and a couple leaders at Cascade Policy Institute, the
influence of Objectivist thinking in the local tea party movement is
significant -- and I continue to encourage this by maintaining
connections with these leaders and giving tidbits of intellectual
direction/support on Facebook etc. For example, see my recent
comments on an article about the proposed plastic bag ban in Oregon:
http://www.blueoregon.com/2011/02/banning-plastic-bags-protects-oregon-jobs/
One interesting thing I learned is that the producers of the Atlas
movie were in contact with the Cascade Policy Institute last week
about possibly doing an early (pre-April 15th) screening of the movie
in Portland. If that happens, I will set up a table at that event
selling AR books. Cascade says they would like me to do this,
although it's not clear if the terms from the movie owners will allow
it. I'll email if the prescreening firms up.
In the meantime I've requested more copies of pamphlets from ARC, and
will get to Powell's to buy more used copies of CUI etc to turn around
and sell at events like these.
Thanks for your support,
Brad
