We were blessed with a beautiful night again on Saturday, probably below 70 degrees by the time I got to Noblesville for the Hamilton County fair. This seems like the coolest summer in my memory. Besides being exceptionally pleasant, this cool weather seems to belie dystopian liberal predictions of global warming.

In any case, I'd never been to the Hamilton County fair. They certainly take their fair pretty serious. Maybe it had to do with the placement of the commercial tent where all us politician types were set up, but it sure seemed like a lot of animals. The 4-H part of the fair was definitely prominent. I stopped on the way in to make friends with a couple of sheep. But enough about the Democrats. [(Adopting Foghorn Leghorn voice) That's a joke, son. I said, joke.]

For starters, we had a fine turnout from the Hamilton County Libertarian Party. Other than absolutely Marion County next door (Indianapolis), Hamilton County probably has the biggest county party in the state, and the most candidates.

Heck, they've embarassed the local Democrats bad enough to get them to actually run candidates for office. This is something that the badly outnumbered Democrats hadn't even been bothering to do in this Republican county - until the Libertarians began actually running more candidates than the Democrats in the last couple of election cycles.

Anyway, there were too many danged Libertarians running around for me to keep track of. Among the most merciless tormenters of the local Republicrats in attendance were big, bad Mark Schreiber, and the infamous author of the Kole Hard Facts of Life blog and secretary of the state party, Mike Kole. [Mike's account of the fair]

Kenn Gividen, our hardworking gubernatorial candidate, was again in attendance. He had been out on the grounds when first I arrived. Coming across the tent to our booth in the far back corner, he claimed to hear me from the other end of the tent, which must have been at least 100 yards. Apologies if I was sucking all the air out of the room, but I was talking over the tractors in the ring just back of the tent. Then again, out in Franklin County, we're used to hollering over farm equipment.

Indeed, I was, as Chuck Berry would say, "campaign shoutin' like a Southern diplomat" all night. With the beautiful weather, we had strong steady traffic the whole evening. I kept even busier than in Lafayette the night before. This saved the Hamilton County party people from hearing me sing, cause I was about too busy to breath. Best guess is that I talked at least briefly to 500 people.

By the time I was leaving at 10pm, about all the more "talking" I could do was bleating. This turned out to be just enough to have a brief conversation with a half dozen vocal young goats on leashes that I crossed paths with in the parking lot.

Black goat: "Baaaaaah!"
White goat: "Baaaaah!"
Al: "Baaaaaaah!"