I don't believe Steve Minn needs anyone to come to his defense when someone calls him an idiot. I know at times he has engaged in a little name calling himself. I think however that anyone who believes his comments were entirely baseless and "idiotic" might be missing the fact that this "idiot" has raised, in his usual timid and indirect style, a good point odf discussion. I asked Dave off list yesterday how many delegates could have been at the convention. There were apparently 3,500 possible slots. At the 13 ward conventions 1,300 showed up and at the citywide convention 916 showed. My interest was in congratulating Dave for his efforts to change the system and the numbers highlight the potential for improvement. One could look at these numbers however and argue that the city of Minneapolis voters show up at a higher percentage than delegates show up to the convention. Was the convention boiled down to mainly extremists? Depends on who defines extremist. If you look at the person sitting in the governor's chair it might make you wonder what happened to the other grand political parties of Minnesota. Were the independents the extremists or were the DFL and IR's? Good question, but it is clear that the general electorate was not all that impressed with the selections of the two major parties. I saw a lot of DFLers commenting after that the problem was the electorate just didn't get their message, and if they had they would obviously have voted differently. Would you call this thinking arrogant, or possibly idiotic? Minn's quote called the delegates a "microcosm of a group of extremists." I think activist might be a word that would be more appropriate and probably more acceptable to the delegates. I don't know about everyone out there but I try to read a portion of the postings to this site on a regular basis and I sit on a volunteer committee at City Hall that I actually have to take vacation days to attend some all day meetings. I think that makes me an activist. My wife at times would more properly label me an extremist, and thats on her good days. I thought the postings on the growth of the Stonewall caucus were fitting. One mentioned how they are concentrating now on not just whether the candidate is GLBT but whether they are good people who will do a good job and "do they have a chance of getting elected!" Will we eventually see the day where we don't need a Stonewall caucus but we can all just concentrate on whether they are a good person and will they do a good job? I must be an idiot to think that day will ever come. Bob Gustafson 13 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
