Just back from my Dean Meetup

in Overland Park, Kansas! Great event. We were at a Chinese restaurant, a vast improvement over the Irish place last month -- quieter, better able to talk and do our letter writing.

Who else went to a Meetup tonight?

Lots of fun, and a good turnout. I'm going to Iowa this weekend!

have a great time!

My daughter came with me....Her first Meet-Up....Oh, what a special occasion...:beer:


We are going to Iowa Jan 9th thru the 11th......

And attendance was definitely up from last month. Great little italian place, I got the chicken marsala :)

The big news for me tonight was that a local progressive political group is putting everything together to create a low-power FM radio station & it set me to thinking a lot about doing a "Paul Harvey from the Left" talk show.

Mohawk Valley, New York met at the Radisson Hotel and had a very productive time of getting our petitions to get Dean on the New York primary for March 22, 2004.
Dean was on the front page of the local paper as being the lead in the Zogby poll. So that will be something to take along on the petition drives to help People who don't know Dean ...get to know him :)

Irish beer even better. The problem was that the restaurant was crowded, noisy, and smokey, so it simply didn't work well for a Meetup. The Chinese place is very quiet on Wednesdays, so we tripled their business. We had a good sized room all to ourselves, could eat and speak and do our letter writing easily.

Zidzi- where in the Mohawk Valley are you? Utica maybe? I was born there.

Kansas? I went to Utica to the Dean Meetup but I live 17 miles West of there! Utica's too big for me :)

Picked up handful of the new pamphlets to toss in with Xmas gifts and leave strategically lying around in local coffee shops.

We had a good group, very upbeat and ready to roll. Three people volunteered to do house parties on December 30. 2004 is going to be a wild ride, but my money is on the Doctor.

we had detailed discussion on labor issues and the Iraq war. Edwards and Kucinich supporters contributed heavily. We shared a lot of insight and information. Fantastic meetup.

nice crowd, many older folks (older than me, at 42, anyhow).

Lots of newcomers to politics too.

I was impressed as usual.

We even had a visitor from California, and a high-school student who will be too young to vote in the next election.

:hi:

There were 14 meetups tonight in St Paul and 52 statewide in MN. Our meetup was held in an independent bookstore in my neighborhood. It was a very well-organized and facilitated meeting. And we were busy! We had presentations on the MN caucus system and invitations to attend training sessions for caucus organizing for Dean. We had a presentation on Dean Corps which is a community volunteer project of Dean for Minnesota, doing such things as story-reading to kids in women's shelters, distributing meals-on-wheels over the holidays,providing support to military families with members in Iraq,distributing holiday baskets to very ill Aids patients, plus most interesting, a voter-registration project among targeted non-voters which also includes relaying their particular concerns to office-holders and reps. We continued work on a letter-writing project to voters in Iowa - I took 10 names and addresses home to write later, and we also discussed plans to host and attend Dec 30 houseparties for Dean as well as plans to canvass voters in Iowa this Dec and Jan - Minnesota has committed 1500 volunteers to Iowa. There was information on Howard Dean, the new Common Sense pamphlet and the 60 Min. broadcast on Dean was also played for those who wanted to watch. There were about 40 people in attendance, one high school student, and one very committed college activist but the rest ranged in age from mid or late 20's to about 80 yrs, men and women, mostly white but a few minorities as well. It was very satisfying and motivating to interact with other Dean supporters.

A highlight of the event,our meetup was recorded by Minnesota Public Radio!

Minnesota Public Radio!"

The crowd keeps getting bigger - the thai restaurant was unprepared for so much business! Yummy Thai food!

:P