Dear Friends,

The Dinner Meetup at The Good Earth Restaurant drew eight committed activists. It was a joy to reconnect with some of the original members and to welcome new members.

The discussions were lively and informative.

Going forward, we decided that we need to have some "self-education" time. There are so many issues to tackle and the best way will be to do some of our own homework and then come to the Meetups, ready to really discuss the issues!! The two most burning issues right now seem to be the war in Afghanistan and Domestic Intelligence.

With respect to the war in Afghanistan, we'd like to spend the next meeting discussing its history, the origins of contact between the US and Afghanistan, the present "state-of-the-war", what are US and international "interests" in this country, what "interests" they might have in us, and possible future resolutions/outcomes for present conflicts.

Ultimately, we'd like to address the question : If President Obama was in the room with us right now, what would we counsel him to do? This takes personal knowledge on our part regarding the intricacies of the subject!

So, please hit your local libraries and the Internet to discover what knowledge YOU can bring to the discussion next time!

We also agreed that we will all search for a knowledgeable speaker on Afghanistan to join us. I will contact the folks at the Humphrey Institute and John will talk with people from the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers about a speaker. All other suggestions and speakers are welcome!


Again, the topics for the next three months are:

November Afghanistan

December Domestic Intelligence

January Recap of the past two issues. This will afford people the time to revisit and reevaluate these two very important issues! In addition, since I (Fawn) will have been in France for a while at that point, I will try to bring you some perspectives from that corner of the world.

We also thought that it would be nice to start a Meetup for St. Paul and the East Metro. The St. Paul for Obama Group is still on MyBO which is now the Organizing For America site. It can be used if someone is willing to organize it.


Finally, we agreed to have the November Meetup in St. Paul at the Mai Village Restaurant
November 10th, 7PM.

They have private meeting accommodations that are free if the attendees plan to dine - so tell your friends!

Fawn and John