Menden is just a stone throw away from my city, which is Lünen. We must meet when I go back there for X-mas. I will probably cook at a dinner party at some friends house. Probably Italian food. I will bring some special beers from Belgium too (I live in Brussels). You are invited to it.

"The USA appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Simon Bolivar, Caracas, 1819

Just to give you more info, I looked up the official election result (for 2002 too) in your election district (Märkischer Kreis II, not the most lefty in NRW):

Participation: 76.5% (2002 -2.4 percentage points)
Invalid: 1.3% on list votes, 1.5% on direct votes (both +.1)

Zweitstimmen (list votes; all above 1%):

• SPD (Social Democrats) 39.8% (-3.3)
• CDU (Christian Democrats) 36.8% (-0.2)
• FDP (Free Democrats, market-liberals) 9.5% (+0.2)
• Grüne (Greens) 5.2% (-0.8)
• Die Linke (Left Party, hard left) 5.2% (2002 PDS +4.3)
• NPD (National Democrats, far-right) 1.2 (+0.7) [another far-right, the Schill party, went from 1.4% to zero]

Erststimmen (direct candidate vote, all):

• SPD (Dagmar Freitag) 47.5% (-2.2)
• CDU (Thomas Gemke) 41.1% (+2.4)
• FDP (Jochen Lipproß) 3.8 (-2.1)
• Grüne (Bärbel Keiderling) 2.1 (-0.7)
• Die Linke (Karsten Renfordt) 4.1% (2002 PDS +3.3)
• NPD (Timo Pradel) 1.5 (+0.7)

BTW, I wonder how you manage so far that the decimal and millenal numerical signs are just the opposite outside the Anglo-Saxon sphere (say, €100.000.000,00 instead of your $100,000,000.00) :-)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

DoDo, the Greens are not a left wing party. Not by a long shot. I admit that I go to green party member GPs and dentists. But that has more to do with 'life style' and not politics. And talking about the Greens in Hessen. The last left wing leader of the Greens was Jutta Dittfurth. That was years ago. As you may probably remember she left the party in protest because of Joschka Fischer's realo politics. Do you remember the Krebsmühle project, the big alternative workers co-operative in Oberursel? Well, they hated Dittfurth. And for a good reason. We were then engaged to create new, innovative, self determined and self controlled networks of workers co-operatives. Dittfurth (again: a Protestant predicant's daughter) had studied too much undigested marxist political economy for beginners to understand what we were up to. She still clang to the simplified mechanisms of Engel's postulates in his 'Dialects of Nature' and continued to dream of a final clash of classes. We had no part in it. She didn't see us and subsequently betrayed her party base in Hessen. Dittfurth didn't use the Greens political influence to foster our initiatives. OK, that was then. It's history now. What we witness today is a Greens party which fights for the votes of dentists and other better-off income earners. They compete with the FDP not with left wing parties.

"The USA appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Simon Bolivar, Caracas, 1819