Finally it happened -- the Star Tribune published a letter e-mailed from another planet and featured it as Letter of the Day ("We need a third-party president, and we need that person now," Aug. 4).

Only a stranger to Planet Earth could write that the "two major parties are held hostage by the extremists."

I would say that one party is held hostage and the other is led by a compromiser who gives in too readily in order to avoid train wrecks.

If Dennis Kucinich ran as a third-party candidate, as the letter writer suggests, he would draw enough votes away from the only nonextremist to make possible the election of an authentic extremist.

As the letter writer might have put it: Michele Bachmann, anyone?

FRANK C. MILLER, MINNEAPOLIS