Dinner with U.S. Congressman Brad Miller
by Josh Staiger
So, how often does one get to have dinner and drinks with a United States Congressman?
Well, tonight Bill, Dave, and I got to do just that, as U.S. Representative Brad Miller joined us at tonight's Raleigh Bloggers meetup (completely out of the blue).
Apparently Rep. Miller is active on Daily Kos, as seen in this entry and others listed on his website.
Rep. Miller and his campaign manager were seeking to learn more about blogs, both from a perspective of getting the word out to his constituents and building a community of supporters, and also for monitoring what the blogosphere is saying about him and his opponent.
Of course, we were more than happy to inform him about RSS, feed aggregators, group blogging, blogging etiquette, and other North Carolina blogging communities such as Orange Politics and the Chapel Hill meetup group.
On matters unrelated to blogging, it was quite interesting to hear Brad's perspective on the inside workings of the congress, the current leadership of the Democratic party, and "form" letters that are sent to representatives.
We even got to peek at his United States of a America "corporate" charge card... and, no, he didn't use it to pay for his meal.
As for political issues, it would have been nice to have gotten a bit less of a blank stare when I tried to bring up the topic of intellectual property and patent reform... but sadly this wasn't altogether unexpected :(
In the end, I'm still all kinds of impressed that Rep Miller has the foresight to reach out to the blogosphere. He's more than welcome to join us at Cafe Cyclo again anytime.
Update: