Nate Knows Nada

So I spent a decent amount of today at the “People of Faith” caucus
luncheon, talking with a number of delegates and party people about how
the Democrats are attempting to make a renewed connection with faith
communities.

The speakers outlined in a variety of ways how the Democratic party
could try to make a connection with “communities of faith.”  (N.B.
“Community” has got to be the most overused word in modern civic
culture discourse.  It’s so overused as to have lost
meaning.)  Although the caucus luncheon was meant to include
people of all the monotheistic faiths (well, at least Jews and Muslims
were the only ones mentioned besides the obvious), the focus was
overwhelmingly upon the Christian side of the problem.  At least
in our contemporary political discourse, the significant divide over
religion occurs with the Christians.  There’s the right and
there’s the rest of us.

Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, noted in his speech, “We
need to take back the idea that faith and God are a province of the
religious right.”

He continued, “The media is filled with stories of the divided
church.  Others say that religion doesn’t have a place in
politics.  We think that it does.  Some of us feel that our
voice of faith has been stolen.”

Sojourners is a magazine and an
organization dedicated “to proclaim and practice the
biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice.” 
Wallis focused a lot on his comments on the poor in this country and
abroad, and that seems to be at the heart of much of what he’s worked
on in his life.  He also encouraged the people present to remember
that the care of the environment, prejudice and discrimination, and war
are all issues that faith can inform, and not just in the way portrayed
by the right.  “My evangelical tradition has been distorted such
that it
seems the faith of Jesus has become pro-rich, pro-war,
pro-American.”

He finished, “‘We are the ones we have been waiting for.'”  The
country is terrified by fear; we need the healing of the nation that is
deeper than politics.  The most frequent words of Jesus are ‘Be
not afraid.’  if your political commitments are rooted in your
moral values, in your faith, you need to let your values, your faith
shine through.”

More later.

It’s a well-written speech that Jesse Jackson is giving, but he didn’t
really get rhetorically into it until the last couple of paragraphs of
the speech.  He got a bigger welcome applause than a goodbye
applause.

Cruise over here
to get a good halfway point of what’s going on here in terms of the
convention blogging and how we’ve evolved as information people.

A big shout out to NinjaStu, who came up to Blogger Hell here and seemed to get me working.  I can blog!

If Teresa Heinz Kerry becomes First Lady, she’d be only the second foreign-born one in American history. Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, was the first.

Somebody was enamored of her last night….

Like a number of bloggers, I’ve gotten the request from the Library of Congress to be part of the 2004 Internet archive.

To Whom It May Concern:

The United States Library of Congress
preserves the Nation’s cultural artifacts and provides enduring access
to them. The Library’s traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging,
preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to
the Congress and to the American people to foster education and
scholarship, extend to digital materials, including Web sites.  The
Library has selected your site for inclusion in the historic collection
of Internet materials related to the Election 2004, and we request your
permission to collect and display your Web site.

The Library has
developed two previous Election Web Archives, in 2000 and 2002. These
Election Archives are available along with our other Web Archive
collections through the Library’s Minerva Web site (http://www.loc.gov/minerva/). The Election 2002 Web Archive (http://www.loc.gov/minerva/collect/elec2002/index.html)
illustrates how the Library catalogues archives and makes them
available to researchers either onsite at the Library or through the
Library’s public access Web site.  This will give you an idea how your
archived site may appear on our Web site.

Because of the content
value of your Web site, the Library may have contacted you for
permission to collect and display your site in other Web Archive
collections. If you previously granted permission, we thank you for
your participation, however, each new archive, including the Election
2004 Web Archive, requires separate permissions from each site owner.
At this time, the Library requests your permission to collect your Web
site located at the following URL:

http://www.nateknowsnada.org

Our
plan is to engage the Internet Archive, on behalf of the Library of
Congress, to collect content from your Web site at regular intervals
during the United States National Election period. The Library will
make this collection available to researchers onsite at Library
facilities. The Library also wishes to make the collection available to
offsite researchers by hosting the collection on the Library’s public
access Web site.  The Library hopes that you share its vision of
preserving Web materials about the election and permitting researchers
from across the world to access them.

So, of course, I said yes.  Good research practice and all.

Seen on the way to the convention today: a bumper sticker with a Harry Potter tie-in.

“Voldemort voted Republican.”

You can find the original here.

Most of the traditional media coverage that we’ve been getting has
either been explanatory (what is a blog?  What are these people
doing here?) or dismissive (They’re not real journalists, They aren’t
objective, Don’t pay too much attention to them).  (Hey, at least
that’s what we’ve been getting up in the “Blogger Boulevard.”

So it’s a surprise to see this, from the Hollywood Reporter:

CNN political analyst Jeff Greenfield doesn’t buy the arguments against
blogs. He doesn’t think Internet-based media has any corner on bad
journalism.

“You can be just as sloppy or bad or downright false
in established media as you can with the bloggers,” he said. “With the
bloggers, you have this added advantage that everybody’s watching
everybody else, so that if one blogger on the left makes a series of
assertions, Instapundit will weigh in and say, ‘That guy is so off
base, and here’s why.’ I think they’ve added a lot to the whole
political process.”

I’m going to some of the religion-related events in the convention
tomorrow, and I’m gonna ask some questions of the delegates and anyone
else whom I might run into.

Do any of you have any questions?