How To Write To Congress

BY CAREY GREENBERG-BERGER

Writing to Congress is the single best way to express your view on public policy. The average consumer has a surprising ability to influence legislation by crafting a well written missive and avoiding several common mistakes.

Why Personal Letters Beat Form Letters
Don't get suckered in by the quick and easy "Write to Congress!" form letters littering the internet. Form letters are not an expression of values; they are a show of organizational strength. If the NRA convinces five million people to send letters opposing gun control, it shows that the NRA can muster five million people to action, not that five million people necessarily care about gun laws. Congressional offices know this and generally disregard form letters.

So what happens when you send a letter?

Every office has its own procedures for tabulating constituent correspondence, but most will produce a report at the end of week breaking down how many letters were received by issue area, separating out form letters from letters sent by individual constituents.

Members treat each type of letter differently, but most look for individual letters as a barometer of their district's concerns. These are the letters that have the most influence, the ones we will show you how to write.

What Should Your Letter Say?
We adhere to the three paragraph rule: introduce yourself, introduce your issue, request action. Congressional offices have staffers whose days are spent solely on the mail, so make their lives easier by keeping letter succinct and to the point.

Introduce Yourself: There is a two-prong test for determining your worth: 1) Are you a constituent? 2) Are you an important constituent? Feel free to puff up your chest. Are you a lifelong member of the district? Are you associated with community groups? Say so! Convince the reader that yours is a voice of experience and wisdom.

Be specific: Don't just ask a Member to oppose mandatory binding arbitration agreements. Ask them to rush to the floor to support S.1782, The Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007.

Marshall Facts: Your argument - and you are making an argument - must be supported by facts. Feel free to use facts gleaned from us or other sources, but don't copy and paste paragraphs of pre-written text from form letters. Personal experiences are particularly effective, and often moving. Share them!

Be Exceedingly Polite, Please: Congress attracts haughty personalities. Staffers don't appreciate being spoken down to or insulted. You are trying to rally them to your cause, so be nice!

Clearly State Your Request: Plainly tell your representative that you want them to support or oppose a certain bill. If you want a response, explicitly (but politely!) ask for one.

It should go without saying that your letter should follow all formal style guidelines, such as a return name and address, and should be free of spelling and grammatical errors.

Send Your Letter To The Right Place
Only write to your representatives. You have three: one Representative in the House, and two Senators. Do not send more than three letters. Some citizens try to get their voice heard by writing to all 435 members of the House. Congressional courtesy compels the 434 Members who do not represent the zealot to forward his letter to the one lucky Member who does. This angers the Member's staff greatly at the expense of any point you are trying to make.

The addresses for your Representatives and Senators are available online, but don't waste your time with an email. Letters carry significantly more weight. Send your letter to the Capitol, where the legislative staff is based, though it will take a while to arrive since all incoming Congressional mail is irradiated thanks to those still-unidentified Anthrax mailers.

For an even greater impact, send your letter care of the staffer covering the issue. These staffers - called Legislative Assistants - are the Member's eyes and ears on their assigned issue areas. Finding the staffer destined to read your letter is easy: call the Capitol switchboard (open 24 hours a day!) at (202) 224-3121, ask for your Member's office, and ask the person who answers for the name of the staffer handling the issue area or bill number. Once you get that name, address your letter like this:

Member Of Congress
c/o Staffer
Office Building/Number
Washington, DC 20515

What Should You Expect In Return?
Depends. There are 535 Congressional offices and each handles constituent correspondence differently. The vast majority respond to letters with either a form letter pre-written by a Legislative Assistant, or with a more personal response written by a Legislative Correspondent. Controversial issues that attract many letters normally receive a form letter response, while smaller issues or specific questions often receive the attention of a personalized response.

Conclusion
Members of Congress work for you. Without your votes, they won't stay in office. They go to great lengths to cultivate a positive relationship with you, their boss. Very few people take the time to write to a Member of Congress, so the few that do carry a disproportionate influence.

Fifteen minutes is well worth the time to influence a $2 trillion enterprise.

R.O.D.E.N.T

Just a short piece I wrote in the middle of the night.-DavidG

“I’m a rodent from a different world,” said a tiny mouse standing upright on my kitchen counter. I nearly dropped the gallon of milk onto the floor. The little white animal tapped a toothpick shaped death ray at me.

“What do you want?” I asked in disbelief. My back hit the kitchen table and I splashed milk onto my shirt.

It took out a small cigarette and lit it. A tendril of smoke rose in the air and it took a big puff. “Your Mr. Wendle right?”

I nodded and held my breath.

“Well Mr. Wendle, we’re going to take a walk out back.” The ray gun was aimed at me while it climbed down the counter. “And don’t bring the milk.”

He motioned to the garage door. I put the milk down and preceded to head out.

“Bring your coat?” It said behind me. I picked up the coat off the rack and open the door. I scanned the darkness of the garage nervously and felt a stinging on my left leg. “Get in the car and roll down all the windows.”

The keys were in the coat pocket and I did what it said. As soon as the windows were down, several other mice scurried in through the back windows and the original mouse climbed through the passenger’s side . It looked up at me, pointing his black ray gun at me and said, “Now let’s get to your work.”

Throughout the ride, the mouse stood on the arm rest on the passenger side door. I parked in my usual spot and turned the car off.

“Good. Now you listen well. We’re going in there with you and your going to head straight to your office.” Mice started climbing into my jacket’s pockets. “Any funny stuff and your gone. Do we understand each other.”

I nodded, as it tossed the cigarette out the window and climbed into my left breast pocket. I got out and made my way inside and up to the guard shack.

“Hello Mr. Wendle,” said Derron, the burly security guard. “Early today.”

“Lot’s of work to do,” I croaked and waddled to the elevators. His eyebrows rose but soon flipped up his newspaper.

It took forever for the doors to open and when they did I hurried inside and pushed the seven button. Luckily no one was here this early and I had the elevator to myself. The doors opened and I rushed to my office. Once inside the mouse in my breast pocket crawled out onto my shoulder and pointed to the lock box on my wall.

“Get the keys to the lab and let’s go for a walk down the hall.”

“Wh…why do you need to get to the lab?” I asked.

He shot me with his laser in the neck sending my vision blurry. It soon cleared but my head ached.

“Just do what I say and get those keys.”

In a few minutes I fumbled the keys in the locked lab door. It opened on a few attempts and I turned on the lights. The mice jumped out of my pockets.

“Miller you in here?” yelled one of them.

“He’s over here,” said another.

“He better be alright,” said the one pointing the gun at my head.

They returned carrying another mouse and tossed him into my pockets. They followed him in and the one on my shoulder said, “Back to your house.”

I walked out of the elevator and past Derron. He looked up over his newspaper at me.

“Forgot my paperwork,” I said and left.

I drove home and parked the car in the garage. They carried the mouse from my pocket and out the window. Laboring, they worked their way into the already open door. The mouse in my breast pocket darted out and onto my shoulder.

“We can go inside now,” It said. Once inside it put the gun to my head. I stiffened. “I should blow you away. I should but I’m going to let you live.”

I watched as the mice took the escapee out the kitchen window and into my backyard. I walked over to the window and noticed a triangular ship in my magnolias, mist rising from its metallic sheen.

“You ever hurt a mouse again and you’re a goner.” and then it shot me.

It knocked me down and as I looked up from the kitchen floor, I saw the mouse jump from the window sill. Moments later the ship lifted into the air and took off. Motionless, I looked under the refrigerator at a small mouse nibbling a stiff ravioli.

Mirror particles form new matter

By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Fragile particles rarely seen in our Universe have been merged with ordinary electrons to make a new form of matter.

Di-positronium, as the new molecule is known, was predicted to exist in 1946 but has remained elusive to science.

Now, a US team has created thousands of the molecules by merging electrons with their antimatter equivalent: positrons.

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, is a key step in the creation of ultra-powerful lasers known as gamma-ray annihilation lasers.

"The difference in the power available from a gamma-ray laser compared to a normal laser is the same as the difference between a nuclear explosion and a chemical explosion," said Dr David Cassidy of the University of California, Riverside, and one of the authors of the paper.

"It would have an incredibly high power density."

As a result, there is a huge interest in the technology from the military as well as energy researchers who believe the lasers could be used to kick-start nuclear fusion in a reactor.

Bin Laden More Popular Than Musharraf

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf -- a key U.S. ally -- is less popular in his own country than al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to a poll of Pakistanis conducted last month by an anti-terrorism organization.

Additionally, nearly three-fourths of poll respondents said they oppose U.S. military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan, according to results from the poll conducted by the independent polling organization Terror Free Tomorrow.

"We have conducted 23 polls all over the Muslim world, and this is the most disturbing one we have conducted," said Ken Ballen, the group's head. "Pakistan is the one Muslim nation that has nuclear weapons, and the people who want to use them against us -- like the Taliban and al Qaeda -- are more popular there than our allies like Musharraf."

The poll was conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow by D3 Systems of Vienna, Virginia., and the Pakistan Institute for Public Opinion. Interviews were conducted August 18-29, face-to-face with 1,044 Pakistanis across 105 urban and rural sampling points in all four provinces across the nation. Households were randomly selected.

According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating. Musharraf's support is 38 percent. U.S. President George W. Bush's approval: 9 percent.

Asked their opinion on the real purpose of the U.S.-led war on terror, 66 percent of poll respondents said they believe the United States is acting against Islam or has anti-Muslim motivation. Others refused to answer the question or said they did not know.

"We failed in winning hearts and minds in Pakistan," Ballen told CNN. "In fact, only 4 percent said we had a good motivation in the war on terrorism."

Seventy-four percent said they oppose U.S. military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan.

After American relief efforts following the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan's Kashmir region, 46 percent of Pakistanis had a positive opinion of the United States, according to the poll. But as of last month, only 19 percent reported a favorable opinion.

Meanwhile, al Qaeda has a 43 percent approval rate; the Taliban has a 38 percent approval rate; and local radical extremist groups had an approval rating between 37 percent to 49 percent.

The weak gravitational wave in our 3D universe confirms super string theory and higher dimensions

India Daily Technology Team
Aug. 22, 2007

According to many contemporary physicists, two particles of identical mass attract and repel each other even when there exist no classical external forces and their average relative momentum vanishes. This quantum force depends crucially on the number of dimensions of space.

The fact that the gravitational wave is so weak in our 3D universe is another confirmation that higher dimensions exist. The extraterrestrial phenomena clearly show the existence of much stronger gravitational waves beyond the realm of the outer edge of the universe.

Black Hole singularity is a case where we can go close to higher dimension piercing through the pseudo conduit of our 3D universe. The intensity of the gravitational wave in the black hole is immense.

Hyperspace consists of at least ten or more dimensions. The gravitational wave is thousand times stronger in the quantum vacuum based Hyperspace of much higher dimensions.

One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's

Bacterial to Animal Gene Transfers Now Shown to be Widespread, with Implications for Evolution and Control of Diseases and Pests

MEDIA CONTACT: Jonathan Sherwood (585) 273-4726

Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species.

The research, reported in today's Science, also shows that lateral gene transfer—the movement of genes between unrelated species—may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution.

Such large-scale heritable gene transfers may allow species to acquire new genes and functions extremely quickly, says Jack Werren, a principle investigator of the study. If such genes provide new abilities in species that cause or transmit disease, they could provide new targets for fighting these diseases.

The results also have serious repercussions for genome-sequencing projects. Bacterial DNA is routinely discarded when scientists are assembling invertebrate genomes, yet these genes may very well be part of the organism's genome, and might even be responsible for functioning traits.

"This study establishes the widespread occurrence and high frequency of a process that we would have dismissed as science fiction until just a few years ago," says W. Ford Doolittle, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Microbial Genomics at Dalhousie University, who is not connected to the study. "This is stunning evidence for increased frequency of gene transfer."

"It didn't seem possible at first," says Werren, professor of biology at the University of Rochester and a world-leading authority on the parasite, called Wolbachia. "This parasite has implanted itself inside the cells of 70 percent of the world's invertebrates, coevolving with them. And now, we've found at least one species where the parasite's entire or nearly entire genome has been absorbed and integrated into the host's. The host's genes actually hold the coding information for a completely separate species."

Wolbachia may be the most prolific parasite in the world—a "pandemic," as Werren calls it. The bacterium invades a member of a species, most often an insect, and eventually makes its way into the host's eggs or sperm. Once there, the Wolbachia is ensured passage to the next generation of its host, and any genetic exchanges between it and the host also are much more likely to be passed on.

Since Wolbachia typically live within the reproductive organs of their hosts, Werren reasoned that gene exchanges between the two would frequently pass on to subsequent generations. Based on this and an earlier discovery of a Wolbachia gene in a beetle by the Fukatsu team at the University of Tokyo, Japan, the researchers in Werren's lab and collaborators at J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) decided to systematically screen invertebrates. Julie Dunning-Hotopp at JCVI found evidence that some of the Wolbachia genes seemed to be fused to the genes of the fruitfly, Drosophila ananassae, as if they were part of the same genome.

Michael Clark, a research associate at Rochester then brought a colony of ananassae into Werren's lab to look into the mystery. To isolate the fly's genome from the parasite's, Clark fed the flies a simple antibiotic, killing the Wolbachia. To confirm the ananassae flies were indeed cured of the wolbachia, Clark tested a few samples of DNA for the presence of several Wolbachia genes.

To his dismay, he found them.

"For several months, I thought I was just failing," says Clark. "I kept administering antibiotics, but every single Wolbachia gene I tested for was still there. I started thinking maybe the strain had grown antibiotic resistance. After months of this I finally went back and looked at the tissue again, and there was no Wolbachia there at all."

Clark had cured the fly of the parasite, but a copy of the parasite's genome was still present in the fly's genome. Clark was able to see that Wolbachia genes were present on the second chromosome of the insect.

Clark confirmed that the Wolbachia genes are inherited like "normal" insect genes in the chromosomes, and Dunning-Hotopp showed that some of the genes are "transcribed" in uninfected flies, meaning that copies of the gene sequence are made in cells that could be used to make Wolbachia proteins.

Werren doesn't believe that the Wolbachia "intentionally" insert their genes into the hosts. Rather, it is a consequence of cells routinely repairing their damaged DNA. As cells go about their regular business, they can accidentally absorb bits of DNA into their nuclei, often sewing those foreign genes into their own DNA. But integrating an entire genome was definitely an unexpected find.

"The question is, are these foreign genes providing new functions for the host? This is something we need to figure out."

Werren and Clark are now looking further into the huge insert found in the fruitfly, and whether it is providing a benefit. "The chance that a chunk of DNA of this magnitude is totally neutral, I think, is pretty small, so the implication is that it has imparted of some selective advantage to the host," says Werren. "The question is, are these foreign genes providing new functions for the host? This is something we need to figure out."

Evolutionary biologists will certainly take note of this discovery, but scientists conducting genome-sequencing projects around the world also may have to readjust their thinking.

Before this study, geneticists knew of examples where genes from a parasite had crossed into the host, but such an event was considered a rare anomaly except in very simple organisms. Bacterial DNA is very conspicuous in its structure, so if scientists sequencing a nematode genome, for example, come across bacterial DNA, they would likely discard it, reasonably assuming that it was merely contamination—perhaps a bit of bacteria in the gut of the animal, or on its skin.

But those genes may not be contamination. They may very well be in the host's own genome. This is exactly what happened with the original sequencing of the genome of the anannassae fruitfly—the huge Wolbachia insert was discarded from the final assembly, despite the fact that it is part of the fly's genome.

In the early days of the Human Genome Project, some studies appeared to show bacterial DNA residing in our own genome, but those were shown indeed to be caused by contamination. Wolbachia is not known to infect any vertebrates such as humans.

"Such transfers have happened before in the distant past" notes Werren. "In our very own cells and those of nearly all plants and animals are mitochondria, special structures responsible for generating most of our cells' supply of chemical energy. These were once bacteria that lived inside cells, much like Wolbachia does today. Mitochondria still retain their own, albeit tiny, DNA, and most of the genes moved into the nucleus in the very distant past. Like wolbachia, they have passively exchanged DNA with their host cells. It's possible wolbachia may follow in the path of mitochondria, eventually becoming a necessary and useful part of a cell.

"In a way, wolbachia could be the next mitochondria," says Werren. "A hundred million years from now, everyone may have a wolbachia organelle."

"Well, not us," he laughs. "We'll be long gone, but wolbachia will still be around."

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation's Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research program, which supports large, integrative projects addressing major questions in biology.

Where have all the dolphins gone?

The alarming drop in numbers of the Bay's three most common species of dolphin -- the striped, bottlenose and common -- can be attributed to one or both of two causes, Clive Martin, senior wildlife officer for the Biscay Dolphin Research Programme, told AFP.

"We know for a fact that by-catch is killing thousands of dolphins every year," he said, referring to commercial fishing operations in the bay, which is formed by the northern coast of Spain and the eastern French seaboard up to the tip of Brittany.

Martin singled out French "pair trawlers" that sweep the ocean with huge nets twice the size of a football pitch strung out between them as being especially lethal to the marine mammals.

"Dolphins are sometimes trapped hundreds at a time, and are asphyxiated" when they cannot come up for air, he said. Most dolphins typically replenish their lungs with fresh air every five minutes or so, he explained.

The second -- and probably more important -- reason that dolphins have disappeared is that there is simply very little left for them to eat.

"Anchovy fishing in the Bay of Biscay has progressively failed, and this year there is a complete ban by Spain, France and the United Kingdom on the fishing of anchovies," a principal food source for dolphins, Clive said.

He speculated that the roving sea mammals -- which swim in pods numbering in the dozens for bottlenose dolphins, and sometimes in the thousands for the common dolphin -- had moved west toward the mid-Atlantic looking for food.

A sharp decrease in the presence of many seabirds that also feed on fish -- such as auks, shearwaters and gannets -- lends support to this explanation.

The Bay of Biscay Research Programme has been systematically recording dolphin sightings along the same route from Bilbao, Spain to Portsmouth, England for 13 years.

Compared to the comparable period in 2004 and 2005, dolphin sightings in 2007 have decreased by 50 percent, he said.

The Bay of Biscay hosts a greater variety of dolphin populations than any other part of the world's oceans. Clive suggested that policy makers should consider transforming the area into a sanctuary for marine life.

© 2007 AFP

Unravelling The Random Fluctuations Of Nothing

Science Daily — The dream of theoretical physics is to unite behind a common theory that explains everything, but that goal has remained highly elusive. String theory emerged 40 years ago as one of the most promising candidates for such a theory, and has since slipped in and out of favour as new innovations have occurred.

Now Europe is fortunate to have one of the world’s leading experts in string theory working on an ambitious project that could make significant progress towards a unified theory, and at least help resolve two mysteries. One is how the universe emerged in the beginning as a random fluctuation of a vacuum state, and the other is a common explanation for all sub-atomic particles.

Czech physicist Dr. Martin Schnabl has been selected to receive a EURYI Award by the European science Foundation (ESF) and the European Heads of Research Councils (EuroHORCS) to help him pursue his project and build on five years of hard work culminating in the solution of an equation in string field theory that had gone unsolved for 20 years.

The elegance and beauty of the solution have been widely praised in a field that is highly regarded for its aesthetic appeal, drawing together many important concepts in mathematics and physics. The EURYI Awards scheme, entering its fourth and final year, aims to attract outstanding young researchers from anywhere in the world to work in Europe for the further development of European science, contributing to building up the next generation of leading European researchers.

String theory was developed in an attempt to bring together the physics of the big and the small, represented respectively by general relativity and quantum mechanics. It replaces the idea of elementary particles occupying a single zero point with a one dimensional string joining two points. In this sense a string, like a particle, is a model designed to represent or predict particular fundamental properties of the physical universe.

But while the number of particles continued to grow, the string was an attempt to join them all together, leading to the idea of a string field. This field represents all particles as vibrations of a string at given frequencies. The string field is then the sum total of all vibrations, elegantly bringing all particles together into one, so that physicists no longer need to be embarrassed by the discovery of yet another particle type.

“It's a sort of field theory for the infinite tower of oscillatory modes of a string, each of them representing different particle species,” Schnabl said. As Schnabl observed, string field theory, by explaining also how quantum mechanics is compatible with general relativity, is essential for understanding what goes on in situations where both of these are playing together.

“It is important in the regimes where quantum gravity is important, such as black holes and the beginning of the universe,” added Schnabl. In both cases, dimensions can be small, requiring quantum mechanics, but energies and mass are enormous, creating huge gravitational fields that currently can only be dealt with by general relativity.

One of the problems of string field theory lies in conducting experiments that test predictions or help inspire new theoretical developments. The theory predicts that the universe has 10 dimensions, of which four are the ones we observe in spacetime. Yet in 40 years no better candidate has emerged to explain the properties of the universe, or all universes, at all scales of time and distance. Furthermore the string field has a habit of feeding the rest of physics and mathematics by virtue of lying at the cutting edge of analytical reason. This is why it should interest lay people as well, insisted Schnabl. “The very general public can be interested if they enjoy watching mankind's advances in understanding some of the deepest questions about the nature of our universe.”

Schnabl, a 34 year-old Czech scientist, is a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. He will be conducting his research at the Institute of Physics Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic after receiving his award in Helsinki, Finland on 27 September 2007 with other 19 young researchers.

After wiretapping victory, Bush says he wants more authority from Congress

Michael Roston
Published: Monday August 6, 2007

The day after President George W. Bush marshaled political forces in Congress to grant him greater authority to engage in counterterrorism-related spying, the president stated that he would seek greater changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when the legislative branch returns to work in September.

"While I appreciate the leadership it took to pass this bill, we must remember that our work is not done," the President said in his Sunday statement. "This bill is a temporary, narrowly focused statute to deal with the most immediate shortcomings in the law."

The President said next month he would focus on further immunizing private companies that cooperate with government wiretapping. However, he used complicated language to describe these activities.

"When Congress returns in September the Intelligence committees and leaders in both parties will need to complete work on the comprehensive reforms requested by Director McConnell, including the important issue of providing meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001," he said.

One constitutional scholar derided Bush's reasoning, particularly the tortuous language in his statement.

"Apparently 'allegedly helped us stay safe' is Bush Administration code for telecom companies and government officials who participated in a conspiracy to perform illegal surveillance," wrote Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin in a Monday morning blog post. "Because what they did is illegal, we do not admit that they actually did it, we only say that they are alleged to have done it."

Balkin also offered another amusing interpretation of Bush's words.

"Or perhaps the Administration is suggesting that although such parties are alleged to have helped the country stay safe, there's no evidence that their repeated violations of federal law actually did much to promote our security," he quipped.

Last week, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell made a related appeal, appearing to acknowledge that telecommunications companies had not only 'allegedly' assisted the government in its wiretapping activities.

"[T]hose who assist the Government in protecting us from harm must be protected from liability," he said in a Friday statement. "This includes those who are alleged to have assisted the Government after September 11, 2001 and have helped keep the country safe....I appreciate the commitment of the congressional leadership to address this particular issue immediately upon the return of Congress in September 2007."

And for one top Congressional advocate of Bush's proposed wiretapping 'reforms,' the participation of telecommunication companies in government spying was not described as an allegation at all.

"These are companies who were doing the patriotic thing," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in an interview with Paul Gigot for Fox News's Journal Editorial Report on Saturday night. "They were helping the U.S. government, the American people, get the information that we believe we needed to keep us safe. They voluntarily participated, and now that the program is exposed, they've been open to all kinds of lawsuits."

Meanwhile, pundits were already building the case for expanding liability protections for telecommunications companies that help the government spy.

"The new legislation does not go far enough because, while it addresses liability for telecommunications companies under FISA, it does not look at companies' liabilities under other laws," wrote Harold Furchtgott-Roth, a former Federal Communications Commission commisioner, in a Monday article in the New York Sun. "This is an important point because the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have many legal cases against various communications companies for cooperating with the federal government on many matters outside FISA."

Hoekstra in a statement released to RAW STORY Saturday night after the House passed his legislation said that, "he would use momentum from Congressional Republicans’ efforts to fix FISA to push for comprehensive reform of the law to...obtain retroactive liability for parties who may have aided the government."

But Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also stated her own plan to pass legislation in September with the intention of countering the changes enacted by the President's allies in Congress.

"Tonight, the House passed S. 1927, a bill approved by the Senate yesterday, which is an interim response to the Administration’s request for changes in FISA, and which was sought to fill an intelligence gap which is asserted to exist," the Speaker said in a Saturday letter to the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees. "Many provisions of this legislation are unacceptable, and, although the bill has a six month sunset clause, I do not believe the American people will want to wait that long before corrective action is taken."

She therefore called on the committees, "as soon as possible after Congress reconvenes," to pass "legislation which responds comprehensively to the Administration’s proposal while addressing the many deficiencies in S. 1927."

Why Media have little time, tolerance for 'second-tier' candidates

Clear the Stage

By Peter Hart

With the public still many months away from choosing major-party presidential candidates, robust public debates with a wide sampling from across the political spectrum would seem to be an empowering democratic exercise. And for a press corps so often complaining about the scripted and stilted tedium of day-to-day political campaigning, wide-open debates and a freewheeling exchange of ideas might make for good TV.

But many journalists seem not to agree. In the coverage of the early candidate debates, the media have fallen into a familiar pattern of trying to “weed out” candidates who do not meet the press corps’ ideological preferences (Extra!, 9–10/03). The most vigorous weeding, as usual, has been directed at left-leaning Democrats, but the media outrage when Rep. Ron Paul (R.-Texas) raised questions about the “war on terror” demonstrated that the media’s insistence on ideological orthodoxy is unfortunately bipartisan.

In the wake of the first Democratic candidates’ debate (MSNBC, 4/26/07), many media outlets and commentators seemed annoyed that the so-called “second-tier” candidates were even bothering to run. As FAIR has noted (Extra! Update, 6/07), early election polls are very bad at predicting the eventual nominee, so it’s unwise to use them to determine which candidates are viable front-runners and which campaigns are merely a nuisance.

That’s not the way it’s seen by many Washington pundits, though—at least when it comes to Democrats. The Los Angeles Times argued (4/27/07) that the wide format of one Democrats’ debate “allowed each candidate a total of 11 minutes to talk—giving [Ohio Rep. Dennis] Kucinich and [former Senator of Alaska Mike] Gravel, both of whom have a negligible showing in polls, equal time with the front-runners, which they used to take aggressive hits at [New York Sen. Hillary] Clinton and [Illinois Sen. Barack] Obama.”

It’s not merely about polling, of course—if that were true, the media would be just as scornful of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson or Sen. Joe Biden (D.-Del.), who both lurk near the bottom in national surveys. The problem is that the press sees some of the lesser candidates as potentially shifting the debate. As Washington Post columnist David Broder lamented (6/7/07):

Prodded by four long shots for the nomination and threatened by the rhetoric of former senator John Edwards, a serious contender, the two front-runners, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have abandoned their cautious advocacy of a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces and now are defending votes to cut off support for troops fighting insurgents in Iraq.

Broder can take comfort in the fact that this “threatening” rhetoric isn’t actually given much debate time; while Kucinich and Gravel were asked only eight questions in the April 26 debate, “front-runners” Clinton, Obama and former vice presidential candidate John Edwards each received 12. No doubt aware of this disparity, Sen. Chris Dodd’s campaign took the unusual approach of counting up airtime in the June 3 debate. The disparities were more or less in line with the polling—top-tier candidates spoke more than the also-rans, with the debate moderator—CNN’s Wolf Blitzer—logging 13 minutes of time, more than all candidates except Clinton and Obama.

After that debate, CNN’s Howard Kurtz (4/29/07) seemed annoyed media were paying any attention at all to Gravel: “He was sort of a bomb-thrower on that stage. Why should a network allow somebody with, say, zero chance of becoming president into these debates?”

CBS’s Bob Schieffer lodged a similar complaint (Face the Nation, 4/29/07): “Is it fair to have all these people out there? I mean, it is a free country. Everybody [who] wants to run for president should have that opportunity and does. But clearly, somebody like former Sen. Mike Gravel is not going to be a serious candidate, and yet he gets equal time, and . . . I would just say it honestly: In my view, it just wastes time.”

While Schieffer may see an inclusive debate as time wasted, MSNBC host Chris Matthews pinpointed the importance of including “second-tier” candidates when he asked Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod (4/26/07) if he thought his candidate “was hampered” by Gravel and Kucinich’s “radical critique . . . it made your guy seem more like he was part of the establishment than he would like to have seemed?”

Often reporters and pundits act, when they’re trying to winnow the field, as if they’re only aiming to improve the democratic process. But Matthews’ question recognizes that there is a sizable segment of the population whose dissatisfaction with mainstream party politics wouldn’t be included at all in the national debate if it weren’t for the “second tier.”

The initial reaction to lesser-known Republican candidates appearing in debates was quite different. After the GOP debate, the L. A. Times editorialized (5/4/07), “The breadth of small-fries in the field makes it hard to define a coherent Republican message, but that’s a sign of intellectual ferment in the troubled GOP.”

When three of the GOP contenders signaled their doubts about evolution, the Washington Post helpfully noted (5/6/07) that “a look at public polling on the issue reveals that the three men aren’t far from the mainstream in that belief.” And in an online column, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman declared (5/3/07): “Let’s hear it for the ‘second-’ and ‘third-’ tier presidential candidates. . . . If you know, as I do, some of the other, putatively lesser, GOP contenders, you have to be impressed with the depth of their political passion, their knowledge and even their track records. They represent, in undiluted form, the vivid primary colors of the conservative movement.”

The contrast was striking: The lesser-known (and generally more conservative) Republican candidates were cheered for participating in the process, while the Democratic candidates who represent more progressive ideals were derided for taking up the time of other, more worthy candidates. And once a candidate is deemed worthy of the “top tier,” they’re more often given a pass on things that might sink a lesser rival. When GOP contender Mitt Romney, for example, made a bizarre claim during a June 5 debate about Saddam Hussein barring weapons inspectors from Iraq prior to the March 2003 invasion, the gaffe was all but invisible in the post-debate press (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/8/07).

But there are still ideological pitfalls for a Republican lesser-known, as Ron Paul discovered during another Republican debate (5/15/07). Paul dared to raise a taboo subject: al Qaeda’s stated reasons for the September 11 attacks. “They attack us because we’ve been over there, we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years,” Paul said. “We’ve been in the Middle East. . . . Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us?”

GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani responded by saying he’d never heard such an “absurd explanation” for the September 11 attacks, “that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq”—a response that got sustained applause from the audience, and much the same from the press corps.

The media reacted strongly in support of Giuliani. Fox News Channel’s John Gibson scored a twofer (5/17/07) by mangling Paul’s words (“Paul suggested that the U.S. actually had a hand in the terrorist attacks”) and then linking him to the Democratic Party, citing a poll that claims many Democrats “think President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand. . . . It wouldn’t have stunned me had it come up in the Democratic debate, but it’s a jaw-dropper to see it in the Republican debate.” Time magazine’s Joe Klein (5/17/07) declared it to be Paul’s “singular moment of weirdness,” and stated that Giuliani “reduced Paul to history.”

Lost amidst the media excitement over Giuliani’s response was whether or not Paul was correct. The Nation’s John Nichols wrote a column (5/16/07) pointing out that Paul’s argument more or less echoed the findings of the 9/11 Commission, which noted that Osama bin Laden had called in 1996 for Muslims to drive U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia—whose mission there was largely to support air patrols over Iraq—and that subsequent statements rallied followers to oppose U.S. policy in Israel/Palestine and Iraq. Such discussions are common in academic and policy circles, but not so in the mainstream media.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews declared (5/16/07) that “Ron Paul has a big problem,” saying that while it was important for Americans to “understand the simmering hatred and the hostility, the sea of hostility, over there,” Paul’s comments were unacceptable on factual grounds: “You can’t say it’s because we put troops in Iraq, over the no-fly zone, because they tried to blow up that same building back in ’93, before all these skirmishes over the no-fly zone. You can’t say that particular argument.”

Paul actually made no reference to the no-fly zones in his debate remarks. But if that’s what Matthews thought Paul was referring to, the cable news host should be aware that the no-fly policy was first declared in 1991, and that there was an extensive series of air raids in support of the no-fly zones in January 1993—a month before the 1993 attack.

When Paul convened a press conference on May 24 at the National Press Club featuring former CIA terrorism expert Michael Scheuer, the press ignored the event, although reporters have interviewed Scheurer regularly for several years. The fact that Scheuer essentially agrees with Paul’s premise, as he explained to AntiWar radio (5/18/07), might explain the media’s fickleness.

CNN host Howard Kurtz (5/20/07) slammed Paul’s “unorthodox theory” about the September 11 attacks, declaring that “news organizations are allowing ego-driven fringe candidates to muck up debates among those with an actual shot at the White House.” The real problem isn’t that Ron Paul can’t win the White House, or that progressive candidates might “muck up” a debate; if anything, they’ve started a debate the media don’t want to have.

Time May Not Exist

Not to mention the question of which way it goes... by Tim Folger

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10^-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-­DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”

No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.

The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

“It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he answers, “Beats me. Are we done?”) “The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.”

The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.

Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality.

By “big things,” Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious Planck scale. As of now there is no physical theory that completely describes what the universe is like below the Planck scale. One possibility is that if physicists ever manage to unify quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be described by some modified version of quantum mechanics. In such a theory, space and time would no longer be smooth and continuous. Rather, they would consist of discrete fragments—quanta, in the argot of physics—just as light is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. These would be the building blocks of space and time. It’s not easy to imagine space and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and time exist, if not in space and time?

As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. “Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,” says Rovelli. “There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.”

Rovelli has been working with one of the world’s leading mathematicians, Alain Connes of the College of France in Paris, on this notion. Together they have developed a framework to show how the thing we experience as time might emerge from a more fundamental, timeless reality. As Rovelli describes it, “Time may be an approximate concept that emerges at large scales—a bit like the concept of ‘surface of the water,’ which makes sense macroscopically but which loses a precise sense at the level of the atoms.”

Realizing that his explanation may only be deepening the mystery of time, Rovelli says that much of the knowledge that we now take for granted was once considered equally perplexing. “I realize that the picture is not intuitive. But this is what fundamental physics is about: finding new ways of thinking about the world and proposing them and seeing if they work. I think that when Galileo said that the Earth was spinning crazily around, it was utterly incomprehensible in the same manner. Space for Copernicus was not the same as space for Newton, and space for Newton was not the same as space for Einstein. We always learn a little bit more.”

Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Rovelli senses another temporal breakthrough just around the corner. “Einstein’s 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people’s thinking about space-time. We’re again in the middle of something like that,” he says. When the dust settles, time—whatever it may be—could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine.

Is a second black hole lurking in the Milky Way's heart?

• Maggie McKee

NewScientist.com news service 07:04 24 July 2007

Bush Outlaws All War Protest In United States

Posted by Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscr on Thursday, July 19th at 5:00 PM July 19, 2007

In one of his most chilling moves to date against his own citizens, the American War Leader has issued a sweeping order this week outlawing all forms of protest against the Iraq war.

President Bush enacted into US law an ‘Executive Order’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order_%28United_States%29 on July
17th titled "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq", http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070717-3.html and which says:

"By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29,
2004."

According to Russian legal experts, the greatest concern to the American people are the underlying provisions of this new law, and which, they state, are written ‘so broadly’ as to outlaw all forms of protest against the war. These provisions state:

"(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

(c) the term "United States person" means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.

All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order and, where appropriate, to advise the Secretary of the Treasury in a timely manner of the measures taken."

To the subsection of this new US law, according to these legal experts, that says "...the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit...", the insertion of the word ‘services ’ has broad, and catastrophic, consequences for the American people in that any act deemed by their government to be against the Iraqi war is, in fact, supporting the ‘enemy’ and therefore threatens the ‘stabilization of Iraq’.

In an even greater affront to the American people are the provisions of a law called The Patriot Act, http://www.aclu.org/safefree/resources/17343res20031114.html and that should they run afoul of this new law they are forbidden to allow anyone to know about it, and as we can read as reported by the Seattle Times News Service: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/2002527215_patrioted29.html

"The [Patriot] act also expands the use of National Security Letters, which are a kind of warrant that the Justice Department writes for itself, authorizing its agents to seize such things as records of money movements, telephone calls and Internet visits. Recipients of a National Security Letter are not allowed to tell anyone about them, and so cannot contest them."

It is interesting to note, too, that this is not the first time that the United States has unleashed the brutal power of their government against its citizens to further their war aims and stifle domestic dissent, as during the European conflict of World War I they enacted a law called The Sedition Act of 1918 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918 and which "...forbade Americans to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, flag, or armed forces during war."

It is curious to note that after the enactment of this new law there has been no protest by any of the other political leaders in the United States, with the exception of the only Muslim member of the United States Congress, Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison, http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2007/07/17/critics_muslim_rep_likened_bush_hitler/6980/ and who compared President Bush to the Nazi War Leader Adolph Hitler by stating the attacks upon the World Trade Center could be likened to the burning of the Reichstag.

Today, as the United States faces an imminent economic collapse, http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1019.htm while at the same time its war bill has reached the staggering amount of $648 billion, http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation/story/194233.html one of the last freedoms the American people have had to protest their leaders actions against them, and other peoples in the World, has now been taken away from them, the freedom to speak and write in opposition to what is being done to them.

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear", http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_orwell.html said the great British writer George Orwell, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell but, and sadly, liberty has been lost to the once free people of the United States who are no longer allowed to tell their leaders, or each other, what they don’t want to hear.

With this being so, the American people should, likewise, contemplate their ‘new’ future, and as, also, stated best by George Orwell, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_orwell.html

Music licensing companies come calling for royalties

Local venues, artists miffed

BY JOHN A. TORRES
FLORIDA TODAY

Six months after raising the curtain on their gourmet coffee shop in the beachside Indian Harbour Place shopping center, Laurie and Jim Hall decided to offer live music on Friday and Saturday nights.

The performers, normally duos, mainly covered songs written and made famous by other musicians. There was no cover charge, no pay for the musicians, no limit to how long patrons could sit on a couch with their coffee, playing chess and enjoying the music.

No problem.

Then a few months later, music industry giant ASCAP started calling and sending letters saying East Coast Coffee & Tea was in violation of copyright laws. The fee to continue the music was $400 a year.

"At the time, the shop was losing money, so we had to break it up into payments," said Laurie Hall. But the Halls paid, and the music continued.

Six months later, other music copyright companies began calling the Halls and demanding money. Most days there would be three or four phone calls from each company, Hall said. Finally, unable to afford the fees, she had to call most of her musicians -- those who did not play original music -- and tell them they would not be allowed to continue performing.

This aggressive -- but legal -- posture being taken by music licensing companies has the potential to unplug live music in many restaurants, bars and coffee shops in Brevard County.

It comes on the heels of a massive music industry crackdown during the past several years on illegal downloads from the Internet. Whether it's a professional recording taken from a Web site or an accordion player singing a Jimmy Buffet tune in a small venue, the industry is working to collect royalties for whoever wrote the songs.

"They have threatened to shut down my place," said Lou Andrus, owner of the popular beachside nightclub Lou's Blues.

Copyright laws

When a songwriter signs with one of the licensing companies -- the country's three biggest are BMI, SESAC and ASCAP -- his or her music is copyrighted.

Unless Hall pays the three major companies, and even some of the smaller ones, she would be breaking the law by having musicians perform songs written by others.

"It makes me so angry," Hall said. "People like playing here because it's not a bar, there's no smoke and it's a clean environment. I feel like the greedy music industry is extorting money from us and hurting these musicians just starting out."

In addition to the $400 she has already paid ASCAP, she routinely receives annual bills from BMI for $305 and from SESAC for between $250 and $300.

She doesn't understand why a little coffee shop is in the same "eating/drinking establishment" category as places where music is more front and center, such as Lou's Blues or Meg O'Malley's in downtown Melbourne. Hall said she likely will start offering music just one night a week.

SESAC spokesman Shawn Williams said in e-mail responses to questions that it is his company's responsibility to enforce copyright laws, many of which were enacted nearly a century ago.

"The copyright law requires each business that publicly performs music to obtain permission prior to performing any copyrighted music," Williams said, adding that the owners of East Coast Coffee need to decide whether music "is important to their operations and overall profitability. We have many license agreements with small establishments."

Williams defends the money collected.

"This provides the majority of income to songwriters," he said.

Run-ins

Andrus, the owner of Lou's Blues, said he has had many run-ins with the copyright companies over the years.

"It started 15 years ago when I had a guy come out to our other place, Cantina dos Amigos, and play Mexican music on his guitar on the patio," Andrus said. "They came after me for money. Are they really sending royalty checks to the songwriter in Mexico?"

Andrus said he pays BMI and ASCAP about $3,000 a year but is ignoring the smaller companies that seek royalties from him.

"There are so many damned companies you don't know who to pay," he said. "One guy called and said I had to pay him if I played any gospel music at all. It's really a mess."

Hall insists that her coffee shop makes no extra money when the musicians play. Unlike a bar where patrons may imbibe several cocktails during the course of the night, her customers normally order one cup of coffee per performance.

But Andrus and others who refuse to pay could find themselves paying anyway -- in the form of fines.

"The law provides damages ranging from $750 to $150,000 for each song performed without proper authorization," Williams said.

And in no way do the songs have to be performed live, or even on the radio, to elicit calls for royalties.

Andrus said a friend of his who owned a restaurant that did not feature music was contacted by a company looking to charge him because it owned the rights to a Hank Williams Jr. song, "Are You Ready for Some Football?" The song preceded every "Monday Night Football" telecast, which the restaurant carried on its televisions.

He said his friend simply chose to turn the volume down when the song came on.

The licensing companies use a variety of methods to find out whether copyrighted music is being used.

"ASCAP representatives may visit establishments and find that they advertise live entertainment," explained Richard Reimer, senior vice president of ASCAP, in an e-mail. "Local newspapers carry advertisements for venues that present live entertainment and, of course, the Internet is a valuable resource as well."

A Woman's Poem and a Man's

WOMAN'S POEM

Before I lay me down to sleep,
I pray for a man, who's not a creep,
One who's handsome, smart and strong.
One who loves to listen long,
One who thinks before he speaks,
One who'll call, not wait for weeks.
I pray he's gainfully employed,
When I spend his cash, won't be annoyed.
Pulls out my chair and opens my door,
Massages my back and begs to do more.
Oh! Send me a man who'll make love to my mind,
Knows what to answer to "how big is my behind?"
I pray that this man will love me to no end,
And always be my very best friend.

MAN'S POEM
I pray for a deaf-mute nymphomaniac with huge boobs who owns a liquor
store and a golf course. This doesn't rhyme and I don't care.

Searching for Big Foot

MANISTIQUE, Michigan (AP) -- Researchers will visit Michigan's Upper Peninsula next month to search for evidence of the legendary creature known as "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch."

The expedition will focus on eastern Marquette County, said Matthew Moneymaker of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

"We'll be looking for evidence supporting a presence. ... We hope to meet local people who might have seen a Sasquatch or heard of someone else who had an encounter," Moneymaker told the Daily Press of Escanaba.

The legend of Bigfoot dates back centuries. But skeptics have challenged accounts of sightings, and practical jokers have staged hoaxes that have included grainy film footage of people dressed in costumes.

But Moneymaker said members of his organization have either glimpsed Bigfoot or gotten close enough to hear the creature in all but three of 30 expeditions in the United States and Canada.

The late Grover Krantz, a Washington State University professor who specialized in cryptozoology, the study of creatures that have not been proven to exist, believed Bigfoot was a "gigantopithecus," a branch of primitive man believed to have existed 3 million years ago.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-E. E. Cummings

A World Apart

To Charlie

Dear Charlie,

I’m going to miss you. I will cherish the memories of playing you in chess, tennis and any outside activity. Remember when you came out and played volleyball behind my dad’s house after being released from the hospital. You always had a laid back demeanor and an air of intelligence around you.

It touched me when you told me a few weeks back that you where looking at our wedding album, which you shot, and told me that it was a one of the best things you have ever done. Kelly and I can’t thank you enough for that and I couldn’t have known a better photographer.

You’ve impacted so many people throughout your life and each will have their own special memories of you. I’ll prize mine. Have the chessboard set when next we meet.


David Arroyo Gillett

TorrentSpy Now Tracking Visitors

A court decision reached last month but under seal until Friday could force Web sites to track visitors if the sites become defendants in a lawsuit.

TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search engine, was ordered on May 29 by a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles to create logs detailing users' activities on the site. The judge, Jacqueline Chooljian, however, granted a stay of the order on Friday to allow TorrentSpy to file an appeal. The appeal must be filed by June 12, according to Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney.

TorrentSpy has promised in its privacy policy never to track visitors without their consent.

"It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users," Rothken said. "If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise."

The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Columbia Pictures and other top Hollywood film studios, sued TorrentSpy and a host of others in February 2006 as part of a sweep against file-sharing companies. According to the MPAA, the search engine was sued for allegedly making it easier to download pirated files. Representatives of the trade group could not be reached for comment.

The court's decision could have a chilling effect on e-commerce and digital entertainment sites, said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He calls the ruling "unprecedented."

EFF, which advocates for the public in digital rights' cases, is still reviewing the court's decision, but von Lohmann calls what he's seen so far a "troubling court order."

This is believed to be the first time a judge has ordered a defendant to log visitor activity and then hand over the information to the plaintiff.

"In general, a defendant is not required to create new records to hand over in discovery," von Lohmann said. "We shouldn't let Web site logging policies be set by litigation."

Many Web companies keep visitor logs, which can include Internet Protocol addresses, as well as other information. Some choose not to record this data, including EFF, von Lohmann said.

Source: ShoutWire.com