For instance, even if "a corporation" does not have "the right to free speech", they can simply pay an employee to use their right to free speech on their behalf.
...at which point that employee would have sold his right to free speech to that corporation and would no longer be granted the free speech rights that individual persons enjoy (at least for that portion of his speech for which he was paid). Paid speech isn't free speech.
Just add these four simple words (which should be common sense but I guess it has to be spelled out for some people) to the Constitution:
Corporations are not persons.
Bam! No more first amendment issues. No more campaign finance issues. No more rooted government.
I was with you up until this: It's a democracy (roughly). It's perfectly legal for the majority to oppress and condemn the actions of the minority, especially when the minority is not any specific culturally or racially defined block of people.
Define "oppress." Those are some extremely dangerous thoughts you got there, brother. Most atrocities of the twentieth century grew out of beliefs like that.
Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence or outright stupidity.
Why? Are you assuming there aren't malicious people in this world? Living by aphorisms implies that not much critical thinking is going on. Where malice is indicated, ascribe it as such. Incompetence and stupidity notwithstanding.
Thanks, Bev, for being so diligent and credible on this whole issue. When one tries to point out that things like this will happen if there is no oversight, they normally get the tin-foil hat thrust upon them. So many people are willing to just bury their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong. "It's the way we do things in 'Merica so that means it's good, righteous, and holy." "Don't worry, be happy" seems to be the mantra. Just look at the parent to your post. Say everything's fine - get modded up to a 5. Point out very specifically (with proof) that things aren't fine - nobody notices (you're lucky you didn't get modded down, actually.) It's like the whole country is on Prozac. What does one have to do to get them to take notice? Ah, I know. We need to own a giant brainwashing media conglomerate. Let's get started on that. Good luck, and thanks again. Keep up the good work. Democracy needs you.
Yes. Anything that doesn't result in more profit to corporations is simply "emotionalism." We must not let emotionalism interfere with our quests for oil, money, and power. We must stomp our Jack boots on those who would point out the seedy underbelly of our crusade. Eliminate emotions! We will be profitable!
Or perhaps they meant Titan is in temporal (time-related) flux like in some Star Trek episode? Yes, that one. It is, in fact, in temporal flux. You are, too. Do you have a watch or a clock with a second hand? See how it moves like that? Spooky, huh?
...as it is the regulations that are highly catered to the large corporations...like welfare programs (an addicted and malleable lower class).
Oh, please. Corporations despise welfare because it keeps people from becoming completely beholden to them. Corporations lust after cheap labor. If they could eliminate welfare they could keep people over a barrel and make them work for pennies because workers would know they would starve without a job. In fact, if you look at the conservative political agenda, you can see that their entire economic policy is geared toward creating a cheap, desperate labor force. Welfare works against that agenda by providing people with a safety net. And if you don't think politicians are aiming for cheap labor, ask yourself why nothing is ever done about illegal immigration. It's a dirty little secret that our economy is perched on the backs of a desperate underground labor market. They'd like the rest of us to join that labor pool.
What we need is a gradual and steady reversal of the many power-grabs performed by the government over the last century.
The government was created of the people, by the people and for the people. It's not working that way now, but are you arguing for a reversal of the power of the people? Be advised that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If government power is taken away, corporate power will quickly take its place. Some would argue that this is already happening. I happen to be one of the people that the constitution gives government power to, as in "We the people." I'm certainly not anxious to hand that power over to corporations. We don't need to give away our power, we need to take it back and use it for the good of the people instead of the good of the corporations.
I'll finish with a quote: WE, the PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Doctors walking off the job because malpractice costs have gotten too high in some states, I suppose that's a fiction...
I have two questions for you. - Who sets malpractice premiums, trial lawyers or insurance corporations? - In states that have implemented malpractice caps, have insurance corporations lowered their premiums? You've been duped again. Insurance corporations are blaming their problems (stock market losses) on the weakest among us, the sick and injured. They want to guarantee their profits by eliminating any risk but risk is why insurance exists. People pay insurance companies specifically to assume the risks of our activities (driving, owning a home, cutting into peoples' bodies). Why should they be able to socialize the risk but privatize the profit?
If you have one or two illegal MP3 files, you can get nailed for $50,000 by the RIAA... You're just helping to make my point for me. The RIAA has rooted the government and bought itself a law (the DMCA) that gives copyright holders "supercitizen" status. Corporations can now issue a subpoena without help from a judge. Can you or I do that? No, because we're just simple citizens and they are supercitizens.
The only thing likely to work is massive civil disobedience. The only problem with that, though, is that they've already considered that and have implemented mechanisms to counter it. Don't think for a minute that the Patriot act is aimed at fighting terrorism. It's meant to be used against US citizens to prevent 1960's-style activism from upsetting their applecart. At least someone is learning from history.:/
OMG! The corporate propaganda machine has been working overtime on you. The lawsuit crisis is a total fiction perpetrated by corporations trying to protect their ill-gotten profits. Demonizing trial lawyers is their favorite weapon because lawyers can be used for good or ill and all they have to do is highlight the bad actors. Killing "tort reform" is one of the good things trial lawyers are doing. So-called "tort reform" is just the corporations' attempt to close the court house doors to the citizens. That's especially grievous because the other two branches of government have already been closed to us. What avenue will citizens have to petition their government for a redress of grievances once the courthouse doors are welded shut by "tort reform?"
Citizens can't afford to "talk" to their representatives. The only thing politicians listen to is money because that's the only thing that will keep them in office. Write to the president and all you'll get is your name placed on a list of suspects to be checked out when the Patriot II act is passed. If you don't thing government regulatory agencies have been rooted by corporations then I have two words for you... Stephen Griles. Quit living in free-market fantasy land. We've lost control of our government to corporations and they'll do anything and everything to keep us from getting it back.
We are looking at a problem with government, not the corporations...
Exactly. And the problem with government is that it's been taken over by the corporations. "We the people" no longer run the government so corporations are getting out of control. Extremely bad behavior is being rewarded with extremely high profits (Microsoft) or increased stock prices (SCO).
Unfortunately most govt agencies are incompetant,...
Incompetence isn't the problem. The regulatory agencies have been captured by the corporations they're supposed to be regulating. The agencies are also under a starvation attack from lawmakers who love to cut the budgets of any agency that pisses off their corporate owners.
Corporation have WAY too much control over the legal process and society. They're wielding their greed-drunk power without any thought for anything except their profit. Remember "No Face" from Spirited Away? Think about it. Better to keep them out of the bath house.
Grrrrr! The angry capitalist speaks! Who said anything about VIA paying for anything? This thread is about a guy using his own industrious labor to open a channel to speak to a previously closed chip architecture. Are you just mad that a man would actually use his labor to help the public at large rather than hording the gains to himself and biting the fingers off of anyone who would touch it? It just makes you guys sick to see anyone express a streak of altruism, doesn't it? Your path is the way toward tyranny by the rich and corporate feudalism. His is the way toward freedom and enlightenment. Money isn't everything. We are human beings not faceless consumers.
Dude, in case you haven't noticed, the government isn't enforcing environmental law anymore. Take mountaintop removal mining, for instance. The Clean Water Act says that you can't dump waste into a stream or degrade it's quality but coal mining corporations blast away entire mountain groups in a watershed and fill up the steams of Appalachia with the waste to the tune of about 1000 miles of streams completely lost and buried so far. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act says that a strip mine must return the land to it's "approximate original contour" unless the flattened land is to be used for some value-added purpose. The mining corporations claim the nearly sterile plains of grasslands they leave in place of hardwood forested mountains and streams are an improved "fish and wildlife habitat." Well, I guess there may be some fish left in those streams crushed underneath all that mining waste. If you're gonna ding somebody for being concerned about whether an operation has their environmental ducks in a row, learn how the law is enforced in the real world.
It's hilarious that someone used a mod point to mod this comment down. I'm sure I speak for all the readers here when I say that we're all truly sorry that you (the modder) were traumatized by a toilet prank at some point in your life. Hopefully, one day you'll be able to read about toilet pranks without that burning urge to kill someone.
It's a fallacy to believe that one brain is superior to another just because it may be wired a little differently. If what you say is true, it just goes to show that dyslexics process information differently rather than showing that a non-dyslexic brain is hindered in some way. An example is the disease (or injury) that prevents people from forgetting (I think it's called hypernesia.) While it might seem like an advantage to be able to remember every single detail of your life, it's actually quite debilitating because your brain becomes so cluttered with triviality that you're unable to focus on what's important and what isn't. In your description of the mechanism behind dyslexia, suppose you're a hunter and you see an animal 20-meters ahead of you. A dyslexic brain would rotate the scene around until the hunter didn't know which way to throw the spear. It would seem, in this case, that the "limitation" of not arbitrarily rotating images around in our minds is actually a valuable trait.
Why doesn't NASA sponsor an X-Prize type contest where the first team to recover the Hubble gets to keep it under the same terms as the copyright of a new Disney movie. That would spur private space transportation development, save the Hubble from fiery death, and create pressure to shorten the terms on copyrights.
Don't know if you're still reading or not, but here's an article from today's paper...
'We're enemies now' Mine runoff has Boone countians opposing Big Coal
By Tara Tuckwiller STAFF WRITER
SYLVESTER -- Last week, Jimmy Dickens worried more than usual about the water his 4-year-old daughter bathes in, brushes her teeth with and drinks.
Independence Coal Co., a Massey Energy Co. subsidiary, had leaked 250,000 gallons of heavy metal-contaminated "blackwater" into a nearby stream, and then didn't tell anybody.
By the time a local resident noticed the grayish water, called the state Department of Environmental Protection, then the Sylvester water plant found out, called somebody who called a neighbor who called Dickens's sister-in-law who called him -- it was a day after the spill, and the Dickens family had been gulping contaminated water all the while. - advertisement-
Ten miles away, Maria Pitzer had problems of her own. It had barely begun to mist rain, and suddenly the creek in front of her house rose two feet.
Of course, the creek hadn't been itself since June. That's when a heavy rain washed off a strip mine on the hill above Pitzer's 50-year-old house and slashed a ravine through her yard, 12 feet deep and 60 feet wide in spots. The floodwaters ripped
her dog from his collar, and would have swept her 9-year-old daughter from Pitzer's arms if she hadn't slung the child across her shoulders and waded to safety.
Since that day, every time that creek rises the tiniest bit, Pitzer panics for herself, her husband and her two children. This time, she suspected the mine had let off water, thinking the rain might overflow the pond. She called the state Division of Environmental Protection. What's going on? she asked. The inspector said he looked at the mine ponds. Everything seemed to be working OK, no breaks.
But Pitzer has to wonder: Is this what happens when everything's working OK?
"It'll be 12:30 at night, I'm laying in bed, and it'll sound like the creek's up," Pitzer said. "So I'll get a flashlight and go out, and sure enough, it will be." Rain or no rain.
"That makes it hard to sleep. You never know what it [the creek] is going to do. Nothing in my life is normal anymore."
Turning victims into activists
In Sylvester, Dickens is one of more than 100 residents who were awarded thousands of dollars by a court order when Massey subsidiary Elk Run Coal Co. was found to have polluted the town with coal dust.
That hasn't done a thing to stop the blackwater spills that, to Dickens, seem incessant.
"The thing is, this is not abnormal," he said. "This is a constant thing."
Last week's spill of more than 250,000 gallons was the biggest DEP spokeswoman Jessica Greathouse can remember since October 2000, when a Massey subsidiary spilled 300 million gallons of contaminated sludge that wound up in the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River.
Last week's spill contaminated about 5 miles of Laurel Creek and Hopkins Fork, which flow into the Big Coal River. The DEP ordered Elk Run to stop using the supply yard where the leak came from immediately.
Toxic spills and flooding every time it rains have turned people like Maria Pitzer -- who formerly didn't get involved in such issues -- into activists. Drive around Pitzer's community, located in the heart of one of West Virginia's biggest coal-producing counties, and you'll see fliers urging people to speak up by Aug. 29 on a federal study on the effects of coal mining.
With the public comment period ending in 16 days, Pitzer said most of her neighbors didn't even know the study has been going on for the past five years.
"I've got the community center giving out information, and I've been walking door-to-door," she said. "Every comment I can get in will help them realize the impact of what's going on."
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For instance, even if "a corporation" does not have "the right to free speech", they can simply pay an employee to use their right to free speech on their behalf.
...at which point that employee would have sold his right to free speech to that corporation and would no longer be granted the free speech rights that individual persons enjoy (at least for that portion of his speech for which he was paid).
Paid speech isn't free speech.
Just add these four simple words (which should be common sense but I guess it has to be spelled out for some people) to the Constitution:
Corporations are not persons.
Bam! No more first amendment issues. No more campaign finance issues. No more rooted government.
I was with you up until this:
It's a democracy (roughly). It's perfectly legal for the majority to oppress and condemn the actions of the minority, especially when the minority is not any specific culturally or racially defined block of people.
Define "oppress." Those are some extremely dangerous thoughts you got there, brother. Most atrocities of the twentieth century grew out of beliefs like that.
Here's one.
Show him this one, too.
Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence or outright stupidity.
Why?
Are you assuming there aren't malicious people in this world? Living by aphorisms implies that not much critical thinking is going on. Where malice is indicated, ascribe it as such. Incompetence and stupidity notwithstanding.
Thanks, Bev, for being so diligent and credible on this whole issue. When one tries to point out that things like this will happen if there is no oversight, they normally get the tin-foil hat thrust upon them. So many people are willing to just bury their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong. "It's the way we do things in 'Merica so that means it's good, righteous, and holy."
"Don't worry, be happy" seems to be the mantra. Just look at the parent to your post.
Say everything's fine - get modded up to a 5.
Point out very specifically (with proof) that things aren't fine - nobody notices (you're lucky you didn't get modded down, actually.)
It's like the whole country is on Prozac. What does one have to do to get them to take notice? Ah, I know. We need to own a giant brainwashing media conglomerate. Let's get started on that.
Good luck, and thanks again. Keep up the good work.
Democracy needs you.
Yes. Anything that doesn't result in more profit to corporations is simply "emotionalism." We must not let emotionalism interfere with our quests for oil, money, and power. We must stomp our Jack boots on those who would point out the seedy underbelly of our crusade. Eliminate emotions! We will be profitable!
Or perhaps they meant Titan is in temporal (time-related) flux like in some Star Trek episode?
Yes, that one. It is, in fact, in temporal flux. You are, too. Do you have a watch or a clock with a second hand? See how it moves like that? Spooky, huh?
Palm Beach county, the seminal example, had a Democrat for a Supervisor of Elections
Oh, do you mean this Palm Beach County elections supervisor?
Oh, please. Corporations despise welfare because it keeps people from becoming completely beholden to them. Corporations lust after cheap labor. If they could eliminate welfare they could keep people over a barrel and make them work for pennies because workers would know they would starve without a job. In fact, if you look at the conservative political agenda, you can see that their entire economic policy is geared toward creating a cheap, desperate labor force. Welfare works against that agenda by providing people with a safety net.
And if you don't think politicians are aiming for cheap labor, ask yourself why nothing is ever done about illegal immigration. It's a dirty little secret that our economy is perched on the backs of a desperate underground labor market. They'd like the rest of us to join that labor pool.
What we need is a gradual and steady reversal of the many power-grabs performed by the government over the last century.
The government was created of the people, by the people and for the people. It's not working that way now, but are you arguing for a reversal of the power of the people? Be advised that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If government power is taken away, corporate power will quickly take its place. Some would argue that this is already happening. I happen to be one of the people that the constitution gives government power to, as in "We the people." I'm certainly not anxious to hand that power over to corporations. We don't need to give away our power, we need to take it back and use it for the good of the people instead of the good of the corporations.
I'll finish with a quote:
WE, the PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
This is what government should be doing.
Doctors walking off the job because malpractice costs have gotten too high in some states, I suppose that's a fiction...
I have two questions for you.
- Who sets malpractice premiums, trial lawyers or insurance corporations?
- In states that have implemented malpractice caps, have insurance corporations lowered their premiums?
You've been duped again. Insurance corporations are blaming their problems (stock market losses) on the weakest among us, the sick and injured. They want to guarantee their profits by eliminating any risk but risk is why insurance exists. People pay insurance companies specifically to assume the risks of our activities (driving, owning a home, cutting into peoples' bodies). Why should they be able to socialize the risk but privatize the profit?
If you have one or two illegal MP3 files, you can get nailed for $50,000 by the RIAA...
You're just helping to make my point for me. The RIAA has rooted the government and bought itself a law (the DMCA) that gives copyright holders "supercitizen" status. Corporations can now issue a subpoena without help from a judge. Can you or I do that? No, because we're just simple citizens and they are supercitizens.
The only thing likely to work is massive civil disobedience. The only problem with that, though, is that they've already considered that and have implemented mechanisms to counter it.
Don't think for a minute that the Patriot act is aimed at fighting terrorism. It's meant to be used against US citizens to prevent 1960's-style activism from upsetting their applecart. At least someone is learning from history.
Corporate Feudalism? We're almost there, brother.
OMG! The corporate propaganda machine has been working overtime on you.
The lawsuit crisis is a total fiction perpetrated by corporations trying to protect their ill-gotten profits. Demonizing trial lawyers is their favorite weapon because lawyers can be used for good or ill and all they have to do is highlight the bad actors.
Killing "tort reform" is one of the good things trial lawyers are doing. So-called "tort reform" is just the corporations' attempt to close the court house doors to the citizens. That's especially grievous because the other two branches of government have already been closed to us. What avenue will citizens have to petition their government for a redress of grievances once the courthouse doors are welded shut by "tort reform?"
Citizens can't afford to "talk" to their representatives. The only thing politicians listen to is money because that's the only thing that will keep them in office. Write to the president and all you'll get is your name placed on a list of suspects to be checked out when the Patriot II act is passed. If you don't thing government regulatory agencies have been rooted by corporations then I have two words for you
We are looking at a problem with government, not the corporations...
Exactly. And the problem with government is that it's been taken over by the corporations. "We the people" no longer run the government so corporations are getting out of control. Extremely bad behavior is being rewarded with extremely high profits (Microsoft) or increased stock prices (SCO).
Unfortunately most govt agencies are incompetant,...
Incompetence isn't the problem. The regulatory agencies have been captured by the corporations they're supposed to be regulating. The agencies are also under a starvation attack from lawmakers who love to cut the budgets of any agency that pisses off their corporate owners.
Corporation have WAY too much control over the legal process and society. They're wielding their greed-drunk power without any thought for anything except their profit.
Remember "No Face" from Spirited Away? Think about it. Better to keep them out of the bath house.
Grrrrr! The angry capitalist speaks!
Who said anything about VIA paying for anything? This thread is about a guy using his own industrious labor to open a channel to speak to a previously closed chip architecture. Are you just mad that a man would actually use his labor to help the public at large rather than hording the gains to himself and biting the fingers off of anyone who would touch it? It just makes you guys sick to see anyone express a streak of altruism, doesn't it? Your path is the way toward tyranny by the rich and corporate feudalism. His is the way toward freedom and enlightenment. Money isn't everything. We are human beings not faceless consumers.
This obviously makes a huge difference to his ability to release the driver.
orv is the writer of the code in question, so let's get the moderators to mod up all of his comments in this thread.
Dude, in case you haven't noticed, the government isn't enforcing environmental law anymore.
Take mountaintop removal mining, for instance. The Clean Water Act says that you can't dump waste into a stream or degrade it's quality but coal mining corporations blast away entire mountain groups in a watershed and fill up the steams of Appalachia with the waste to the tune of about 1000 miles of streams completely lost and buried so far.
The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act says that a strip mine must return the land to it's "approximate original contour" unless the flattened land is to be used for some value-added purpose. The mining corporations claim the nearly sterile plains of grasslands they leave in place of hardwood forested mountains and streams are an improved "fish and wildlife habitat." Well, I guess there may be some fish left in those streams crushed underneath all that mining waste.
If you're gonna ding somebody for being concerned about whether an operation has their environmental ducks in a row, learn how the law is enforced in the real world.
It's hilarious that someone used a mod point to mod this comment down. I'm sure I speak for all the readers here when I say that we're all truly sorry that you (the modder) were traumatized by a toilet prank at some point in your life. Hopefully, one day you'll be able to read about toilet pranks without that burning urge to kill someone.
It's a fallacy to believe that one brain is superior to another just because it may be wired a little differently. If what you say is true, it just goes to show that dyslexics process information differently rather than showing that a non-dyslexic brain is hindered in some way. An example is the disease (or injury) that prevents people from forgetting (I think it's called hypernesia.) While it might seem like an advantage to be able to remember every single detail of your life, it's actually quite debilitating because your brain becomes so cluttered with triviality that you're unable to focus on what's important and what isn't.
In your description of the mechanism behind dyslexia, suppose you're a hunter and you see an animal 20-meters ahead of you. A dyslexic brain would rotate the scene around until the hunter didn't know which way to throw the spear. It would seem, in this case, that the "limitation" of not arbitrarily rotating images around in our minds is actually a valuable trait.
Why waste that money on science when the same money would buy us a day and a half of occupying Iraq?
There's a good return on your tax dollars!
Why doesn't NASA sponsor an X-Prize type contest where the first team to recover the Hubble gets to keep it under the same terms as the copyright of a new Disney movie. That would spur private space transportation development, save the Hubble from fiery death, and create pressure to shorten the terms on copyrights.
I know, pie-in-the-sky. But so was Hubble, once.
Don't know if you're still reading or not, but here's an article from today's paper...
'We're enemies now'
Mine runoff has Boone countians opposing Big Coal
By Tara Tuckwiller
STAFF WRITER
SYLVESTER -- Last week, Jimmy Dickens worried more than usual about the water his 4-year-old daughter bathes in, brushes her teeth with and drinks.
Independence Coal Co., a Massey Energy Co. subsidiary, had leaked 250,000 gallons of heavy metal-contaminated "blackwater" into a nearby stream, and then didn't tell anybody.
By the time a local resident noticed the grayish water, called the state Department of Environmental Protection, then the Sylvester water plant found out, called somebody who called a neighbor who called Dickens's sister-in-law who called him -- it was a day after the spill, and the Dickens family had been gulping contaminated water all the while.
- advertisement-
Ten miles away, Maria Pitzer had problems of her own. It had barely begun to mist rain, and suddenly the creek in front of her house rose two feet.
Of course, the creek hadn't been itself since June. That's when a heavy rain washed off a strip mine on the hill above Pitzer's 50-year-old house and slashed a ravine through her yard, 12 feet deep and 60 feet wide in spots. The floodwaters ripped
her dog from his collar, and would have swept her 9-year-old daughter from Pitzer's arms if she hadn't slung the child across her shoulders and waded to safety.
Since that day, every time that creek rises the tiniest bit, Pitzer panics for herself, her husband and her two children. This time, she suspected the mine had let off water, thinking the rain might overflow the pond. She called the state Division of Environmental Protection. What's going on? she asked. The inspector said he looked at the mine ponds. Everything seemed to be working OK, no breaks.
But Pitzer has to wonder: Is this what happens when everything's working OK?
"It'll be 12:30 at night, I'm laying in bed, and it'll sound like the creek's up," Pitzer said. "So I'll get a flashlight and go out, and sure enough, it will be." Rain or no rain.
"That makes it hard to sleep. You never know what it [the creek] is going to do. Nothing in my life is normal anymore."
Turning victims into activists
In Sylvester, Dickens is one of more than 100 residents who were awarded thousands of dollars by a court order when Massey subsidiary Elk Run Coal Co. was found to have polluted the town with coal dust.
That hasn't done a thing to stop the blackwater spills that, to Dickens, seem incessant.
"The thing is, this is not abnormal," he said. "This is a constant thing."
Last week's spill of more than 250,000 gallons was the biggest DEP spokeswoman Jessica Greathouse can remember since October 2000, when a Massey subsidiary spilled 300 million gallons of contaminated sludge that wound up in the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River.
Last week's spill contaminated about 5 miles of Laurel Creek and Hopkins Fork, which flow into the Big Coal River. The DEP ordered Elk Run to stop using the supply yard where the leak came from immediately.
Toxic spills and flooding every time it rains have turned people like Maria Pitzer -- who formerly didn't get involved in such issues -- into activists. Drive around Pitzer's community, located in the heart of one of West Virginia's biggest coal-producing counties, and you'll see fliers urging people to speak up by Aug. 29 on a federal study on the effects of coal mining.
With the public comment period ending in 16 days, Pitzer said most of her neighbors didn't even know the study has been going on for the past five years.
"I've got the community center giving out information, and I've been walking door-to-door," she said. "Every comment I can get in will help them realize the impact of what's going on."
One example is Pitzer's neighbor, an 87
No, It's Supposably . Don't you watch "Friends?"