[Imc] Call Your Senators for LPFM!

[Peter Miller]

This is cribbed from earlier alerts.  I added more specific instructions and
phone numbers.  THESE CALLS MATTER!  Please take a minute to call.  -Peter

Earlier this week, the Senate attached Bill S.3020 to a large, unrelated
appropriations bill to sneak it through without comment or hearings.  We cannot
allow this to happen!  Pick up your phone today and call your Senator and
demand that they unattach Bill S.3020 from any spending bills.

Call the telecommunications staffpeople for senators Fitzgerald and Durbin:
Durbin's staffer is David Lieber, (202) 224-2152
Fitzgerald's staffer is Joe Matal (ma-TALL), (202) 224-2854

Identify yourself as someone who's applied for a LPFM license, and demand to
speak to a human being about your application.  (They shunted me through to
voice mail for both of them.)

When you get through, tell them that you want the "Low-Power FM-delay bill,"
S.2030, un-attached from the appropriations bill to which it's been attached.  

Talking points:

LPFM is a popular idea: The first two round of applications for these LPFM
licenses have already been submitted, resulting in nearly 1300 religious
groups, local governments, health and social service groups, youth and senior
groups and others applying.  

The sponsor of the bill, Rod Grams, received a $7000 campaign contribution from
opponents of low-power FM radio.

Attaching this bill as a rider to a completely unrelated appropriations
(spending) bill is an outrage.  Senators should have full hearings, listen to
the public and experts, and then vote on legislation based on its own merits.

The rider will prevent community groups from having access to our airwaves by
forcing more studies.  It's a sneaky trick, and we hope you're not deceived.

The call for field testing is bogus.  The engineering issues are clear, with
testing of 75 different consumer receivers now in the public record.  Though a
call for field testing may sound reasonable on its face, it is in fact a
patently wasteful and fruitless exercise.  Field testing does not test
interference to consumers radio receivers. Interference to consumers' receivers
is the only real question in this proceeding which merited scientific testing
and scrutiny.   Field testing only tests how radio waves travel over the
surface of the earth, which has been abundantly understood for the past 50
years.  One can only conclude that the special interest opposition to LPFM
hopes to simply outspend tenfold the LPFM advocates by continuing to demand
ever more frivolous testing regimes for questions that are already well
understood.  The testing program proposed in S.3020 is an example of big,
wasteful government at its worst.  The real goal of this legislation is to
stall the implementation of LPFM until after the Presidential election, when
the NAB and other corporate interests hope to get a more sympathetic hearing of
their special interest demands from a new FCC Chairperson.