In case you are not aware, my brother (Michael Eisen) and Larry Lessig have been engaging in a public “debate” with John Conyers over Conyers’ sponsorship of a bill to revoke the NIH policy on Open Access to publications. First the elder Eisen and Lessig wrote a posting:Is John Conyers Shilling for Special Interests? which they then followed up with John Conyers, It’s Time to Speak Up. Now Conyers has written a reply: A Reply to Larry Lessig (which I note should have been titled A Reply to Eisen and Lessig, but that is for another day). Anyway it is worth reading them all and if I had not been sick for the last like 3-4 weeks I would write more but I have a million things to catch up on now that I have mostly gotten rid of nasty microbe #3.
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Jonathan Eisen's Lab 
Conyers is hilarious. The guy just digs himself in the more he talks — rather like Blagojevich.<>To hear Professor Lessig tell it, I introduced a bill that is utterly without merit and entirely the product of shady special interest dealing. Without any evidence to support his contention (other than my receipt of what can only be described as modest contributions from publishers), he labels my motivations for introducing this bill as “corrupt,” accuses me of “shilling” for “Big Paper,” and dismisses the whole thing as nothing more than a “money for influence scheme.” <>So, Conyers *admits* he introduced a bill favoring the publishers’ interests after accepting money from them (the amount doesn’t matter, if it wasn’t that much it just means he’s easily bought).
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I’ve written a long dissection of his “logic”:http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=234
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I am < HREF="http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2009/03/repconyers_just_doesnt_get_it.php" REL="nofollow">collecting responses<> to this as they come in.
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