Why I am not a democrat after 40 years as one..and it's not the usual reason

"Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."

"I was in radio under the reign of the Fairness Doctrine, at WMEX in Boston in the 1940s and early '50s," he remembers. And being Nat Hentoff, he naturally aired a few of his opinions from time to time. Uh oh. "Suddenly Fairness Doctrine letters started coming in from the FCC and our station's front office panicked. Lawyers had to be summoned, tapes of accused broadcasters had to be examined with extreme care; voluminous responses had to be prepared and sent. After a few of these FCC letters, our boss announced that there would be no more controversy of any sort on WMEX. We had been muzzled."

BILL MOYERS: Tell me exactly what the fairness doctrine was.

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Pretty much that you had an obligation to present two sides of an issue. There wasn't really an obligation to go out and hunt for somebody if something outrageous was said on a station that you owned, or television station. But if someone asked to come on to present an opposing view, they were allowed to do it. And the stations were obligated to do it. And most station owners that I've talked to have said it wasn't onerous. They didn't find it all that difficult.

BILL MOYERS: What happened to the fairness doctrine? It was in effect for years. In the early '80s the Federal Communications Commission decided to...

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Do away with it the grounds, on the grounds that they said it was not a law. It was just a policy. Congress then sprang into action and passed a law putting it into a law that...

BILL MOYERS: They overrode the FCC?

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: They overrode the FCC. And I'll tell you that it was such an astonishing vote. I think it was three to one in the House, two to one in the Senate. Among the people voting for it were Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich and others

BILL MOYERS: Well, you know some serious people, including some liberals have said that one reason Rush Limbaugh has succeeded is because he is good entertainment.

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Exactly. He doesn't make any pretense of being a news person or even telling you the truth. He says he's an entertainer.

BILL MOYERS: And you're saying that kind of discourse is dominating America right now.

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Dominating America and a waste of good broadcast time and a waste of our airwaves.

BILL MOYERS: Not to the people who agree with him.

Today, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and others have said many times they want the Fariness Doctrine back. Mr. Obama has been qutoed in the Florida State Newspaper as being in agreement with them, but as usual is now obfuscating his position. I can find NO MENTION on his website.

This little blog gets ~45k page loads, and ~15k uniqhu visitors every day. Does that make me 'public'?

I have no doubt that Reid, Pelosi and certianly given his utterly digusting record in the past 6 months, Obama, wish to stifle, intimidate and shut off ALL OPPOSING OPINION OF ANY KIND, save for that which they deem meritorious.

Not only has the Democratic party drifted so far left that in a naked moment in Ohio their nominee baldly revealed he believes in what Marx said, but his leading followers in congress have ALL stated they want to take action to bring back what a well known liberal called MUZZLING.

Just as the opposition to a bad war morphed into anti americanism by americans until those who believe in the same KIND of america Bill Ayer's does are poised to control it, just as the opposition to voter suppression in the south of the 60's morphed into massive fraudulent voter registration, we now see that this party has morphed from all that Jefferson wanted into a party poised to reduce free speech DRAMACTICALLY, and justify it to themselvs without second thoughts.

They are disgusting