Senator Harkin joins Bill Press and Senator Stabenow in calling for regulating free speech.

As if Senator Debbie Stabenow's calling for ignoring the First Amendment wasn't bad enough considering her standing to personally benefit from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, now we have Senator Tom Harkin joining the call for making the unelected 5-person FCC the de facto program director of every talk radio station in the country.

While talking with the struggling, once famous Bill Press on his radio show, Senator Harkin said this:



"By the way, I read your Op-Ed in the Washington Post the other day. I ripped it out, I took it into my office and said 'there you go, we gotta get the Fairness Doctrine back in law again.'"

As if it isn't bad enough that a bunch of old men with no real-world experience and no background in economics are attempting to micromanage the economy with a power-grab and spend bill that would even make Stalin blush, these central planners are seeking to silence dissent in the name of diversity.

Press has reason to be upset, his show was taken off the air in Washington, DC, though not for the black helicopter type reasons he would like you to believe. Press, and the rest of the "progressive" talk is going the way of the dodo because more people listen to him sing in the shower in the morning than listen to their radio shows. So it's in their financial interest to have the government mandate stations carry the type of show they just so happen to be producing. The legislators on board with this power grab have more nefarious motivations.

The "spendulus" bill currently worming its way through a House-Senate conference is facing its toughest obstacle not from squishy lawmakers, but from a public being informed about the pork-laden bill through the only media outlet where conservatives and libertarians have a clear voice - talk radio. Those phone lines on the Hill aren't melting down because of outrageous aspects of that bill discovered by MSNBC or The New York Times, it's coming from talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

If Liberals are able to silence them, or at a minimum, "balance" them by forcing station to carry what amounts to direct propaganda for the so-called "progressive" agenda, the public will be less informed by omission. Rather than a choir of liberty loving hosts singing from the Constitutional hymnal, stations will be forced to morph into a battle of bands format and lose their self-chosen identity.

Add to that the fact that liberal talk radio fails, doesn’t sell and doesn’t attract an audience or advertisers, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster for the talk radio business as a whole. That, come to think of it, may well be what they’re hoping for.

In typical left-wing fashion, the phrase "celebrate diversity," while accepting of nearly anything you can think of that liberals embrace, stops just short of differing opinions. The modern liberal movement has turned into Trotsky with better suits and friend provided drivers.