TAKING AWAY FREE SPEECH

Brian C. Anderson has written an excellent article in Opinion Journal Shut Up, They Explained; The left's regulatory war against free speech.

The rise of alternative media--political talk radio in the 1980s, cable news in the '90s, and the blogosphere in the new millennium--has broken the liberal monopoly over news and opinion outlets. The left understands acutely the implications of this revolution, blaming much of the Democratic Party's current electoral trouble on the influence of the new media's vigorous conservative voices. Instead of fighting back with ideas, however, today's liberals quietly, relentlessly and illiberally are working to smother this flourishing universe of political discourse under a tangle of campaign-finance and media regulations. Their campaign represents the most sustained attack on free political speech in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Though Republicans have the most to lose in the short run, all Americans who care about our most fundamental rights and the civic health of our democracy need to understand what's going on--and resist it.

[snip]

If the Democrats take back Congress or the White House, watch out. Nothing would please them more than to drag the country back to the good old days, when liberals didn't have to put up with Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and Bill O'Reilly and Matt Drudge and the countless other upstarts recasting our public debate.

It is worth reading all of it... I gotta' warn you though, it's a long one.