Jay, I know that my good friend Bill Press did get 2 United States Senators (that would be, out of 100) to say they’d consider a return of the Fairness Doctrine.  Some liberal commentators wish he hadn’t even asked. However, I’m still trying to figure out what it is you fear would happen if it did come back?

Do you think that your show on Salem would have to be “balanced” by an hour every day featuring the Rev. Eugene Robinson (or worse, me)?  Do you think that Sean Hannity would have his lips sealed with candle wax for half of his time on Fox so that some Alan-Colmesian figure would speak in his place?  Nothing like this ever happened when the Fairness Doctrine was in place before.  Why would it now?

This is the same kind of tempest in a teapot that Senator James DeMint tried to use to defeat the “stimulus package” (as if he would have voted for it ever anyway) as a abridgment of the right of student groups to meet in college buildings.  There are enough real differences between people like us that we don’t have to manufacture additional pseudo-crises.  By the way, the St. Petersburg Times newspaper recently examined DeMint’s claims about and found them, in their words, “false”.