Good God, I can't believe all the reasonable people who think this power grab is the neatest thing since sliced bread.

Yelling into the electorate's ear is what the First Amendment was WRITTEN for.

The purpose of political action groups--and they are not all right-wing--is to allow people who do not have the money to buy ads and such to combine their resources to make a political point. Just because you might not like the point doesn't mean it has to be criminalized. If you shut off the groups, you leave only wealthy individuals.

Or are we saying that Bill Gates, as an individual, is allowed to make his views known to the world, but the NRA and Greenpeace aren't?

As far as "deliberation" and "First Amendment Issues," I saw how this law came into being. Half the legislators in Washington wouldn't know how the Constitution was intended to work if you rolled it up and shoved it up their south end with a six-foot broom handle. This law had one single purpose, and that was the selective silencing of political opposition, and it was voted along solid partisan lines to crush Republican resources.

I hope that this will die in the courts, but I'm not seeing a lot of action in this area so far.

Note that the media, which is about 6 percent conservative by actual count, is not muffled. This leaves a loophole for talk radio, but the Democrats are working on that one. The Left curses the day in 1981 when the government hammerlock on radio was removed, allowing political radio to enter its heyday, and their lock on the mainstream media to be broken.

Some comments on restoring the "Fairness Doctrine" can be found here, and here. For a good time, do a search on the subject combined with a term like "right-wing."