Hey O'Reilly, I'm talking to you Part 3! Denounce Ann Coulter on Fox!

Fellow Kossacks,

I'm entering day three of my challenge for Bill O'Reilly to debate me and still have yet to hear from him. I request that you please recommend this post as it will provide the collective call to Fox News that we aren't going away. Mr. O'Reilly may ignore me now, but he will have to listen to all of us combined.

Also, I hope all of you attending YearlyKos can join me on Friday 8/3 at 10:30am where I will be speaking at the Future Leaders panel and followed by a hospitality room on that same Friday from 1-5pm at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, Meeting Suite 2 on the third floor about 100 feet to the left of the Convention Center. I'd like to meet each and every one of you to discuss my race and our challenge to Bill O.

Mr. O'Reilly,

On Sunday, and again yesterday, I challenged you to debate me on your show. Since then you have not responded and have continued to attack the DailyKos as a hate site and compared members of this community to the members of Nazi Party and the KKK. With much fanfare, you promised to destroy the DailyKos with one mind blowing example of hatred - you presented a photoshopped image of President Bush with Senator Lieberman in a compromising position. Your selection of one example of a satirical (though demeaning) photo does not rationalize taking a position against the first amendment.

You then went on to condemn the Democratic Presidential Candidates for legitimizing the DailyKos by citing this one example of imagery that your staff found. I'm sure there are many others amongst the millions of diaries, comments and discussion items on this site, but that does not justify censorship of the Internet.

You then celebrated your lack of support for Ann Coulter. Thank you for not supporting somebody that regularly engages in hateful and inaccurate statements, as she did when she suggested the "fragging" of Congressman Jack Murtha. Since that time however, she has appeared regularly on Fox News, and thus I ask you are you willing to join me in condemning Fox News for legitimizing Ann Coulter, who you disagree with? That could be our first point of conversation should you want to actually discuss the national political phenomena that is DailyKos with an actual blogger.

I am glad that Senator Dodd will be joining your program tonight, but I imagine that will largely be to defend his and the other Democratic Presidential Candidates appearance at the YearlyKos convention. They are not attending because they're scared of the DailyKos, they are attending because it's the biggest blogging convention of the year. Whether you like it or not, blogging has taken this nation by storm, and the people no longer have to take all that you say for fact - they can read, research and discuss, and that's what the First Amendment is all about.

Meanwhile, you continue to play to your base by calling the ultimate exchange of free ideas a haven for hatred, when in fact you refuse to discuss this issue with anyone who actually and regularly blogs on the site. As I've mentioned in my last two diaries, I do a weekly live blog and am speaking at the YearlyKos Convention - if you want to debate the merits of the DailyKos and YearlyKos, then show that you still have some shred of journalistic integrity by inviting me on your show.

In closing, I hope you can join us at YearlyKos, and I hope you will try to get an actual feel for the members of this community rather than just picking the most extreme example of Free Speech and attacking it as you've chosen to do for the past two weeks.

-Eric Massa
Commander US Navy (ret.)
Congressional Candidate NY-29