Jim Inhofe: “I had an opportunity prior to the break to talk a little bit about my amendment to the Harkin amendment. There is…”

“I had an opportunity prior to the break to talk a little bit about my amendment to the Harkin amendment. There is criteria that has been used, and used successfully, for a long period of time. There are two criteria. One is, it must be a syndicated type of a program. The program has to be syndicated. No. 2, it has to have at least a million listeners by the ratings. Now, there are some other exceptions, when they are extreme things. Obviously, there are some things that anyone making any evaluation would not want to have our people subjected to. But by and large that is the way it has worked. Now, for a long period of time it just happens that the conservative programs have been asked for by our troops over there, so they have received them. However, if I were to stand here and say I am happy with the programming as it has been, I would not be. Right now I guess the name you hear more often than anybody else is Rush Limbaugh. His is the second most highly requested program. They want all 3 hours, although only some of the 33 stations give him 1 hour. No one gives him more than 1 hour. So that is not as much as I would like to have them go and as much as I think the market demands. I think it has worked well. I would think it would be very bad policy for us to believe we should sit here in this august body of the Senate and make the determination as to what we think--what we think--our troops should be watching and listening to.…”