Right to free speech? The Direct Marketing Association feels that making phone calls to offer people products and pressure them into donations despite their explicitly-stated preference against such calls is within their right to free speech?!? That’s just unbelievable. I also love that part of the DMA’s argument is that the already-existent state do-not-call registries “provide enough protection” to consumers, an argument which naturally begs the question: how does a national do-not-call registry violate a telemarketer’s right to free speech, yet a state one doesn’t? (Are states actually allowed to abridge the most basic of American rights?)

It really shouldn’t come as so much of a surprise that the DMA is attempting to ground its annoying-as-all-hell business practice in the Bill of Rights; after all, his is an industry that already has managed to receive exemptions from caller ID requirements, has started to use prerecorded sales pitches despite Federal laws prohibiting this, and which actually charges consumers for the privilege of using the web to request inclusion on its own do-not-call and do-not-mail lists. I’d love to see a day when unsolicited calls are banned outright.