addition, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had deregulated station ownership, leading the industry to trend towards national syndication and away from local personalities. The contrarian and often left-leaning Lassiter increasingly found himself an anachronism, even as he garnered tremendous market shares of listeners who both loved and loathed him. He rolled with the punches as best he could, provoking his audience more furiously than ever and taking on-air potshots at WFLA's own conservative host, Mark Larsen, but it often seemed that his real nemesis was the very industry he was part of, commercial radio. In 1999 WFLA, which had been owned by Jacor, was purchased along with all of Jacor's holdings by Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia). At the time Clear Channel was building its radio empire and employing a variety of cost-cutting techniques, such as relying heavily on centralized, syndicated programming and eliminating local personalities and technicians from its payroll. Lassiter, disgusted by the changes Clear Channel was making and knowing that his time in radio was not long, began expressing open hostility to their policies on the air; at one point he was even reading employee questionnaires circulated inside the offices, and describing the deeply caustic answers he was filling in. Finally on December 1, 1999, four weeks before his contract was set to expire, Lassiter opened his broadcast with a monologue aimed directly at WFLA's business office: Predictably, he was told the next day that he need not bother to return to work at WFLA that day or any other. "Most men would have been devastated upon losing a six-figure, cushy job," Lassiter said later. "I was relieved." He officially retired from radio. His slot was filled by future radio star Glenn Beck. Retirement/Death Shortly after his retirement, Lassiter experienced a serious downward slide in his health. A lifelong and unrepentant smoker, he had long ignored the advice of his physicians, and after he was diagnosed with diabetes in about 1990 he had ignored the problem until the disease had advanced considerably. Between 2000 and his death, he would lose 40 percent of his foot, receive treatment for bladder cancer, experience slow decline in kidney function, and slowly lose his eyesight. During his retirement, Lassiter devoted himself to his longtime interest in futures trading, and in 2002 he started a public journal of his trades on Elite Trader, a popular web site for financial traders. He posted on