“My days here are numbered because I dared to speak out against the Bush administration and say that the religious agenda of George W. Bush concerning stem cell research and gay marriage is wrong. And that what he is doing with the FCC is pushing this religious agenda. And also the fact that the guy takes more vacation than any President ever. It’s time for him to leave. Having said that pushed me off the air in six markets.” – Howard Stern, venting. I have no idea whether Stern is being paranoid or not. Since I don’t really function before 10 am, I don’t have much exposure to him. But I like his spirit; and I do think that Howard Stern and Howard Stern listeners are not people the president needs to alienate in an election year. And it says something about the fragility of the Republican coalition that he feels he has to. Bush is doing his damnedest to make it hard for anyone who isn’t a paid-up evangelical to support him this year. Why?
P.C. EDIT WATCH: A lovely politically correct editing slip marred an opera review in the Los Angeles Times recently. The original sentence read that Richard Strauss’ operatic epic, “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” was “an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean…” Fair enough. But you can’t have the epithet “pro-life” in the Los Angeles Times. So the sentence was changed to “an incomparably glorious and goofy anti-abortion paean…” There is no reference to abortion in the opera. The paper was therefore forced to run not one but two corrections on February 25. The writer rightly insisted that the paper exonerate him personally from the idiocy. It reminds me of the occasion when a newspaper decided to remove all usage of the word “black” from its copy, when referring to African-Americans. it was deemed too offensive a term. Everything was fine until some tired copy-editor lazily edited an economics column. Suddenly, the federal budget moved from red ink “into the African-American.” Hey, but no one was offended.
The Dish 