I'm seeing at the top of Drudgereport that Mel Gibson went on Sean Hannity's show today and expressed concern about Bush as our president, particularly centered around the claims regarding WMD's. I wonder if that has any effect with people....
Stern being able to motivate a few more people to vote in Kerry states such as California, New York, etc or a Bush state such as Texas isn't very important. The respective leads for Kerry & Bush in those states are such that a few more or a few less votes are unlikely to matter. Stern's possible impact in states such as: Ohio Florida Pennsylvania etc is all that really matters in terms of this discussion. The 8 million or whatever number for his total listening audience is not important......just the subset that listens in possible <i>swing</i> states.
you're just going to have to face the fact that you and Mel are buddies now!!! allies in a similar cause!!!
Forget this gay marriage thing, I want a Constitutional Amendment that says Mel Gibson can't run for President.
By the by, I was looking at one of the websites for one of the stations that Howard Stern is on, and it implored listeners to complain to their Senators, etc. about the FCC's indecency rules because the FCC says you can't play Pink Floyd's "Money" on the air since it has the s-word in it. Did the FCC recently outlaw bleeping out the bad words? That's the way it was always done before. Not really understanding why there's suddenly this desire to get rid of any standard of decency on the airwaves. Sure, it seems like the FCC goes overboard a lot of the time when dealing with indecency, but do we really want a world with no standards? And should there be rules that a broadcast station has to follow in exchange for their being able free access to billions of dollars worth of spectrum?
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/li.../could_sterns_anti_bush_rants_shock_the_vote/ Could Stern's anti-Bush rants shock the vote? By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff, 3/18/2004 American liberals have been waiting for a perch on talk radio, a medium dominated by conservative and right-wing voices since the 1980s. And on March 31, the new Air America Radio network will give them a nascent one, as it premieres in the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago markets. Just as "The Daily Show" brings an openly lefty spin to TV news, Air America will fly in the face of the right wing with hosts including Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and Marty Kaplan. But wait a minute: Is "shock jock" Howard Stern -- stripper aficionado, champion of misfits everywhere, all-purpose radio provocateur -- already giving liberals a voice on the airwaves? And is that voice powerful enough to affect the upcoming presidential election? Since the FCC crackdown on media "indecency" in the wake of Janet Jackson's Nipplegate incident, Stern has transformed his morning variety show into a rabidly anti-Bush talk forum. Every weekday, he has been devoting hours of his broadcast (locally on WBCN-FM, 104.1) to impassioned criticism of President Bush and support of Senator John Kerry. Railing tirelessly against the president, Stern has been attacking Bush's yoking together of church and state, the legitimacy of his National Guard service, his use of Sept. 11 imagery in his campaign ads, his stances regarding First Amendment rights, his handling of Iraq, and his stands on gay marriage and stem-cell research. "Join me and friends of this show who are outraged," Stern said on the air last Friday. "Vote out every Republican you can find." He has also been urging his listeners to send money to Kerry's campaign, calling him "a good man" and praising his record in Vietnam as well as his later criticism of the Vietnam War. . . .
The GOP is rumored to be floating the idea of a constitutional amendment that would allow naturalized citizens to run for President, presumably to run a certain Austrian, an event that would show Sylvester Stallone to be a prophet or seer of some kind (what a thought!).
yeah his dad moved the family when he was 12 supposedly to avoid the Vietnam war draft. really though, if Bush loses this November it would not shock me one bit to see a Mel Gibson/Bruce Willis Republican ticket in 2008. the GOP has no rising young stars with mainstream appeal since JC Watts and Steve Largent retired from office.
Great. That means the Democrats will probably counter with Tim Robbins and Barbara Streisand. We think politics is shallow and stupid now, but just wait until it involves whether or not an actor's creative accomplishments should matter in an election.
Clear Channel Drops Stern on FCC Threat 54 minutes ago By JONATHAN D. SALANT, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Federal regulators Thursday proposed $495,000 in indecency fines against Clear Channel Communications for broadcasts by Howard Stern, prompting the nation's largest radio chain to drop the country's best-known shock jock. Clear Channel suspended Stern in February from its six stations that carry his program, which regularly features graphic sexual discussion and humor. It decided to make the move permanent after the Federal Communications Commission cited the chain for 18 alleged violations from Stern's April 9, 2003, show. "Mr. Stern's show has created a great liability for us and other broadcasters who air it," said John Hogan, president of Clear Channel Radio. "The Congress and the FCC are even beginning to look at revoking station licenses. That's a risk we're just not willing to take." In a statement posted on his Web site, Stern said he was not surprised by the fine. He characterized it as furtherance of a "witch hunt" against him by the Bush administration. "It is pretty shocking that governmental interference into our rights and free speech takes place in the U.S.," he said. "It's hard to reconcile this with the 'land of the free' and the 'home of the brave.'" Stern has charged on the air that he's being punished for his criticism of President Bush (news - web sites). Clear Channel's political action committee and its employees have given $265,800 to Republicans for the 2004 election, more than any other broadcaster, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...=/ap/20040408/ap_on_go_ot/fcc_howard_stern_10
I thought Clear Channel had already dropped him. What does their latest announcement mean? Did I misunderstand when they dropped him the first time?
