HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?
Chicago Tribune: So here's what it takes to get a shock jock fired in sophisticated and urbane New York. You induce two people to have sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral and get a flunky to give you minute-by-minute "color commentary" from the pews.
That's why New York-based shock jocks Greg "Opie" Hughes and Anthony Cumia were fired late last week. (The station's general manager and program director also were "suspended indefinitely.")
Now we know how low the bar is set. But this is good news -- at least we know there is still a bar. For a while there, it appeared there was virtually no limit, that these merry vulgarians of the radio could do almost anything without much more than a slap on the wrist.
Now don't get us wrong. We support free speech in all of its splendors and across the spectrum of opinion, even if it is crude, puerile, mind-polluting sludge of the type that is spewed not only by the shock jocks in New York, but plenty across the country, including in Chicago. There's apparently an audience for that, and we respect that.
But isn't it refreshing to know that some things remain beyond the pale, even in a culture where some television and radio programmers seem always in a race to see how low they can go?
Lewdness charges
Wasn't it satisfying to see those two accused sex partners paraded before the cameras, answering to public lewdness charges for the stunt, which they performed (their attorney said they were only "simulating sex") in order to win a contest (and a free vacation) for having sex in risky places?
It's odd, though. Of all the stunts to get fired for -- sex in church. Why that? One Florida shock jock sponsored a "roadkill barbecue" in which a live boar was slaughtered with a knife in the radio station parking lot. He got charged -- and acquitted -- but didn't get fired. Nor did the San Francisco deejays who tied up traffic on the Bay Bridge for hours, while one of them got a haircut in the middle of the road. (They did get fined and had to settle a civil lawsuit.) Or a Washington jock who urged a call-in listener to steal gasoline at a local service station. (He apologized.)
So why Opie and Anthony?
WKQX-FM's Mancow Muller -- one of the jocks who pulled off the Bay Bridge stunt at a previous job -- told a Chicago Tribune reporter that the Opie and Anthony stunt crossed the line. "You're going to say things you regret," Muller said. "You're going to do things you don't like. It happens. But this was so calculated to me."
Yes, calculated to get attention. As for Opie and Anthony, this apparently isn't the first time they've been fired. They were canned in 1998 after announcing on April Fool's Day that the mayor of Boston had been killed in a car crash.
But don't worry about them. They'll be back on the air, somewhere, because they get ratings. And that is what really counts.
FACING THE NUMBERS
Washington Post: The Congressional Budget Office weighed in with its latest budget projections this week, more in a gloomy series. CBO analysts see overall deficits lasting until 2006. The $5.6 trillion surplus once projected between 2002 and 2011 has deflated like a garden slug hit with a dose of salt: Only $336 billion remains. Throughout the coming decade, on-budget income is projected to fall short of spending, meaning that the government will need to tap into those Social Security funds that everyone was promising last year to leave inviolate. The bulk of the surplus that the CBO's forecasters see accumulating by 2012 rests on the assumption that last year's tax-cut package will expire as scheduled after 2010, an outcome that President Bush is aggressively campaigning to prevent. These numbers ought to throw cold water on that effort, but there was no sign of that this week.
Last year when Congress was debating Mr. Bush's tax-cut plan, surplus projections looked like money in the bank to administration officials and to Republican, and some Democratic, lawmakers. They did not hesitate to argue that even with the tax cut, funds would still be available to pay down the debt and support defense spending increases. Now there is no hesitation to argue that cuts in spending are the only answer.
Pork-barrel spending
"The real danger to the budget comes from pork-barrel spending by the Congress," declared White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. "We should control what we can," said Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels, "which is spending." But, of course, that's not all that officials could control. Mr. Bush not only continues to push for a permanent extension of last year's tax cuts, but also has suggested that he will propose yet more cuts when Congress returns after Labor Day. Democrats, who were quick to sound the alarm this week about the dangerous direction in which the budget is heading, have mostly resisted the push for permanent reductions. But only a few have been willing to step up and endorse the prudent course in the face of a steadily deteriorating budget outlook: holding off the portions of the tax cut that have not yet been implemented.
The change in the CBO's surplus estimates since March was shaped in significant measure by what CBO Director Dan Crippen termed an "astounding" drop in tax receipts. The shortfall in expected revenue went far beyond what might be expected from lower receipts from capital gains or lower incomes during the recession, the CBO said Tuesday, and could persist or grow over time.