It is true that advertisers have special sensitivities.
Pizza companies sometimes don't buy commercials on shows that have bloodshed,
fearing the unappetizing juxtaposition with tomato sauce.
Phone companies have been known to avoid advertising on crime shows featuring ransom calls.

Still, there was something chilling about Procter & Gamble's decision to pull its ads from an Emmy-nominated
episode of the CBS show "Family Law" because the company was worried about a story involving gun ownership.
P. & G. is not prudish. It advertises on soap operas, where hotties hop in and out of bed all day.
But, as The Times's Bill Carter reported on Friday, the company is sensitive to political "hot-button issues."

CBS apparently replaced the episode — in which the law firm defends a woman whose son shoots himself
with her handgun — with a different episode because it felt it would never make up revenue lost from P. & G.
at a time when advertising is in a deep slump. CBS also said that this summer it wouldn't repeat other episodes
— dealing with the death penalty, abortion and interfaith marriage — that troubled P. & G.

Other TV executives and producers cringed at the prospect that advertisers would be able to dictate the content of shows.
Lately, it seems, there's a whole lot of chilling going on.

Cesar Chavez organizing a grape boycott to advance the cause of migrant workers gave way to Tom DeLay
trying to organize a boycott of CNN to advance the right-wing agenda.

Once the tactic of the disenfranchised — invented in 1880 by Irish tenant farmers to isolate a punitive British
overseer named Charles C. Boycott — boycotts are now the tactic of the enfranchised.

The Bush White House says it will boycott journalists at Talk magazine because the September issue features a fantasy
fashion layout, with two sultry models playing the Bush twins in pink frosted lipstick and pink feather boas behind bars.
(Everyone is sympathetic to the Bushes' desire to shield their daughters. But sending Jenna, still on probation, to L.A.
to be a summer intern at Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, which produces "The Sopranos," and be exposed to the wild Hollywood party scene is begging for tabloid trouble.)

Growing up with "The Jetsons," "Star Trek," the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the World's Fair with lunar
colonies and underseas resorts, and Disney's "Tomorrowland Speedway," we imagined the 21st century as sleek
and expansive, a cascade of creativity and invention in the arts, technology, science and medicine.
But the combination of the narrow Bush vision and shrinking economy is creating a climate where everything
feels crimped, more about limiting expression than liberating it.

We face the jarring prospect that some of our top scientists may move to England, where they won't face the same
strangling curbs on stem cell research, which is bound to go forward even without President Bush holding up his little
"Stop" sign. Expatriate scientists are redolent of American artists in the 20's who flocked to sophisticated Paris,
far from Prohibition and Calvin Coolidge.

We've had the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Aquarius.
Now we're in the Age of Arrested Development.

Never mind the interplanetary cooperation presaged in "Star Trek."
We're retreating from planetary cooperation. America has grown insular, isolationist, paranoid.

Nothing leaps ahead. Power clings to the passé, retreating from the cutting edge, running safe TV shows,
choosing scientific stasis. Everything — from Washington's trashed international treaties to the coal-and-drill
Bush environmental policy to Hollywood's tedious remakes and endless parade of World War II and
Cinderella-themed movies — looks backward, not forward.

Our missile shield, more science fiction than science, has become a metaphor for our passive, defensive, retro crouch.

In the name of Captain Kirk, how did this happen?
How did we end up charting a course to timidly go where every man has been before?

Mo, you ignorant slut.
You're NOT that stupid.

You and your whore friends shielded the boy king during the campaign - THAT'S how we got here.
You and your whore friends fabricated horseshit about Al Gore and protected Governor Blow Monkey.
You and your whore friends chose NOT to ask any meaningful questions.
Why don't you use that NYWTimes bully pulpit to ask Weak & Stupid
 where he was when the National Guard record says he was "unavailable for duty?"

No, you'd rather screech personal slurs at Senator Clinton than do your damn job, MoDo.
Instead of telling the truth about Bush, you fabricated lies about Bill and Hillary - because your whore paper LIKES that.
Don't sit there and ask, "How did this happen?" when YOU and your whore friends fucking caused it.

Bob Schieffer  "Bush has such a firm grasp on foreign policy issues"
Candy Crowley  "Bush is such a genius, and we all love him."
Tim the Whore  "Al Gore is a serial exaggerator and cannot be trusted, ...not like Bush."
Cokie the Whore  "Al Gore is so stupid, he chose to lie about Love Story when his wife is still alive!"

David Letterman was the ONLY guy to ask any kind of probing questions of the Failure in Thief
and he's a goddamn comedian. He's not SUPPOSED to be separating the boys from the men.
That was YOUR job, MoDo, but you decided to play the whore, instead.

So don't just sit there, waving your chalky thighs in the air - get off your ass and DO YOUR JOB.
Stop fabricating lies and stop walking the street in those hooker shoes.