Politics

Declaring a "radio jihad" against President Bush, radio shock jock Howard Stern "has emerged almost overnight as the most influential Bush critic in all of American broadcasting," writes Eric Boehlert, "as he rails against the president hour after hour, day after day to a weekly audience of 8 million listeners. Never before has a Republican president come under such withering attack from a radio talk-show host with the influence and national reach Stern has."

Not unexpectedly, months of high-profile Bush-bashing by Democratic presidential contenders haven't helped the Bush campaign. "On the Democratic side, you saw pictures of their campaigns busy with guys out in their shirt-sleeves, yelling and screaming and working hard.

The "mystery of the United States," writes Tom Frank, is that "wealth is today concentrated in fewer hands than it has been since the 1920s; workers have less power over the conditions under which they toil than ever before in our lifetimes; and the corporation has become the most powerful actor in our world. Yet that rightward shift - still going strong to this day - sells itself as a war against elites, a righteous uprising of the little guy against an obnoxious upper class." Nevertheless, he adds, "There is a grain of truth in the backlash stereotype of liberalism.

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote next week on a "cheeseburger bill." The bill -- the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act (HR 339) -- would bar lawsuits against fast-food outlets accused of causing obesity.