While Howard Stern was on vacation last week he read Al Franken’s latest book, “Lies and the Lying liars Who Tell Them: A Fair And Balanced Look At The Right.”

A combination of the information in that book and the rediculous travesty of the recent hearings before congress about the Super Bowl Half-Time show “tragedy” have caused Howard to rethink some of his normally GOP-friendly political positions.

He’s certainly a social liberal- but he’s consistantly supported Republican candidates and supported the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive invasions of sovereign nations that are deemed possible threats (and about half the time turn out not to be…) Until this week, Howard (and most of the crew on the show) steadfastly defended President Bush against any and all criticism from callers and guests on a daily basis. Now Howard is making a point of saying that he is no longer planning on voting for Bush- in fact, his new mantra is “anyone but Bush.”

He’s also started busting the administration on obvious conflicts of interest, such as Colin Powell’s son running the FCC and Dick Cheney socializing with a Supreme Court justice who has Cheney’s case in front of him. Up until this week Howard was either unaware or unconcerned about these issues. Now, just days after he turned on Bush, he’s been barred from all Clear Channel stations.

This is no coincidence.

Clear Channel communications has a damning history of pandering to the Bush administration. Remember the Dixie Chicks? They were suddenly pulled off of ALL Clear Channel stations for criticizing the president. How evil is that? Now that Clear Channel has become the largest radio conglomerate in history, radio has gotten incredibly bland. DJ’s are no longer local. Music is programmed through a high tech version of payola. This is the final decline of radio as we know it. Radio used to be a great thing. No longer.

Howard has talked about the corruption of the FCC for years- in 1997 the FCC threatened to halt all of Infinity’s paperwork and never approve future purchases of radio stations or consolidation if they challenged the millions of dollars in fines the FCC demanded to be paid. Howard cheered the news that fines were being increased after the Super Bowl Holocaust- maybe now someone will actually fight the fines instead of just writing them off as a cost of doing business.

Howard has predicted that he will be fired before the end of the year- with an environment like this it seems very likely, very soon. He also said he was going to offer his resignation next Monday to Mel Karmazin- the head of Viacom, owner of Infinity. We’ll see where this goes, Howard has been threatening to quit since the early ’90’s because of censorship. Now finally it’s coming to a head. It may take moving to a new medium- satellite- to give Howard the freedom he needs to continue doing a great show.