“They’re on a roll,” says Arthur Belendiuk, a Washington communications attorney who has helped file indecency complaints against radio broadcasters in recent years. “Indecency is clearly the flavor of the month at the FCC. How long it will last nobody knows.”

Some of the commission’s recent indecency fines have been easy calls, penalizing radio shows that blatantly turned their backs on community standards and broadcast unedited sex talk shows, discussing “licking pussy,” and other obvious graphic and sexual remarks. But Thursday’s fines are sure to raise eyebrows. For instance, in the Bono ruling the commission, overruling its own internal indecency chief, as well as decades of commission guidelines, unveiled a radical new policy declaring that the mere utterance of the “F-word” on TV or radio is both indecent and obscene. The FCC announced that broadcasters who inadvertently transmit the remark, even if it comes during a live, unscripted event, including, theoretically at least, sporting events, will be subject to heavy fines.

“By our action today, broadcasters are on clear notice that, in the future, they will be subject to potential enforcement action for any broadcast of the ‘F-Word’ or a variation thereof in situations such as that here,” wrote FCC chairman Michael Powell. Suddenly the indecency battle has emerged as the new ground zero in the culture wars.

As for Stern, the commission’s decision to fine him for indecency will likely fuel speculation that the famous shock jock is being used by the FCC to make a larger point about indecency. Stern and his supporters can point to three facts in support of that case. First, the content of Stern’s show has not changed substantially over the last decade, during which time the commission never fined him. Yet suddenly, amid the controversy sparked by this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, he’s deemed to be indecent. Second, the fine the FCC levied yesterday was for a broadcast that aired nearly three years ago. If it was indecent in 2001, 2002 and 2003, then why did the FCC wait until 2004 to rule? And third, the raunchy material from Stern’s 2001 program that the FCC found to be out of bounds is almost mild compared to the other violations the FCC has been documenting.

Stern became the center of the firestorm last month when Clear Channel Communications, radio’s largest owner, kicked him off six of its stations and publicly labeled the syndicated morning show “vulgar, offensive, and insulting.” The ban was part of Clear Channel’s announced zero tolerance policy toward indecency, and came just one day before the head of Clear Channel radio was to testify before Congress on the issue of indecency.

In the wake of Clear Channel’s move, Stern has claimed that the broadcast giant, which has close ties to the Bush family and the Republican Party, kicked him off the air because he had been telling his 8 million weekly listeners to vote President Bush out of office. Clear Channel denies Stern’s politics had anything to do with its decision to pull his show.

Since Clear Channel’s move, Stern has been on an anti-Bush drive-time crusade, criticizing the president at every turn, and claiming the administration bowed to pressure from the political right and ordered the FCC to go after him. “George W. Bush is going to be out of office in November thanks to me,” Stern told his listeners Friday morning, describing Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as “two drunks who found Jesus.” He also contemplated holding a fundraiser for Bush’s November opponent, Sen. John Kerry. “I’m sure I’m going to campaign for the guy,” he said.

Stern, who was at the center of the last indecency debate during the early ’90s, had been warning listeners that the FCC was about to penalize him, and Thursday it finally did. The commission fined Stern’s employer, Infinity Broadcasting, $27,500 for a program that aired July 26, 2001. Stern was describing slang words for raunchy sex acts and body parts:

Stern: Well, a “blumpkin” is receiving oral sex while you’re sitting on a toilet bowl if you are a man. You’re sitting on a toilet bowl and, uh, while you’re evacuating you receive your oral.

Stern: A “balloon knot” is when you bend over and I can see right up your old wazoo and, uh, you know that’s a balloon knot that you see.

Stern sidekick: It was the “David Copperfield.” OK, do you want to explain it, since I … When you’re goin’ like a dog … and you’re about to finish and instead you don’t finish, you spit on her and then you turn around and when she turns her face around then you go … So it’s kind of like an illusion …

Stern: Right.

Sidekick: To David Copperfield.

Raunchy and crude? No question. But compare that to the most recent FCC indecency fines. Last week the FCC fined Clear Channel $247,500 for a bit that aired on WWDC in Washington (as well as several other syndicated stations) during the “Elliot in the Morning” show, which was celebrating porn star Ron Jeremy’s 50th birthday:

Female voice: I masturbate with Jeremy’s video every day. Uh, not every day, but every other weekend.

Jock’s voice: Wow. What is it that you like about him so much?

Female voice: The way he licks pussy. I want to do a threesome with him. See who’s the best. If I can lick better or he can lick better.

Incredibly, the station rebroadcast the exchange for a recorded station promotion.

The same day the Stern fine was announced, the FCC reaffirmed an early ruling against WLLD in Tampa, Fla., for airing a live rap concert. One song contained the following lyrics:

“God damn, where are my pussy eating niggers? Any my niggers into eating pussy? Y’all make some noise. Hey, where are my girls? If you’re eating pussy, where you at? That’s it. Oh, they all like it. I ain’t eating no pussy tonight. If you all don’t like it, fuck it. I ain’t going to beg you. You like it?”

The station was fined $7,000.

And also yesterday, the FCC fined Clear Channel’s WAVW in Ft. Pierce, Fla., $55,000 for broadcasting an interview, at 7 a.m., with a man and woman before, during and after they had real or simulated sex. According to the ruling, “The DJ said to [the female participant], ‘I think you like giving oral as much as you like being on the receiving end, right?’ She said yes … She asked if she could bring some pictures of herself down to the station. The DJ said, ‘Yes and when you come down you can give me some oral,’ to which she replied yes and the DJ said, ‘I’ll bet your husband is saying no right now.’”

As the FCC noted, the person who heard the show and filed the complaint said she heard “sounds like ‘someone was eating,’ which are referenced later in the conversation as the woman having had ‘a mouthful’ prior to the beginning of the actual or simulated sex act, both comprising clear references to oral sex.”

And last year the FCC ordered Infinity’s WKRK-FM in Detroit to pay just $27,500 in fines for airing a lengthy program that included graphic discussions of defecation (i.e., guys who like to defecate on women), violence, and oral and anal sex.

All of those instances seem to be clear examples of broadcast material that’s offensive. The FCC’s ruling yesterday on Stern’s infraction seems less obvious.

As odd as the Stern fine is, the Bono ruling may be even more peculiar. It came in connection with the Jan. 19, 2003, telecast of the Golden Globe awards show on NBC, during which time U2 lead singer Bono, accepting the best original song award, declared the honor to be “really, really fucking brilliant.” His comment was telecast unedited.

The Parents Television Council complained to the FCC, asking it to levy fines against NBC and its affiliates for indecency. But last fall, the commission’s enforcement bureau ruled Bono’s maverick remark was not indecent because “the language used by Bono did not describe, in context, sexual or excretory organs or activities and that the utterance was fleeting and isolated.”

For years those have been among the key guidelines the FCC uses in determining indecency fines. To be considered indecent, “the material must describe or depict sexual or excretory organs or activities,” according to the commission. And the broadcast “must be patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium.”

The FCC has also considered the full context to be of great importance and established three key factors: “(1) the explicitness or graphic nature of the description or depiction of sexual or excretory organs or activities; (2) whether the material dwells on or repeats at length descriptions of sexual or excretory organs or activities; (3) whether the material appears to pander or is used to titillate, or whether the material appears to have been presented for its shock value.”

In other words, to be indecent the content should be sexually explicit, go on at length and be used to titillate. No wonder the FCC’s enforcement bureaus last fall dismissed the complaint against Bono for blurting out the F-word once, and using it in a nonsexual way as an adjective. (In its defense filing with the FCC, NBC argued Bono used the F-word as an “intensifier.”) Based on FCC precedent, Bono’s critics had no case.

But that was pre-Super Bowl nipple rings. (The FCC was flooded with more than 200,000 complaints following the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake breast-baring routine.) On Thursday the FCC announced that “given the core meaning of the ‘F-word,’ any use of that word or a variation, in any context, inherently has a sexual connotation, and therefore falls within the first prong of our indecency definition.”

Addressing the question of violating community standards, the commission declared, “The ‘F-word’ is one of the most vulgar, graphic and explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the English language. Its use invariably invokes a coarse sexual image. The use of the ‘F-word’ here, on a nationally telecast awards ceremony, was shocking and gratuitous.”

Even more amazing, however, was the FCC’s decision to cite Bono’s fleeting remark not only as indecent, but as obscene and profane as well. Traditionally that has been a far tougher threshold for the FCC to reach, and unlike indecent speech, which enjoys some protection in the courts, obscene or profane material does not. To make their case, commissioners cited a recent profanity ruling by the 7th Circuit, which ruled profanity as any term that’s “construable as denoting certain of those personally reviling epithets naturally tending to provoke violent resentment or denoting language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance.” [Emphasis added]

Over the past several decades, broadcast indecency and obscenity guideposts were created after back-and-forth with the courts, as judges, broadcasters, concerned citizens and FCC commissioners wrestled with striking a balance between indecency and free speech. That balance has been paramount because the FCC is virtually unique among government agencies in that it can fine Americans for what they say, if they say it on the shared airwaves.

In its landmark 1978 case, FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (better known as George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” case), the Supreme Court ruled that while free-speech issues are involved in indecency conflicts, the government can regulate broadcasts because children may be listening. It was the Supreme Court that created the indecency benchmark by ruling as indecent “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs.”

But still, the question is, does Bono’s “fucking brilliant” fall into that definition? It does now. In its Thursday ruling, the FCC essentially waves off its previous guidelines and announces a new indecency day has dawned.

“This sends a signal to the industry that the gratuitous use of such vulgar language on broadcast television will not be tolerated,” wrote Powell in his statement released Thursday. He stressed it was needed in order to “protect our children.”

It’s interesting to note that upon being named the FCC chairman by President Bush in 2001, Powell complained to reporters, “There’s a lot of garbage on television. There are a lot of things children shouldn’t see.” But he stressed, “I don’t know that I want the government as my nanny.”

What a difference three years make.

If you’re looking for snark, go elsewhere. (OK, the bald eagle thing was kind of hokey.) I am officially over my Rick Warren tantrum (at least until I see him Tuesday); between Episcopal Bishop Eugene Robinson’s moving blessing to open the concert, to the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus singing “My Country Tis of Thee” where Marian Anderson sang it almost 70 years ago (after the Daughters of the American Revolution kept her out of Constitution Hall because she was black), followed shortly thereafter by the Navy Men’s Glee Club. Rick Warren, you can’t take that away from me. When the openly gay Robinson called on God to “bless us with anger — at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people,” I knew we’re not in Dick Cheney’s America anymore.

If you’d told me that Garth Brooks would sing more songs than any other entertainer, including Beyoncé, Bono and Bruce Springsteen, I’d have been prepared to be disappointed. But for me one high point was Brooks doing the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” — it helps if you saw the movie “Wedding Crashers’” great montage showing lame cover bands doing “Shout” at weddings of every race and culture, Jewish, Indian, Irish, African-American. Yes, I’ll admit that made me think of Obama presiding over a sappy interracial wedding, and watching that sea of arms flying up every time Brooks said “throw your hands up” was one of my favorite moments of the day.

The genius of the whole event was the culture mashup — readings presented by duos like Steve Carell and Jamie Foxx, Jack Black and Rosario Dawson, Laura Linney and Martin Luther King III, Forest Whitaker and Ashley Judd — yes, Jack Black. Likewise, Jon Bon Jovi and Bettye LaVette’s duet on Sam Cooke’s Obama anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come” was extraordinarily moving. My personal high point — I’d have braved the cold and crowds for this moment alone — was Pete Seeger and his grandson, joined by Springsteen, singing all the lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land” — and watching Obama sing along. The only remotely controversial note (beyond Robinson’s prayer for anger at discrimination) was when Bono called the values embodied in Obama’s election “an American dream, an Irish dream … a European dream, an African dream, an Israeli dream,” and then added: “And also a Palestinian dream.”

Obama himself called the celebration an expression of “just what it is that we love about America.” And where I was disappointed that Obama only slightly nodded to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Denver acceptance speech (on the 45th anniversary of King’s “I have a dream” speech), today his praise and attention to the parallels of their cause was full-throated and moving. Obama’s voice deepened and grew louder as he talked about King’s dream “that his children might be judged on the content of their character.” He also praised “the man who made this day possible,” Abraham Lincoln, and said American progress will come “if we could just recognize ourselves in one another.”

And yes, then there was Garth Brooks. The entire crowd — young, old, black, white, Latino, Asian, everyone — seemed to sing along to “American Pie,” including Obama, which could mark him, generationally and culturally, more than anything else that happened today. Who knew they knew all the words? I didn’t until today (actually, Brooks wisely shortened it). And I couldn’t help seeing Brooks, singing along with a multiracial youth choir, as another part of Obama’s outreach to red America, a real reminder that he doesn’t plan to be president of blue America, or red America, but the United States of America. I hope Republicans get the message.

I think this will go down as one of the best days of my life for a long time, except for the fact that I had to make a kind of comic “Sophie’s Choice”: I had a press credential and my college-student daughter didn’t, so she headed for steerage when I got to the press tent. I told her I’d probably just come out and join her in the crowd, how could I see it without her — until I saw that the press area had uniquely awesome views (they don’t always) and I couldn’t imagine leaving. We texted throughout, and she shared her great stories of the real event — topped by people climbing on Porta-Potties to get a better view, then being ordered down by police, then being unable to get down, then being rescued by men in camoflauge. I missed her when Pete Seeger sang “This Land Is Your Land,” because I used to sing it to her 19 years ago, when she was a baby.

It was the kind of event that made you want to share TMI personal details like that — and also the kind of event where you didn’t need to know a soul to suddenly be surrounded by friends and family. Nora and I met up afterward for the long trek home, and we felt lucky to have two sets of views of this historic day. For the first time in my adult life, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, I am crazy in love with my country, and it was fun to attend this schmaltzy sort of wedding to celebrate the change that’s gonna come. I reserve the right to update this post later, when I slap my forehead and say, “How could I not have written about that?” Or maybe I’ll just Tweet it.

The next question, about his asterisk-level standing in the polls and his anemic fundraising, may have prompted Biden to wonder why he had lingered. But rather than decry the horse-race surveys or make excuses for the paltry $2.4 million he collected in the second quarter (sixth place in the Democratic money marathon), the six-term Delaware senator made his anything-can-happen argument with the aid of a potent audience-participation experiment.

Biden simply asked, “How many of you think that the majority of the people in Iowa have firmly made up their mind about how they will vote in the caucuses?” Not a single hand was raised, demonstrating that most Iowans recognize how shallow are the sentiments reflected in the polls.

First elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29 (three weeks before he was constitutionally eligible to serve), Biden has always seen himself as a smart, hardworking, glad-handing East Coast politician with a gift for Irish blarney and charm. When he made an abortive bid for president in 1987, Biden now admits, “I was focused on my conviction that I was a better candidate than the other people — and not that I was ready to lead the country.”

But as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden is now in the curious position of running for president as the long-shot candidate with substance, while Barack Obama, John Edwards (some days) and Hillary Clinton (by marriage) outshine him in the megawatt, star-search spotlight. The self-made senator, who graduated from the University of Delaware with a C average, can only triumph if experience ends up mattering more than excitement. As Biden explained in his stump speech in Grinnell, simultaneously sounding boastful and aw-shucks embarrassed, “I know most every one of these world leaders by their first name. It’s not because I’m important … I was a kid coming up when they were coming up.”

From his perch at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or possibly as a Democratic secretary of state (his likely job had John Kerry been elected) or as president, Biden may yet play a central role as America grapples with the never-ending nightmare that is Iraq. Biden, along with his fellow Sens. Clinton, Edwards and Chris Dodd, voted for the 2002 resolution permitting Bush to launch the war. During a 2005 interview with me, Biden recanted his vote, saying, “I never figured on the absolute incompetence of the administration … If I knew Cheney and Rumsfeld so wholly possessed the president’s attention, I never would have voted for that.”

Unlike his rivals for the nomination, Biden has been championing a plan (which he proposed last year with Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations) to subdivide Iraq along ethnic lines within a federal system. (The plan for separate Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions is explained in detail on Biden’s campaign Web site.)

But these days, Biden acknowledges that it may soon be too late to salvage anything from the debacle in Iraq. During an interview Tuesday along the Iowa campaign trail, Biden talked bluntly between stops about the dire alternatives facing the man he imagines will be the next president: “I may be left on Jan. 20, 2009, with no option but to withdraw and to contain [the civil war within Iraq]. To literally have inherited a fractured country … where there is no way to put Humpty-Dumpty back together.”

During one conversation in the campaign van headed into Grinnell, Biden found himself torn between holding a cup of coffee and gesturing with both hands. Confronted with a classic unwinnable situation, he carefully put the coffee cup on the floor. There is a bluntness to Biden, which stands in contrast to a candidate like Clinton, who seems to mentally convene a focus group before answering a question.

But Biden can also be impolitic in his criticisms of immediate-withdrawal-for-Iraq political grandstanding, and the bloggers who encourage it. “I don’t believe that this sort of red-meat, ‘I’ll get out quicker than the other guy’ [competition] has resonance,” he said, adding that in political terms for the Democrats, “I think it has a real danger.” Biden, who has endured 22 years of Republican presidents while in the Senate, criticized bloggers’ vow to “take back” the party. “They don’t own the Democratic Party. What are they talking about?”

No antiwar stance arouses Biden’s ire like Bill Richardson’s hyperbolic claim that he alone of the major Democratic presidential contenders would leave no residual forces in Iraq. As Biden put it, “Governor Richardson, God love him, says that he is the only one who is going to get out entirely, but he is going to leave enough forces to protect our embassy. He ought to talk to the Marines; they say that’s 10,000 troops.”

There is a free-form quality to Biden’s stump speeches as arguments appear from nowhere, presumably because something occurred to the candidate, and then disappear from the repertoire for the rest of the day. Tuesday morning in Cedar Rapids talking to 100 Democrats (a good-size crowd for Iowa in the days before Obama mania and two Clintons campaigning together) at the Blue Strawberry Coffee Co., Biden battled the roar of the espresso machine as he tried to explain a controversial recent vote in the Senate.

Alone among the Democratic presidential contenders, Biden voted for Iraq war appropriations, even though the final legislation did not contain a timetable for withdrawal. Alluding to that vote, he said, “If there is a single solitary troop left in Iraq, we must protect that troop. We have a moral obligation to protect these kids we send … We need 67 votes to overcome the president’s veto. We can cast all the symbolic votes we want. But the bottom line is that I’m not trading symbolism for lives.”

As a presidential candidate, Biden lives in a world seemingly free from fear about how his words will appear out of context. Back in January, as he was launching his presidential campaign, Biden stumbled badly in an interview in which he described Obama as “clean” and “articulate.”

But even now, Biden cannot resist flirting with rhetorical danger. In Cedar Rapids, he borrowed a catchphrase from an anti-integration 1968 third-party candidate while discussing the healthcare plans of his rivals: “As old George Wallace used to say 40 years ago, ‘There ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between our plans.’” Two minutes later, talking about an idea for African debt relief that he had suggested to Bono, Biden said humbly, “It’s not Al Gore inventing the Internet.”

That one even registered on Biden’s internal danger meter, as he realized that there are worse political dangers than appearing immodest. Walking over to me, the only national political reporter in view, Biden loudly insisted, to the delight of the crowd, “It’s real, real clear that I didn’t say that.”

Moments like this, Biden conceded in our interview, represent the downside “of my being straightforward and candid … I’m going to get myself into trouble.” Then Biden, who was already in the Senate as Obama was just getting ready for middle school, said, “I can’t start to calibrate all this stuff … The public in the primaries, as well as the general election, are going to judge me for all of who I am.”

And for Joe Biden — the candidate who never stops talking, but often has much to say — the inherent contradiction is between his still youthful irreverence and the hard-won gravity that comes with the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and watching America go so tragically awry abroad.

It’s awfully tempting to look at this media play and start cracking jokes about how Forbes magazine is going to go all-out on a campaign for debt relief for Africa and increased foreign aid for HIV prevention. That would be something of an editorial revolution, since Steve Forbes, the publisher, is on record as critiquing Bono’s approach to helping out the world’s poor and sick. As he wrote in his column just a few months ago:

Bono’s “emphasis on giving more money to benighted countries is misbegotten. Most of it will be wasted, and despite ‘safeguards’ all too much of it will be siphoned off by corrupt politicos and bureaucrats. Africa has received more than $400 billion in aid since 1960, yet per capita income has declined. No other area of the world has suffered such a regression. Blair, Bono et al. should be focusing on measures that would allow sub-Saharan Africa’s existing entrepreneurial energies to put their countries on the path of rapid, India-China-Pacific-Rim-like economic growth. There are huge barriers blocking those who could catapult Africa’s poor nations onto an economic fast track.”

Don’t bet the house on Mr. “Capitalist Tool” Forbes changing his tune. This purchase of a stake in Forbes Media by Elevation, the investment group of which Bono is a member, doesn’t seem to be a question of editorial philosophy — Elevation seems far more enchanted by the millions of visitors that the Forbes Web site attracts every day.

But still, it’s not often that you get handed a plate of irony as tasty as this one. Bono wrote the introduction to development economist Jeffrey Sachs’ “End of Poverty,” which calls for precisely the kind of massive foreign-aid increases and direct government interventions that are so antithetical to Forbesian ideology. And while on the one hand it is puerile to think that privatization and deregulation can turn Somalia or Rwanda into China or India, it’s also quite true that past decades are littered with failed attempts to use aid money to help Africans escape their poverty trap.

Maybe the real significance of the Bono-Forbes connection is that just the fact that Bono is even tangentially involved is an excuse to revisit the challenges faced by sub-Saharan Africa once again. Underpinning the efforts of Sachs and Bono is a fundamentally optimistic mindset — yes, they concede, many previous efforts have failed. But smart people learn from their mistakes, and if we keep trying, we can figure out ways to improve public welfare in previously “benighted” countries. As Forbes magazine once reported, Bono’s efforts in recent years were instrumental in pointing out the utterly cockeyed nuttiness that African nations owed more to the developed world in annual debt repayments than they were receiving in foreign aid. That’s clearly a “huge barrier” to development, and it’s not one that further deregulation would do a darn thing to address.

Wolfowitz spokesman Kevin Kellems said Wolfowitz and Bono “clicked.” “They were very enthusiastic, detailed and lengthy conversations,” Kellems said. He said that the conversations “were incredibly substantive about reducing poverty, about development, about the opportunity to help people that the World Bank presidency provides and about charitable giving and social progress around the globe.”

The word from the Bono side of the conversation was a little less effusive. The government relations director for Debt, AIDS, Trade and Africa, a lobbying group Bono helped to found, told Reuters: “Bono thought it was important that he put forward the issues that are critical to the World Bank, like debt cancellation, aid effectiveness and a real focus on poverty reduction.”