Okay, here are a couple of cases of actual political correctness gone apeshit:

Exhibit #1:

A television weatherman was fired after referring to slain civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. as "Martin Luther Coon King" on the air, station officials said.

Rob Blair, of KTNV-TV, was delivering the extended forecast Saturday morning when he said: "Martin Luther Coon King Jr. Day, gonna see some temperatures in the mid-60s."

Jim Prather, vice president and general manager of the ABC affiliate, said Blair stumbled when he uttered the remark, but the excuse was not enough to save his job.

Okay, Howard Stern was talking about this incident this morning (yes, I flip between Stern and NPR in the mornings on the way to work when I'm between audiobooks). He played the clip twice. The story makes it sound like he clearly enunciated "coon", which just ain't true.

A more accurate textual representation would be: "Martin Luther coo--, King Junior Day, gonna see some temperatures in the mid-60's". You could debate whether or not there was an "n" sound at the end of "coo", but he clearly self-corrected, and then over-enunciated "Junior". It certainly seemed clear that the guy was fusing "king" and "junior".

What's even more bizarre is that it was a pre-taped news broadcast, and the station had a chance to edit it...but didn't. Only after the fact did they deem it horribly offensive and racist, after they aired it unedited. What basically happened here is that the weatherman had a perfectly understandable slip of the tongue, nobody thought anything about it until it was actually aired, and then they got a ton of angry calls from people overreacting. So to cover the station's butt, they fired the guy. Lovely.

Exhibit #2:

Conservative Christian groups accuse the makers of a video starring SpongeBob SquarePants, Barney and a host of other cartoon characters of promoting homosexuality to children.

The wacky square yellow SpongeBob is one of the stars of a music video due to be sent to 61,000 U.S. schools in March. The makers -- the nonprofit We Are Family Foundation -- say the video is designed to encourage tolerance and diversity.

...

Christian groups however have taken exception to the tolerance pledge on the foundation's Web site, which asks people to respect the sexual identity of others along with their abilities, beliefs, culture and race.

"Their inclusion of the reference to 'sexual identity" within their 'tolerance pledge' is not only unnecessary, but it crosses a moral line," James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, said in a statement released Thursday.

So there's no actual content in the video that they take offense to. They don't like the wording of something on the website associated with the video. So tell me how this is going to affect kids? A 5 year-old watches the video with all these cartoon characters singing about how we should all be nice to one another, so then the kid logs onto the associated webpage, reads the tolerance pledge, and subsequently assumes a gay lifestyle?

Sweet fancy Moses.