Knock-kneed FCC Chairman Michael Powell protested that moving to sanction other parts of the obscene halftime show would make the agency a "national nanny -- arbiter of taste, values and propriety." How is the fining of one obscene performance an act of a "nanny" and the fining of another proper?

 For its part, embattled CBS issued a muffled response, still playing the innocent. Back in July, Viacom Co-President Les Moonves called the idea of fines "patently ridiculous" and vowed to appeal them as a perilous threat to free speech. Moonves also claimed strangely that the FCC had "rushed to judgment" as it was taking more than half a year to reach a decision. CBS has promised to appeal -- but do they really want two simmering CBS scandals going on for months?

 Luckily for America, the FCC didn't buy the notion that CBS had no idea it was about to stun the country from one football-crazy coast to the other. It's easy to forget that MTV -- CBS's sister corporation that produced this debacle -- almost immediately boasted about the stunt on its Website: "Jaws across the country hit the carpet at exactly the same time ... a kinky finale that rocked the Super Bowl to its core," the network oozed. "MTV was Super Bowl central, so armchair quarterbacks, fair weather fanatics and fans of Janet Jackson and her pasties were definitely in the right place." Only when the full force of outrage hit did CBS and MTV start playing dumb about what they had done.

For her part, Janet Jackson has gone from apologetic to ridiculous, even by Jackson family standards. She told the gay men's magazine Genre that "I truly feel in my heart that the president wanted to take the focus off himself at that time and I was the perfect vehicle to do so at that moment."

 No comment.

 Parents are angry -- but from Hollywood's assault on moral standards. Sixty-three percent of parents surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they favor new regulations to limit the amount of sex and violence in TV shows during the early evening hours when children are more likely to be watching. The Kaiser survey also found that more than half of all parents, 52 percent, said they would like to see federal regulators apply content standards to increasingly sleazy cable stations as well.

 CBS should pay this fine and clean up its act, coast to coast.