Pearl Jam’s Free Speech Sticks Bush

Rick de Yampert of the Daytona Beach News-Journal weighed in on Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder’s recent show in Denver where he took a Bush mask and “impaled” it on a microphone stand, then slammed it against the stage. “Finally, an anti-war protester who realizes our president’s warmongering, and all its cataclysmic ramifications still to come, calls for dissent more potent and provocative than [Natalie Maines’] benign ‘We’re ashamed’ of the president (for which she later apologized),” he said. “Go, Eddie, go! These are strange days for that little ‘freedom of speech’ thing tucked in the First Amendment. War and fear, of course, tend to muck up things like civil liberties.” News-journalonline.com has since removed the article.