Get this. They played the Super Bowl last weekend and the Rolling Stones were the halftime show. The Stones, the NFL, and the TV network agreed that expletives would be bleeped, and so when they sang the words "cock" and "come," there was a two-second cutout for each one. The Barcelona press, La Vanguardia and El Periodico, is screaming censorship and blasting Yankee puritanism. This was, of course, much bigger news than the football game itself.

Look, people, millions of viewers watch the Super Bowl every year and some of them are offended by such language. Therefore, such language was not included in the show. Since the Stones agreed that the line "You'd make a dead man come" is not very appropriate in the middle of a football stadium or a national TV broadcast, I don't see what the problem is.

Another thing is that this little incident has nothing to do with "censorship," a word that the local intellectuals like to throw around. "Censorship" is when the government exercises prior restraint to prohibit certain ideas from being expressed. This was a private agreement made between a rock band, a sports league, and a TV network.

Also, "You'd make a dead man come" is not precisely the sort of message the founding fathers had in mind when they established the First Amendment to the US constitution, which prohibits Congress from making laws that would interfere with the freedom of speech or the press. I think they were thinking about Tom Paine, Edmund Burke, Rousseau, and Locke.

In the wake of Pepe Rubianes's statements on Catalan TV, which were more offensive than the silly cartoons that the Islamists are getting worked up about, and much more offensive than "You'd make a dead man come," I bet they wish they'd bleeped some of the things he said.

Let me also point out that standards have changed considerably over the years. Mick Jagger would definitely not have been allowed to sing "Satisfaction" at the first Super Bowl in 1967. Isn't that a sign of how over-the-hill the Stones are? Their biggest hit is now 41 years old, and they haven't made a decent album since Tattoo You in 1981, 25 years ago. They're exactly the kind of safe middle-of-the road act that gets to play the Super Bowl. Remember the old satanic drug-addled tough-guy Stones of the 1960s? It was all an act in the first place, and it's very old now.

Finally, my biggest question is why should people in Spain care whether the Rolling Stones sing "You'd make a dead man come" or not during an American football game? Get this, it's El Periodico's daily survey on the newspaper's online edition. So far today about 1500 people have voted, with 43% agreeing that the Stones were correct in consenting to the two-second cutouts and 41% disagreeing, while 16% didn't care.