National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" -- once satirized by right- wingers as "Morning Sedition" -- actually ran a weepy story last week on a group of smallbusiness owners who work from their homes and feel oppressed by high business taxes and government licensing requirements. Just who are these embattled entrepreneurs? Screenwriters in Los Angeles. A new city ordinance requires them to fill out licensing forms (like all who work at home) on which they must categorize their output as either "retail" or "wholesale" -- an indignity which is probably a violation of their human, not to mention artistic, rights. What's more, city inspectors can perform inspections of the "workplace." The Writers Guild has sued the city. And NPR's reporter, Mandalit Del Barco, wins this week's Torricelli Recovered Memory prize, named for the senator who bragged of watching the Kefauver hearings -- hearings that took place before he was born. It's not just that these struggling writers have to pay taxes, said Del Barco; but "this is, after all, a town where memories of the McCarthy era blacklist are still alive." Right. And it's also a town where the median age of screenwriters is 29, and having a sense of history typically means being able to come up with clever late-70s pop-culture references for Wayne's World sequels.