Of course, I’m hardly Rosie’s daily television show target demographic.  I work for a living instead of sitting at home staring slack-jawed at the succession of Sham-Wow commercials and ads for shyster lawyers promising big payouts for the imaginary injuries of their deadbeat clients that fill the time between inane segments of mindless yak.  And while the social parasite demographic seems to grow larger after every freebie, hand-out and pay-off the Administration and its Congressional flunkies issue in favor of their employment-averse constituents, Rosie O’Donnell still seems like a bad economic bet.

This is no longer the same country as it was back in 1999 when Rosie was honchoing her first daytime gabfest and hassling Tom Selleck over his support for the Second Amendment of the Constitution.  It’s not even the same country as it was in May 2007, when the former “Queen of Nice’s” anti-conservative bile culminated in her slandering American fighting men and women as terrorists on The View:

ROSIE O‘DONNELL, HOST, “THE VIEW”:  655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead.  Who are the terrorists?

ELISABETH HASSELBECK, “VIEW” CO-HOST:  Who are the terrorists?

O‘DONNELL:  655 Iraqis—I‘m saying you have to look—we invaded…

HASSELBECK:  Wait, who are you calling terrorists? 

O‘DONNELL:  I‘m saying that, if you were in Iraq, and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?

She also takes particular pleasure in attacking the Catholic Church and seems to consider anyone not buying wholesale into her radical agenda against traditional marriage and adoption as a contemptible bigot.  And let’s not forget her equally insightful foray into that moronic twilight zone known as 9/11 trutherism; it completes her personal trifecta of idiocy.  

Rosie’s backers for the new show seem excited at the chance to pick up Oprah’s viewers, whose departure will apparently leave them without a reason to live.  “Those 4, 5, 6 ratings points have to go somewhere,” one told Variety. “Something’s going to come in and fill that vacuum.”

But with the President’s approval ratings in freefall, and with Congress envying the polling numbers achieved by such public favorites as Kim Jong-Il, Vanilla Ice and syphilis, it is a new world.  Rosie’s kind of aggressive, grating, in-your-face liberal stupidity may well serve to alienate a substantial part of today’s potential audience.  Her partners seem to know it too, assuring Variety that:

“If Rosie wanted to just have a platform for her causes, she would go get a show on cable news . . . .  She’s a comedian, not a political pundit.”

Except no one is laughing – her Rosie Live! variety show was cancelled the first night after scoring an anemic 5.25 million viewers, though the presence of such hip, relevant and cutting edge guest artists as Alanis Morrissette and someone/something called “Ne-Yo” probably didn’t help. 

The fact is that Rosie O’Donnell is an unpleasant, smug and actively dumb woman who is unlikely to garner anything like the following she once had before embracing her personal jihad against the most deeply held and sincere beliefs of a significant majority of the country.  The stay at-home mommies I know are too busy to sit and watch television without a very good reason, and being bitched at by a sanctimonious harpy isn’t one of them.  Oprah likes Barack Obama, but (I assume) she doesn’t spend an hour a day telling her audience that they are the scum of the Earth for not agreeing with her.  Rosie probably couldn’t resist – and watching her show would probably make the Bataan Death March look like a week at Club Med.   

So, there are two possible reasons behind the resurrection of Rosie as a daytime talk show hostess.  The first is that the producers think they can make some money by harnessing what they believe to be her undeniable audience appeal.  Perhaps that’s true, but that seems like a triumph of hope over recent experience considering the unbroken track record of audience alienation and failure that has haunted her since she left her original talk show back in 2002 as well as the increasing polarization of the American public into liberal and conservative camps.  Does it seem smart to invest in a show that at the threshold flips the bird to at least 50% of the people who might be enticed to watch it?

The other possibility is that Rosie’s aggressive lefty political stance is a net positive for her backers, and that they believe she would provide a valuable, if only intermittently coherent, liberal voice in the vast wasteland that is daytime television.  And they may be willing to suck up the potential losses in order to let that obnoxious voice be heard.

The truth is probably somewhere in between.  It’s not unknown for Hollywood to try to mix business with leftism (*cough* The Green Zone *cough*).  Of course, that doesn’t always work real well. (*cough* The Green Zone *cough*). 

Will Rosie O’Donnell succeed with her career resurrection?  No one can know for sure, but just in case, I’m keeping a crucifix and some garlic handy.

But it’s too bad my niece didn’t have actor Edward Norton to look to for advice. Not only is he the official U.S. ambassador for Earth Hour 2009, but he was on CNN’s Larry King Live this week, along with Alanis Morissette, to explain just how this symbolic act of the entire world turning out their lights for one hour will encourage world leaders to cap or tax carbon emissions through legislation. Global unity and all that.

Norton even compared turning out the lights for an hour to the famous civil rights march in Selma, Alabama in March of 1965:

If you think about things in our national history, the march on Selma in the Civil Rights Movement, the march itself, unlike some of the boycotts they did was not a, was not an act in itself meant to change the problem. It was a symbolic act and I think this is for my generation, for many people around the world who care about this issue, I think we’re looking for those kind of symbolic acts that show how many people are, are concerned about this.

The only thing the march in Selma has in common with Earth Hour is that they both share the same month.  Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon these days for someone with a cause to promote to try to link it to the Civil Rights movement in order to give it legitimacy. Even The One himself claimed that his parents met at the Selma march in order to give His birth more meaning (even though He was three and a half years old when the first Selma march occurred).

It’s fashionable for Hollywood celebrities to “give back” by donating time – and sometimes money -to a pet cause, be it cancer, AIDS, or whatever. Not only does it make them look like they care (and yes, sometimes they really do), but it gives them free publicity. Everybody wins, right? Unfortunately for them, that publicity sometimes makes them look like knuckleheads.

Global warming has become a popular cause because it’s easy to tell other people how to live their lives while not necessarily making changes in yours. Just by “getting the word out” you’re helping. If Arianna Huffington doesn’t have to live the life of a global warming paragon, why should anyone else? And since you don’t have to have a complicated scientific degree (one only needs to look to Al Gore’s successful global warming career), just about anyone who “cares” can be an expert.  Sheryl Crow, Laurie David, Leonardo DiCaprio and Carmen Diaz are just a few of the glitterati to lend their names to the global warming cause.

Looking back to the 1980s, noted scientist Meryl Streep helped hobble the apple growing industry in America when she became the face of the evils of Alar, despite the fact that claims of its dangers were unfounded. Perhaps Edward Norton is looking to cripple the economy in general by taking part in a hoax that won’t save the earth from anything (anyone heard of the sun?).

By the way, the economy includes movies and television. I wonder how big Hollywood’s carbon footprint is? How much does global warming owe to all of the electricity needed to run the hot lights, cameras, editing equipment, and air conditioning (or heating) for the stars’ individual on-set trailers? Not to mention all of the gasoline that is used traveling to and from site locations and to run the cars and other vehicles featured in the films and shows.

If Norton and others are looking for a way to lessen the threat we face from global warming, how about making the ultimate sacrifice by shutting down the entertainment industry as we know it? Actors and actresses could instead turn to live theater, giving daytime plays outdoors for maximum earth-saving benefit. They could travel around the country by wagon train to further shrink their carbon footprints. And just think of all the electricity we could save by there being no more movie theaters and no need for televisions, DVD players, cable boxes and so on in our homes.

Sure that’s ridiculous, and I would never actually expect it to happen. But if these cap and trade regulations that Norton is such a fan of take place, you can bet that the entertainment industry will eventually be affected. As it is, the recession is causing some celebrities to look for infomercial deals as acting and modeling gigs begin to dry up. Even liberal blowhard Alec Baldwin connected the dots between higher taxes and the entertainment industry. Shocking, I know, but if Alec can grasp it, there must be hope.

Meanwhile, I’ll be saving the earth by making sure I don’t watch any Edward Norton movies, either at home or in the theaters. He’ll be proud of my efforts, I’m sure.