Quick! Give me a foreign object to throw at the television

While searching for something to throw at the TV Wednesday night after Melinda Doolittle was unceremoniously dumped from “American Idol,” I came across the day’s mail, which included an envelope from TrueMajority.org.

My congressional budget flying disc was here. Yea!!

But I’ll get back to that in a sec. First, to all the women out there who swooned over Blake Lewis and voted him into the finals, shame on you. I’m predicting when the CDs for the top three “AI” finalist come out, Doolittle will be this year’s Chris Daughtry and outsell Lewis and co-finalist Jordin Sparks combined.

Daughtry, who finished in fourth place last year, has a No. 1 album under his belt while finalist Katherine McPhee and winner Taylor Hicks could do no better than No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart for album sales.

Blake’s good looks -- and he is VERY cute, I’ll admit -- got him into the finals, not his singing. That beat box thing is impressive, but it got old over the course of the show -- dared to upset rock god Jon Bon Jovi! -- and will get old over the course of a full-length CD. I suspect he’ll fall to Sparks in the finale, but I really couldn’t care less at this point.

And so back to what I threw at the TV.

Several weeks ago, the Ben & Jerry ice cream founders were on “The Colbert Report” touting their newest flavor named for Colbert, Americone Dreams (very tasty, BTW), and stumping for a grass roots political organization called TrueMajority. They also offered a free gift for those who logged onto the organization’s Web site and submitted a request.

The prize was a wire-rimmed foldable cloth flying disc showing the breakdown of the budget, 50 percent of which is allocated to the Pentagon. The point of the disc was to show how indebted the nation is to the military industrial complex and how little is actually spent on things like education and social programs. The group hopes to persuade Congress to “fight for social justice, give children a decent start in life and protect the environment” by trimming the money given to the Pentagon.

This small symbol was intended to show what Americans, when they work together, can accomplish. What a beautiful sentiment.

When I took my precious little symbol of good ol’ U.S. patriotism from the envelope, the sticker affixed to the front of the bag said it all:

“Made in China.”

sigh.