Michael Moore reports that neither he nor the Dixie chicks have been hurt by the “Oscar backlash.” In fact, they’ve been making extra trips to the bank because of it. Frank Rich (on Moore’s website) had this to say:

Mr. Moore’s boorish Oscar night yelling, far from relegating him to obscurity, seems to have enhanced not only his movie’s box office but his own magnitude of stardom. While Hollywood and its acolytes may believe that Mr. Moore was (in that now terminally overused word) “inappropriate,” there may well be plenty of other Americans who find it more mischievous than scandalous to break etiquette at a glitzy awards show. Upending a ceremony at which the high priest is Steve Martin is not, after all, an act of sacrilege quite on a par with disrupting high mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

So much for Fox News’ report that the Michael Moore fan club was meeting in a telephone booth. So much for Madonna’s fear of dissent. And so much for the permanence of Nixon’s “silent majority.”