No, the strangely warm conversation between the liberal comic and the conservative shouting head was most confrontational on the topic of Helen Thomas, whom O'Reilly had compared on his Fox News Channel show to the "Wicked Witch of the East" from Wizard of Oz. "If you're going to do a little humor, learn how to do it," Goldberg said. Zing!

Goldberg may have devised the most realistic strategy yet for effectively arguing with O'Reilly on his notoriously hostile show: hold your tongue. She endured absurd, delusional O'Reillyisms like the "bottom rung" comment and the assertion that O'Reilly understands "the Barack Obama phenomenon better than anyone else in this country." Her reward for ignoring this bait was the chance to make the point she was prepared to make, and the one that would most effectively rebut her host.

[via HuffPo]

Us has the scoop:

When a reporter approached her at an inauguration event last week, she tried to turn the tables on him by asking him what Barack Obama's greatest characteristic was. When the reporter said he felt uncomfortable answering because he is a journalist, Alba replied, "be neutral - be Sweden about it."

TMZ.com later called her a "ditz" and an "arrogant buffoon" for saying Sweden instead of Switzerland when referring to the neutral country during WWII.

We confess that we often suffer the same mixup: meaning to ask for a Swiss army knife, we'll be handed a perfectly useless (but tasty!) Swedish fish instead. However, Alba took to her Myspace blog to insist that Sweden is really what she meant to say:

I want to clear some things up that have been bothering me lately. I find it depressing that in the midst of perhaps the most salient time in our country's history, individuals are taking it upon themselves to encourage negativity and stupidity. Last week, Mr. Bill O'Reilly and some really classy sites (i.e.TMZ) insinuated I was dumb by claiming Sweden was a neutral country. I appreciate the fact that he is a news anchor and that gossip sites are inundated with intelligent reporting, but seriously people...it's so sad to me that you think the only neutral country during WWII was Switzerland. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_during_World_War_II if you want to see what I was referring to. I appreciate the name calling and the accurate reporting. Keep it up!!

Yes, well, at this "salient time in our country's history," we'll refrain from knocking Alba too hard, only lightly suggesting that perhaps some of those words don't mean what she thinks they mean. We're sure the actress could simply use a vacation—we'd just recommend that she double-check the location on her boarding pass.

• A Few Thoughts and the Inauguration [Myspace]

What resulted was a quick, graceful deflection of every attempt to entrap her, with slights at O'Reilly, George W. Bush, and Fox News delivered for good measure (and with a smile). For most actors, we'd recommend staying out of politics, but it seems to bring out the best in Alba. Forget bombs like The Love Guru—it's time for her to sign for a sexed-up Frost/Nixon 2 (in which Frost's nubile daughter has her own encounter with Nixon—this time, with some very different interrogation techniques).

• 'Kind of an a-hole': Jessica Alba tells the truth about Bill O'Reilly [Crooks and Liars]

• WATCH VIDEO

O'REILLY: [...] Mr. Hamlin says playing a gay character in the 1982 movie "Making Love" hurt him. How so, Mr. Hamlin?

HARRY HAMLIN, ACTOR: Well, it wasn't exactly painful, but after having done that film, I have not done another studio picture in 20-some odd years. Which is not to say I regret in any way having made that movie. I think it was a film that was very timely. It was about a sub culture that the media was not paying any attention to, and I was very happy to be a part of it.

O'REILLY: Now, you think the fact that you played an aggressive gay character. And before that, you of course were on "L.A. Law" and a leading man type of person. Do you think they Hollywood execs say we can't put a leading man into a romantically heterosexual guy? Do you think that's what it was?

HAMLIN: Well, I think that Hollywood today remains somewhat of a cowboy town. I was a leading man at the time — a young leading man on my way up. I think if they were casting a film and they wanted somebody to play a heterosexual male lead, they'd probably say wait a minute, that guy was just gay in that movie, and the audience is going to get confused.

Actually, LA Law didn't begin until 1986, four years after Hamlin appeared in Making Love. But while choosing to play an "aggressive gay" in that movie probably seemed like the next logical step after prancing around in a toga that showed too much thigh in Clash of the Titans, we can see how that might not have helped his career in the less-tolerant 1982 world. When a desperate, pinklisted Hamlin signed up for LA Law, he probably realized that he was sacrificing any chance as a big-screen leading man; in the mid-80s, becoming a TV star would kill your movie aspirations quicker than playing the bottom PI in Simon on Simon.

• Homosexuality and Hollywood [FoxNews.com]

As O'Reilly puts it, here are the facts: There are death threats. He has to hire bodyguards. He can't check into hotels with his family. People on the street with cell phones are stealth paparazzi, capable of snagging a picture one minute, then posting it on the Web the next. He adds that during the past year he's had to "even get more stuff to make it more difficult for people to get through the wire. Who wants to live like that?" [...]

"I don't need to do the show anymore [and] I'm as famous as I need to be. I don't like being famous. ... I can't take my family and stay in a hotel, so what good is it?

"You have to worry about who's looking at you - are they taking your picture? Did you curse at this guy? If you nudge somebody's bumper, are they going to sue you for $80million?

"I never felt sorry for people like Lindsay Lohan in my life. I thought they were dopey little movie stars. Now I feel sorry for those people. That poor little girl is 19 and can't leave the house without some idiot doing something."

Soon enough, O'Reilly will learn to stop fighting against fame and embrace it like his teenage inspiration. Everything will seem so much easier once he gets a huge sets of tits bolted on, suddenly drops thirty pounds, and loses hours at a time crammed into a Spider Club bathroom stall with a couple of his closest gal pals. Yes, that will all be nice, but his first real taste of freedom, when he finally feels utterly, deliciously alive, will come that first time he hears the satifsying crunch of his bumper slamming into an SUV full of paparazzi, $80 million lawsuits be damned.

• What's hate got to do with it? [Newsday]