In this season of peace on earth, goodwill towards men, Santa Claus and other myths, House Republicans are once again showing they’re not only the party protecting the interests of the Have Mores, they’re aggressively the party who would literally take food out of a poor child’s mouth, brazenly blocking legislation to fund school meals for tens of thousands of hungry American kids. The increase would add up to a grand total of six cents per kid.

That’s all… six whole cents.

And to add insult to injury, Sarah Palin brought cookies to a Pennsylvania school to protest what she was spinning as a nanny state edict banning cookies from school lunches. You can’t even buy a cookie for six cents. Hell, you can’t even make them yourself for that little.

So while it doesn’t surprise or even shock me that Republicans could be so clueless and so heartless as to actually deny children food, some of whom are the children of the more than 15 million unemployed Americans and who only ever see a square meal at a school lunch, it does shock and sadden me that there’s not more Democrats pointing out how little money it costs to feed a child. By my calculation, and I’m no math wizard here, just one single Bush tax cut giving one single Republican fat cat a $80,000 bonus would buy… (clicketyclicketyclick on my calculator)… one million children a school lunch, and still have $20,000 left over to buy the human skull off the Skull and Bones Society. Now imagine how many school lunches $700 billion could pay for.

The House of Representatives just voted 234 to 188 to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts on incomes up to $250,000, after having blocked an earlier attempt by GOP members from offering their own bill to make the tax cuts permanent for all Americans, including the highest earners, which angered the Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner, who called it ‘chicken crap.’

Or, to paraphrase Marie Antoinette, if there’s not enough money to feed our kids a cookie, let them eat chicken crap.