Say what you want about glitzy celebs, some of them put their money where their mouth is.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have moved their family to New Orleans. Their kids will attend school there. Angelina has put out a request to participate in volunteer activities. Pitt is following through with plans announced a few years ago join forces with Global Green USA and build 20 environment-friendly homes.

Jolie is also hanging out at local spots and mingling. We need more like them. [hat tip Scribe.]

And now for something different. The Golden Globes are about to begin. The dresses and hairstyles are the best part for me. If you watch tonight, let us know who you admired and who you thought was a dud.

I also love that it covers both tv shows and movies, and takes place in such a different setting than the Oscars.

Update: Pretty boring so far. As I expected, the best part is the dresses. Very few faux pas so far. Most of my favorites for the awards didn't win, but the night is still young.

Update: Excellent tribute by Tom Hanks to Warren Beatty. Annette just glowed. I wondered why no one mentioned the Parallax View, though.

Jon Chait has chutzpah, that's for sure. Today he writes:

I DON'T WANT to accuse American doves of rooting for the United States to lose in Iraq because I know they love their country and understand the dire consequences of defeat. But the urge to gloat is powerful, and some of them do seem to be having a grand time in the wake of being vindicated. . . . Most liberals made the same argument as Schell in 1990, and as subsequent years exposed the silliness of the claim, many of them were humbled. . . . What's even sillier is judging someone's foreign policy insight solely based on his or her stance on the last war. Over-learning the lessons of the last war is a classic foreign policy blunder. Yet many liberals want to make the lessons of the Iraq debacle the central basis of American foreign policy. The story in Radar is of a piece with this growing impulse.

Gloating by Chait is ok I guess. But like Gore and (Howard Dean, Chait), I and many people got it right in both wars, and for good principled reasons. More.

New York's losing Attorney General candidate, Jeanine Pirro, won't be crying in her spilled milk.

Instead, she'll be raking in $1 million a year as host of her own Warner Brothers television talk show.

Good luck Jeanine, break a leg. We are all much safer and freer with you on television than directing crime policy.

My prediction: the show will be a big hit. Guilt still sells in America.

I've been reading all day about the Apple iPhone. It looks very cool. But I kept wondering, what does it have that the Treo doesn't have?

I just got the Treo 680 over the holidays, so the TL kid could take my Motorola Razor - he had a dinosaur of a Nokia.

Aside from the fact that the Treo's phone reception sucks and the battery needs daily recharging, I finally figured out most of its bells and whistles and I like it.

I love my video iPod, but I'm wondering whether I'd shell out $500 to $600 bucks for a new one just because it has a phone and a touch screen.

Logic like this escapes me:

Tomorrow at the Denver Public Library, downtown, as part of their month long Jack Kerouac exhibit:

From Kentucky to Colorado
The Literary and Journalistic Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson

Sunday, January 7, 2:30-4 p.m.

Denver Central Library, Level B2 Conference Center

10 West 14th Avenue Parkway

A tribute to the late, great Hunter S. Thompson who was deeply influenced by the writings of Jack Kerouac. David Amram accompanies spoken-word readings by Thompson’s son and grandson, Juan and Will Thompson, and Thompson’s widow, Anita Thompson.

Comedian Chevy Chase has an oped in Saturday's New York Times about his making fun of Gerald Ford on SNL and how he got to know the former President and Mrs. Ford. It ends with a very funny comment by Mr. Ford. I won't spoil it, go read.

Nicely done, Chevy.

. . . and they would be right. But he is a malignant airhead. In a return to the misleading GOP serving shill that we have all come to know and detest, David Brooks serves up a sexist screed that would have you believe that since Dems like FDR and Nancy Pelosi and buffoons like George Bush were/are rich, that they are all the same:

I have a dream, my friends. I have a dream that we are approaching the day when a ranch-owning millionaire Republican like George Bush will make peace with a vineyard-owning millionaire Democrat like Nancy Pelosi.

I have a dream that Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child and who, with her investor husband, owns minority shares in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel and the CordeValle Golf Club, will look over her famous strand of South Sea Tahitian pearls and forge bonds of understanding with the zillionaire corporate barons in the opposing party.

Furthermore, I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich — between Randian hedge fund managers on the right and helipad environmentalists on the left. I dream that the big-money people who seem to dominate our politics will put aside their partisan fury and discover the class solidarity that Karl Marx always said they shared, and their newfound civility will trickle down to the rest of us. I dream that Berkeley will make peace with Buckhead, Streisand with DeVos, Huffington with O’Reilly.

What a liar. The rest of us Brooks? You are the common man? FDR was just a rich guy like George Bush? What a lying snake.

Of course this is part of the new GOP civility offensive and a shot across the bow at the Democrats' newfound commitment to populism.

Brooks did not always think of himself as The Common Man:

Can a non-profit news network survive without corporate contributions, government funding or advertising?

The Real News thinks so and is set to launch its first daily newscast.

The Real News is a product of Independent World Television. Paul Jay is the Chairman and CEO.

I've had the pleasure of working with Paul in the past (in 2000 on the TNT documentary, Was Justice Denied?, which we spent six months filming part-time around the country) and I would bet that if anyone can make this a reality, he can. Check out his video message on the Real News site.

I hope you will keep your eye out for the launch of The Real News, and make a point to watch.

Steve Benen points us to an example of how NOT to demonstrate it:

A liberal-bashing book by a veteran St. Louis judge is to become available publicly this week, but it is already causing a stir in political and legal circles — and prompting some to say it could cost him his job.

Chapter 1 of Circuit Judge Robert H. Dierker Jr.'s book, "The Tyranny of Tolerance: A Sitting Judge Breaks the Code of Silence to Expose the Liberal Judicial Assault," has circulated via e-mail since last month and been widely read in legal circles, lawyers and judges say.

The sentiments expressed in that chapter, which frequently uses the term "femifascists" and is titled "The Cloud Cuckooland of Radical Feminism," have already prompted a complaint with the state body that can reprimand or remove judges.

. . . The first chapter was heavily discussed at the recent holiday party for the Women Lawyers' Association of Greater St. Louis. One judge who attended noted, "Everyone's just pretty much shocked." Association President Lynn Ricci said, "I have read it. I find it disturbing." She also said, "I frankly think that it is a shame that this very smart man has lowered himself to name-calling."

Heh, yes that is a shame isn't it? I assume he is planning a careeer as a Right Wing radio talk show host but I could be wrong.

James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul" has died at 73.

Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolized him, and sometimes openly copied him. His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others. Songs such as David Bowie's "Fame," Prince's "Kiss," George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" and Sly and the Family Stone's "Sing a Simple Song" were clearly based on Brown's rhythms and vocal style.

Frank Rich has been a very good columnist of late. But he was not always so. And it is columns like his most recent that remind us that he is still capaable of extreme fatuousness:

[I]n Time’s defense, let me say that the more I reflected on its 2006 Person of the Year — or perhaps the more that Mylar cover reflected back at me — the more I realized that the magazine wasn’t as out of touch as it first seemed. Time made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons. As our country sinks deeper into a quagmire — and even a conclusive Election Day repudiation of the war proves powerless to stop it — we the people, and that includes, yes, you, will seek out any escape hatch we can find. In the Iraq era, the dropout nostrums of choice are not the drugs and drug culture of Vietnam but the equally masturbatory and narcissistic (if less psychedelic) pastimes of the Internet. Why not spend hour upon hour passionately venting in the blogosphere, as Time suggests, about our “state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street”? Or an afternoon surfing from video to video on YouTube, where short-attention-span fluff is infinite? It’s more fun than the nightly news, which, as Laura Bush reminded us this month, has been criminally lax in unearthing all those “good things that are happening” in Baghdad.

Who does Rich think he is describing there? His Johnny Come Lateliness to understanding what Bush is is great and all, but he was part of the problem when Bush was [s]elected. Bob Somerby has documented it and asked this:

Why has a “liberal” like Rich been so tough on Gore through the years? Why did he invent Love Story in 1997? Throughout the course of Campaign 2000, why did he keep pretending that Bush and Gore were a perfectly-matched pair of bumblers? When Gore spoke out on Iraq in 2002, why did Rich attack him again (inventing his facts as he went)? And in his new column, just two weeks ago, why did he nit-pick those ludicrous complaints about Gore? For example, why did he pretend—in that pathetic example—that Gore “waffled” on creationism in 1999? For the most part, readers have no way to evaluate such claims. Why does Rich just keep making them up?

So we DO know the blogs are good for calling exhalted columnists on their hypocritical nonsense at the least. You won't get THAT in the MSM, Frank.