Ellen DeGeneres is like the Big Easy. She’s all about fun. After Hurricane Katrina, add big heart.

Ellen, a native of New Orleans, has raised over $10 million dollars for Katrina relief. In Fat Tuesday’s episode of the Ellen DeGeneres Show, she focused again on Katrina relief efforts. Former President George H. W. Bush sent a videotaped message thanking her for her fundraising.

In the same show, Ellen gave a new GM Acadia to a single mother who lost her home in the hurricane and works 20 hours a day so she could rebuild. She continues to ask her viewers to support Brad Pitt’s Make It Right, a group that hopes to build 150 environmentally friendly homes in the Lower 9th Ward. She has raised over $800,000 for Pitt.

The script has changed.

Pointing to Al Gore, parents throughout the country may be telling their children that if they study hard, lead good lives and not become president they could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Gore is the co-winner of this year’s Peace Prize for sounding the alarm on global warming. He shares the prize with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

While Gore may have fashioned a grand comeback, a look at the post-defeat careers of other recent unsuccessful presidential wannabes shows that there can be life, a good life at that, after losing. All have found things to do, sometimes lucrative things, and many have held elective office, most often in the U.S. Senate.

All have continued in public life and some have remained in politics, most especially in the U.S. Senate.

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, trained to remain cool in the most stressful of situations, was unflappable during his congressional testimony yesterday.

In an appearance before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, he expertly defended his company’s activities in Iraq, where about 1,000 Blackwater guards protect U.S. diplomats and other State Department employees. He described Blackwater as “a team of dedicated professionals” who “risk their lives to protect Americans in harm’s way overseas.”

Prince, a former Navy SEAL, founded Blackwater in 1997. In the early years of operation, the firm did limited business with the U.S. government. However, company fortunes shifted dramatically after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the onset of war in Iraq. By last year, federal contracts totalled $600 million, primarily from protection services provided to the State Department.

Scooter Libby, Joe Lieberman, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Mitt Romney all have at least one thing in common: They’ve been the recipients of Mel Sembler’s largesse and his fund-raising effectiveness.

Sembler, a Florida shopping center developer who founded a controversial non-profit group of drug treatment centers for adolescents, helped raise millions for the elections of Bush the elder and Bush the younger.

The first family of Dallas is not named Perot, or Cuban, or Jones or Hicks.

And it won’t be Bush when the president leaves the White House in 2009 and returns to Big D.

The first family of Dallas is Hunt.

It has been ever since Haroldson Lafayette Hunt moved his oil company to the city in the 1930s so he could be closer to his banker and good train service.

It’s even truer today because of Ray Hunt, the most powerful Hunt - and there have been a lot of them - since old H.L. While H.L. was always trying to find a U.S. president who would listen to him, his son has found one in George Bush.

Judith Miller, a central figure in both the Lewis Libby trial and the debate over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has joined the Manhattan Institute.

The former New York Times reporter is now an adjunct fellow at the conservative think tank. The bio posted on the institute’s web site describes her focus as “Middle East and counterterrorism, and the need to strike a delicate balance between protecting both national security and American civil liberties in a post-9/11 world.”