President Obama has nominated a conservative Republican lawyer who has made her name challenging affirmative action policies to the board of the Legal Services Corporation.

She was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by the late Ronald Reagan, a president who decried “judicial activism.”

While he hasn’t been nominated for any Academy Awards, Josh Brolin may be the actor most connected to the current Oscar nominees.

Brolin obviously made good choices, taking roles in three films with Oscar nominations. He appeared in No Country for Old Men, which was one of the most nominated films of the year, taking eight Academy Awards noms, including best motion picture and best director.

Brolin had a role in In the Valley of Elah, in which Tommy Lee Jones is up for best actor. He also appears opposite Denzel Washington in American Gangster, which picked up two nominations. (Story continues below interactive map.)

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.

It’s the sort of windfall that not-for-profits don’t receive every day.

A little more than a year old, the Alliance for Climate Protection gained $750,000 when former Vice President Al Gore was named co-recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Friday.

Gore announced that he would give his share of the prize to the alliance, a Palo Alto, Calif., organization he formed last year.

The group’s goal is to increase awareness about threats to the environment from global warming.
It helped put on this July’s Live Earth concerts in seven cities around the world.