Jimmy Smits and Barack Obama

Fans of The West Wing have noticed uncanny parallels between the show’s Texas Rep. Matt Santos, and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

Like Obama, Santos is a young, charismatic politician making a long-shot bid for the presidency. Like Obama, he refuses to be defined, or limited, by his ethnicity. And like Obama, he challenges a better-known establishment Democrat who wears the mantle of inevitability.

What do you do when your longtime girlfriend tells you she’s “f***ing Matt Damon?” If you’re Jimmy Kimmel, you f*** Ben Affleck!

After 100 days without writers, TV shows began to return to normal yesterday after most of the striking writers voted to return to work.

Writers for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show were back to work on Wednesday morning, making Jon Stewart one of the first late-night hosts to return to his pre-strike glory.

Before cameras rolled in the Manhattan studio, Stewart seemed pretty pumped up. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” blared, and he mouthed lyrics and drummed along on his desk while looking over his first script in more than three months.

Every movie about a strike needs a heroine, someone brash enough to stand on top of a table with a megaphone and demand justice.

But some credit for the possible ending of the three-month-old strike by the Writers Guild of America may be going to a different sort of heroine.

New York Times reporter Michael Cieply writes today that Laeta Kalogridis, most recently the executive producer of Bionic Woman, helped bring the warring parties together not with a megaphone but with a phone and with e-mail.

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.

With the writers strike, many TV addicts are left with only reality television to entertain them. To help fill the void, reality show heavy-hitter, American Idol, returns tonight and tomorrow for its seventh season premiere on Fox.

But American Idol may be one reality competition that isn’t actually about winning or losing. Lately, winners have been losing recording contracts and losers are topping charts, winning Grammys and Oscars, and debuting on Broadway.

The world of a beauty queen can’t be easy. All those parades, all those ribbon cuttings, all those speeches.

But, as the recent case of Kumari Fulbright shows, it gets even harder if you fall off the pedestal.

“Arizona Beauty Queen Charged With Kidnapping, Torturing Ex-Boyfriend,” announced FoxNews.com, in a story about Fulbright, who was Miss Pima County 2005 and Miss Desert Sun 2006.

Move over Martha Stewart because Rachael Ray’s souffle is rising.

In a year that saw the share price of the once-mighty Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia sag precipitously, Stewart dropped off Fortune’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women.

Ray, meanwhile, strengthened her claim as America’s new domestic diva in 2007. She signed a new contract with Food Network, and pulled down $16 million for her thriving year-old network television talk show.

If you’re familiar with the phrase, “You know you love me,” you’ve been tuning into one of the latest guilty pleasure TV shows: Gossip Girl.

The new drama is from writer and producer Josh Schwartz, best known for creating the The OC, which went off the air in February 2007.

Awkward. That’s the best way to describe John Bowman’s position in the writers strike that began today. He is chairman of the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America, but also executive producer of the new series, “Frank TV,” starring comedian Frank Caliendo.

By striking, Bowman is walking away from his producer job.

This is the first industrywide writers strike since 1988. About 12,000 movie, TV, radio and animation writers are involved.