When you have a show on New Year’s Day, it’s a great opportunity to take a look back and a look forward. To that end, John Caldwell, news features editor at the Advocate, was our guest at the top of the show to talk about the best GLBT news stories of 2006 and give us a taste about what we have to look forward to in 2007. And XM’s Cinemagic channel contributed a segment on their top five films of 2006.

Turning to a bit of news, the newly appointed president of the Log Cabin Republicans Patrick Sammon joined us to talk about his plans to continue reaching out to fair-minded Republicans.

Since Joe loves talking about his diet and many of you are no doubt making resolutions about dieting for the new year, Emily Bender, a lesbian nutritionist, joined us to share some do’s and don’t’s about healthy eating and healthy living (my favorite part — she says it’s OK to use butter). Listen to parts one and two.

We love a good read on The Agenda so we invited author Alex MacClennan, whose new book The Zookeeper has gotten rave reviews. Listen to the segment.

Finally, we brought back our pal Randy Cohen, who writes “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times, to share his insights about surviving the holidays with family and some of the ethical dilemmas one is likely to face in the new year. Listen in to Randy here.

The holidays and the family gatherings and the New Year’s parties are all behind us, and we were back with a fresh new episode of The Agenda with Joe Solmonese last night. Headlining the show was Arianna Huffington — noted author, commentator and founder of the blog Huffington Post. She and Joe talked politics, her new book On Becoming Fearless and the start of the 110th Congress. Listen to the segment here.

On that note we brought in Allison Herwitt, the Human Rights Campaign’s legislative director, to talk about the GLBT agenda for the new Congress. We also talked to Marc Solomon of MassEquality on the initial passage of a discriminatory marriage amendment in the Bay State and I shared an interview I had with Brian Whitaker, the author of Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East.

A new public service ad campaign was recently released targeting gay men, and Dan Carlson of HIV Forum NYC was our guest to discuss it. The campaign — Look, Listen, Love, Respect— features Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie Perez and Amanda Peet. Listen to the interview with Carlson here.

Finally we tried to chase the winter blues away with Ed Salvato, editor-in-chief of Out Traveler. He shared some helpful travel tips and gave us the skinny on the hottest destinations. Listen to segments one and two.