White House press secretary Tony Snow, from today’s news briefing:

Q Tony, thank you. Two questions. Since the President’s one-time election opponent is the only Vice President ever to win the Academy Award’s Oscar, did the President send him congratulations?

MR. SNOW: I’m not aware that he did. But I will send mine.

Q Is this because — the fact that you don’t know that he sent him congratulations due to the fact that the President believes the award should have been for science fiction?

MR. SNOW: No, I don’t. But that was very clever. That was a good one.

First, last week’s answer — Sen. Howell Heflin — and the winning questions:

• Peter Roff: Name the last state Supreme Court Chief Justice to be elected to the United States Senate.
• Jeff DuFour: What late Alabama senator was famously lampooned by Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live for his role in the Clarence Thomas hearings?
• Quin: Who is the only person to be replaced as a U.S. senator by the man (Jeff Sessions) whose federal judicial nomination he personally torpedoed?

Now, this week’s Extreme Trivia answer: Sen. Pat Geary.  What’s the question?

Extreme Mortman helped out the great charity ThanksUSA’s first treasure hunt last year.  The second treasure hunt has just begun, lasting until September.

What is ThanksUSA?  It is a non-partisan, charitable effort to mobilize Americans of all ages to “thank” the men and women of the United States armed forces. The charity is doing that by providing college, technical and vocational school scholarships for their children and spouses.

Other bloggers are likewise invited to promote the promotional effort, and the hunt itself.  Click here for more information.  And feel free to put the ThanksUSA logo on your own site.

From today’s Washington Post.

Mitt Romney has hair that is too perfect, a flip-flop reputation and a particular antagonism toward France.  That information comes not from an adversary but from a 77-page internal PowerPoint presentation about Romney’s strategy obtained by the Boston Globe … It also contemplates using antipathy toward France as a campaign tool, suggesting that comparing Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) to that country might earn Romney votes. 

What, has Mitt Romney gone completely in-Seine?  Sounds like we’re about to get an earful of Eiffel.

Oh, the duck.  Oh, the risotto.  Oh the crepes sporting raspberry and strawberry filling.

Tonight we treated the entire Extreme Mortman staff to a rare night out on the town, or, more accurately, an hour in the basement of the Willard Hotel.  That’s where the Hoover Institution held its annual reception, a culinary feast so extravagant it once again earned its reputation as the most dazzling collection of foods since the parents of Extreme Mortman served up three jars of pickled herring at his Bar Mitzvah.

You know how many hip parties rent really beautiful people to just hang out?  It seems the conservative Hooverites rent really smart intellectuals to just make interesting observations while sipping drinks.
But wait!  What’s that?  There, as we sip The Glenlivet, could it be?  Yes!  It’s Don Rumsfeld chatting up Doug Feith!  Not just chatting, laughing.  Laughing really, really hard.  The kind of laughter that’s so hard it could cause a mistrial if the Scooter Libby jury ever heard it.

We couldn’t figure out the joke, but we saw Feith sipping red wine, and Rumsfeld holding a glass of what seemed to be white.  We had Glenlivet, but liberals could have been just plain livid.  If only we knew what the joke was.  Perhaps the joys of private sector?

White House press secretary Tony Snow, from today’s news briefing:

Number one, of course, we love Helen. Number two, the White House does not make decisions about where people sit, so you can address that to the Correspondents Association. And number three, regardless of the seating arrangement, you’ll still be looking at the back of her head.

Apparently, not much.  New Media Strategies looked at Web 2.0 buzz surrounding Al Gore’s Academy Award win for best documentary, on global warming.

As of 3 p.m. Monday, ten video clips of Al Gore at the Oscars had been uploaded to YouTube.  But none of them had gone viral, meaning no one was e-mailing them around, or received any traction online.  A total of only 384 views for all 10 clips.

Gore’s online social networking numbers are a bit a bit better, but not by much.  Comparing the numbers for the “Draft Gore” MySpace page and the five largest Gore Facebook groups before the Oscars (1 p.m. Saturday) and after (3 p.m. Monday), we found a bump of 8%.  That’s respectable, but the hard numbers are tiny: friends/members increased from 4,649 to 5,019, up 370.

With Web 2.0 dominating politics these days, that might not be enough to launch an Al Gore presidential campaign.  Oscars may mean something to the billion TV viewers, but for online activists, it’s less impressive.

Today’s “Reliable Source” column in the Washington Post has more.  Click here.

We’ll know in a year whether John McCain can win the nomination.  For now, we’ve got a pretty good idea he could win over the Catskills.

McCain is on a joke-telling tear.  His recent swing through Iowa featured rat-a-tat quip after quip, sometimes at his expense, sometimes at others’, and often at the weather, which is one of the few things in the world McCain really can’t do much about.

But was he funny?   Let’s review the jokes he told in Iowa, culled from various sources including Radio Iowa and C-SPAN’s “Road to the White House.”  There’s lots of them.  As the Iowa Caucus Cooler blog observed: “McCain starts of with a slew of jokes almost like it’s a stand-up routine.”

The first knock on the aging McCain – his jokes are old, too.  As in, the last time I heard those John McCain jokes, I laughed so hard I fell off my publicly-financed dinosaur.  Jonathan Martin gently jabbed in The Politico, “The jokes were familiar.”  And Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson noted that one joke  –  the one that involves a guy in Scottsdale introducing him as “ the latest dope from Washington”  –  McCain has “told on the trail for a while.”

I’m of mixed opinion on beating old jokes to death.  On the one hand, a sharp, alert President battling evil-doers should be able to continuously come up with new yuk-yuks.  On the other hand, hey, if the audiences are still laughing, why tinker?

Which must explain this joke:  “We used to say in Arizona we have so little water that the trees chase the dogs.”

As Paul Simon might have sung, still funny after all these years.  And we mean ALL these years for that chestnut.  (MSNBC.com’s Tom Curry once called “threadbare” the McCain joke about having a hard act to follow and feeling like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s fifth husband who on their wedding night said, “I know what I’m supposed to do; I just don’t know how to make it interesting.”  Zsa Zsa Gabor, by the way, was born in 1917, just like that joke.  Even a Larry King punchline might be a bit more topical there.)

Of the weather, McCain dryly said, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce wants Iowans “to know the temperature in Phoenix today is 72 degrees.”  Again, an oldie.  But in this case a goodie.  That joke works for me.  Shows he’s got a sense of Yuma.

Of Phil Gramm’s introduction: McCain said, “And those of you that needed an English translation of Phil’s remarks, we’ll provide them for you.”  Not bad.  It’s a fairly common line, but it’s always made me chuckle.

Here’s another:  “I don’t know if you heard the story about in the state prison, one inmate, they were in the chow line and one of ‘em said to the other one: ‘The food was a lot better in here when you were governor.’”

That line got this review from the Caucus Cooler blog: “I’m not sure why but that was the only joke that made me laugh out loud.”   The joke works because McCain saves the kicker  — “governor” – for the very end.  All too often bad joke tellers telegraph the punchline early in the joke, rendering it useless by the end.  McCain’s got a good sense of timing.  Must be why he skipped Iowa last time.

There was one real clunker.  It went something like:  Barry Goldwater ran for president.  Morris Udall from Arizona ran for president.  Bruce Babbitt ran for president, and McCain, from Arizona, ran for president.  “Arizona may be the only state in America where mothers don’t tell children that someday they can grow up and be president.”

I’m still scratching my head at that.  I understand the joke.  It’s just not funny.  And name dropping Bruce Babbitt doesn’t help.  Senator, they’re not saying boo, they’re saying, who?

But McCain did get off one top-shelf, late-night quality line: “I had my glass of ethanol this morning, and I’m feeling good.”

One word, hilarious.  Further proof that hearing John McCain on the campaign trail these days requires a three-drink minimum.

I know it’s tough to say anything more about Al Gore that hasn’t already been said about cardboard, but consider this additional fact.

The Washington Post this morning reports on Gore’s travels around the world to promote “An Inconvenient Truth,” up for best documentary at tonight’s Academy Awards.  Gore, or, as the Post says he’s called, the Goracle, “worked the premieres in Edinburgh, Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, Sydney, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Zurich, Brussels, Berlin and Tokyo.”

Now whether or not you agree with the thrust of Gore’s global warming message, there’s some charm in internationally crusading for a cause you believe in.

Contrast Gore’s nobility with Bill Clinton.  We learned in Friday’s Post story about Clinton’s multi-million dollar speaking gigs that, “Two-thirds of the former president’s speaking money has come from foreign sources.”

Wonder if, instead of Gore, it were Clinton on stage accepting an Oscar tonight, he’d charge a speaking fee.

I’ve been arguing for a while that as much as the crusty, snooty palace guards of traditional mainstream media like to come off as being Web 2.0 skeptics, even opponents, they secretly celebrate its prominence, if for no other reason than it gives them something new to report on, let alone scoff.

Consider the Washington Post.

Last weekend it was the front-page Saturday screamer about Facebook boosting Barack Obama.

This weekend, more evidence.  Courtesy Wikipedia.

Saturday’s op-ed page features Cass Sunstein’s piece, “A Brave New Wikiworld.”

Sunday’s Outlook section sports Timothy Noah, “I’m Being Wiki-Whacked.”

Independently, both are solid pieces about Wikipedia.  Taken together, they show that Web 2.0 continues to give MSM something to talk about, perhaps even to be puzzled about.  If content is king, Web 2.0 now rules the land.