Those sensationally gifted folks at Fishbowl DC present a delightful C-SPAN moment — Steve Scully’s apparent first experience with marijuana as a gateway drug to Doritos.

Roll a wet towel under your door and check out Fishbowl for the story.

Meantime, here’s who’s on “Washington Journal” tomorrow …

Former Reader’s Digest editor-in-chief Kenneth Tomlinson reviews Stephen Hayes’s book Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President:

One of the great things about biography is it so often reminds us just how serendipitous life can be.
Steve Hayes’s new biography of Vice President Cheney provides another case in point.
Today the Vice President’s greatest fans are people who regard Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls as one of the worst exercises of governmental authority in our lifetime.   Unbelievably stupid.  No accident the idea originated with John Connally.
Can you identify the young man who wrote the Cost of Living Council regulations that were used to implement wage and price controls?
Dick Cheney.
These same fans regard Nixon’s failure to dismantle the Office of Economic Opportunity as a symbol of the wrong-headedness that led his administration to actually fund LBJ’s Great Society.   A huge failure of the Nixon presidency.
At one critical juncture, the White House dispatched to OEO director Don Rumsfeld a demand from Kentucky Governor Louis Nunn that OEO operations in the state’s eastern mountains be defunded.   What Rumsfeld aide was dispatched to examine the Kentucky poverty programs in question only to conclude that following the Governor’s advice would not be worth the political blowback?   Dick Cheney.
Now you can make the case that all this was magnificent on the job training for the one-time University of Wyoming student who, when he arrived at the Wyoming legislature for a prestigious internship, didn’t know whether he wanted to work for Democrats or Republicans.
Here is a man who has become one of the most politically polarizing figures in history, yet as a college senior he essentially had no politics.   Karl Rove couldn’t imagine such a thing.
Even Cheney partisans have to be a little embarrassed over the role he played in the Ford White House, first as Rumsfeld’s deputy and then as the President’s 33 year old chief of staff.   After all, Ford did postpone the arrival of Reaganism by a full four years.
Hayes doesn’t record Cheney’s attitude toward WIN [remember Whip Inflation Now?] buttons—but he does record Cheney’s powerful if unsuccessful memo to the President urging him to receive Solzhenitsyn in the White House.   Later, it would be Cheney’s responsibility to force Ford to face up to his horrible gaff in the first Presidential debate.  The Polish people were not free.
The cowboy was getting his legs.
Hayes follows Cheney back to Wyoming, to the House of Representatives, to the leadership of the Defense Department to Halliburton to the Vice Presidency.
It is clear that Hayes believes the White House has made a fundamental mistake keeping Cheney under wraps in terms of defending the administration’s record on issues ( i.e. the war in Iraq).   I found this especially compelling because the Cheney debate performance against his 2000 vice presidential opponent Joe Lieberman stands out in my mind as the best political performance since JFK.
I did not know until the book of the role former Ohio Rep. Rob Portman played acting as Lieberman in debate preps.   Seems Portman captured everything about Lieberman including his nasal voice inflections.  Turned out Portman was better than Lieberman—and that surprised me.
But whenever I think about the most powerful material in the book, I come back to Cheney’s early life.   Like the time Cheney was twice nailed for drunk driving while working in transmission line construction in the mountains of Wyoming.   Hayes writes:  “The same month that he was arrested for a second time, Cheney’s friends and former classmates received their diplomas from Yale.   As he sat in the jail cell in Rock Springs, the contrast struck him hard.  For eighteen years, Cheney had a carefree life marked by a series of seemingly effortless accomplishments.  His admission to Yale, on a full scholarship, appeared to continue this promising trajectory.
“Now almost four years after the excitement and anticipation of that first cross-country train trip to New Haven, Cheney found himself alone in jail, left to contemplate everything that had gone wrong.  Even for someone who had been—and would be—known for his equanimity, it was another disturbing new low.”
So how did Cheney emerge from these depths?
He experienced no rehab or AA.  Fact is, he didn’t even stop drinking.
Seems his girl friend who had just graduated early from the University of Colorado let him know she had no intension of spending her life with an electrical worker who was in trouble with the law.   He knew Lynne Vincent was a woman of her word.  So he simply straightened up and went to the University of Wyoming (where he lived on tomato soup and rice) and got interested in political science.
Life can be serendipitous.

Instapundit points us to a Gallup poll finding Congress’ approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974.

The dismal ratings seem to be looming larger and larger over the Democrats in charge.

For instance, check out Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI):

“The expectations when we took control in January were so high, and we all feel it,” Stabenow told the Lansing State Journal editorial board last week. “We kind of feel like everybody thought the Democrats are now in control of the House and Senate, the war is going to end, we are going to have universal health care, everybody’s going to be able to go to college, no more global warming.”

Holy high expectations, Batman! Wouldn’t it be easier to just cut taxes and call it a day? Folks might approve of that.

Annoyed yet with that stupid new feature in the Sunday Washington Post Magazine where you’re supposed to compare two similar photos and list 14 ways they’re different? They must be running out of ideas because I swear this past Sunday they had us trying to identify differences in two pictures of poop after someone ate corn.
Anyway, an alert and loyal Extreme Mortman reader was rummaging through the National Archives’ dollar bin of remainders and spotted these two bits of classic Americana. We’ve been told the photos have been doctored a bit, but we’re not experts. In the spirit of that stupid new feature in the Sunday Washington Post, can you list the 14 ways the two photos are different? And no fair trying to guess which fellow was full of Dilaudid.

Gotta love the Europeans.  They’ve figured out another fee to add to everyday life.  This time they want to charge a fee to  — get ready for it, get ready, OK here it comes — PARK!

From EarthTimes:

Amsterdam - The Dutch drivers’ organisation ANWB is critical of a government plan to force owners of polluting cars to pay higher parking fees. On Tuesday, a spokesman of the Dutch Ministry of the Environment said diesel cars and Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) will soon pay more to park their cars. By contrast, environmentally friendly cars will see their parking costs reduced.
The government is due to discuss the bill next month. If accepted by the parliament, the new law could be put into practise in 2008.
Markus van Tol, spokesman of the ANWB, says his organisation supports all initiatives that benefit the environment, but says he is doubtful whether this particular idea will do that.
“Apparently, the draft bill only deals with parking, not with overall car usage.”

A fee on parking?  Shhhh — don’t tell the U.S. Congress.  They might want to import the idea.

By the way, great name for a spokesman — van Tol.  Wonder how much the toll on vans costs over there.

By now we’re so accustomed to seeing Bill Clinton everywhere that catching this cover of Conde Nast’s Traveler …

… should likely merit merely a shrug and this barely audible reaction: “Ho hum.  Why not Bill Clinton on the cover of Traveler?”

But dig a little deeper and check out the interview inside.  You’ll see two fascinating things going on.

One is Traveler’s write-up.  From the lusty headline –  ”Bill Clinton travels the world with purpose; How William Jefferson Clinton uses his power to transform lives and places” — to these types of questions.

• What in your background and experience best fitted you for the work you’re doing now?
• Your friend, King Abdullah of Jordan, said in a recent interview with Condé Nast Traveler that it surprises him that Americans lack knowledge about the international world and that “one of the problems I’ve found with American politicians is the small numbers of senators who have traveled.” How do you account for this incuriosity about the world?
• Both American and international thinkers are concerned that American fear of terrorism has contributed to a kind of xenophobia, … Is the U.S. in danger of becoming a kind of intellectual ghetto?

But better than that exercise into the inner workings of media questioning are the classic Clinton responses.

This one probably is one of his best answers to a tough grilling ever since he wondered what the definition of is is.

CNT: If you could bring back something from your travels as a gift to your own country’s culture, what would it be?
Clinton: That’s hard to say. You know, I love to travel. I mean, I think one of the things that’s made me halfway good at this is that I love to go places and see things. But I would—I wish I could have a basket made in Rwanda in the home of every American—made by Rwandans that are part of these reconciliation cooperatives, where the Hutus and Tutsis who’ve slaughtered each other are now living together, working together, and making their baskets together. I think it would be a great gift to America’s culture—to our rancorous politics and our tough-talking talk shows and all this stuff—to just see that here are people who’ve been through things that no American will ever go through…

Clinton brilliance strikes again.  Baskets for peace!  More textbook proof that Bill Clinton is the best politician of the modern era.

But one thing about that sensational answer bugs me.  He implies that tough-talking talk shows will likely be tempered by Rwandan baskets.  Fair enough.  But what about the bloggers?  Don’t we get baskets, too?  A chicken in every pot, a basket in every case.

… the media went gaga over Hurricane Dean

UPDATE: click here, with the speakers going to 11.

Best press release in a while comes from The Israel Project:  “Israeli Climatologists Available for Comment on Hurricane Dean and Climate Change Developments.”

No doubt these experts been ready to talk about these type of phenomena ever since the Red Sea divided.

First, our last trivia answer …

… and the winning question from Peter Roff: What is a picture of the first White House homepage on the world wide web?   Also, Richard  notes this:

For a chuckle I submit the following which came from an FAQ section on the site:
What is it?  It is an interactive citizens’ handbook that is available on the Internet, a network of computer networks that is used by people in over 150 countries. It uses a service on the Internet called the World Wide Web (WWW), which gives people the ability to share documents that not only contain text but also include graphics, photos, sound, and video.

Now, the next Extreme Trivia answer …

… What’s the question?