Media Sketch

Peter Cook could do the weather even before he knew he could do the weather.

Every day, Capitol Hill gets inundated with political news, so much so that it can’t possibly digest it all. Each morning, however, in the span of two minutes, political Washington gets a dose of the day’s affairs in a compact segment called “Power Breakfast.”

In every journalist’s career, there are moments that stand out for reasons both good and strange.

Greta Van Susteren isn’t the sort of glowing, lip-glossed, on-screen bombshell that Fox News turns out in such large numbers. But she doesn’t look like a geek, either.

Lawmakers who travel to Iraq for a brief first-hand look at the war, as several members did over the Fourth of July recess, are likely to find it hard to gain a better understanding of the U.S. effort there, according to one of the most senior American journalists in Iraq.

It was a dark and stormy night when Charlie Hurt, Capitol Hill bureau chief of the Washington Times, was first swept up by journalism.

It’s classic Carl Hulse. On the morning of the interview, we talk to arrange a time to meet. He says he’s sick and at the vet — it’s the only doctor he can afford. In reality, he’s there for a checkup with his pooch, Max, a border collie who has an itching and scratching problem.

In the early 1990s, Bill Maher, a stand-up comic best known for working the Johnny Carson and Steve Allen shows, published True Story, a semiautobiographical novel about a rat pack of comedians kicking around the East Coast during the comedy boomlet of the 1980s. One of the comedians in the book — Maher’s name for this character is an expletive — is given to streaking during other comedians’ acts as a sort of professional calling card.