The story of how Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” because she wants the government to make religious institutions provide insurance for contraceptives has had an unexpectedly powerful corrupting influence, because someone said the word “slut” and we are a nation of 13-year-old boys. And as a story that has sex, Rush Limbaugh, cable news people acting totally insane, and Mitt Romney saying something weirdly distant and wrong, Jon Stewart was all over it.

Desperate for a last ditch alternative to Mitt Romney as his “Countdown To Loving Mitt” clock continued to tick on Thursday, Stephen Colbert fixated on media darling Jeb Bush.

Today, Jon Stewart tried to inaugurate a new segment of the Daily Show based on how silly Rick Santorum‘s comments over the weekend seem to him, entitled: “How Is It That Mitt Romney Hasn’t Crushed This Guy Yet?” That segment began with Santorum insulting John F. Kennedy but quickly slipped into Romney and his wife’s many Cadillacs, which quickly morphed into a second new segment, “How Is It That Rick Santorum Hasn’t Crushed This Guy Yet?”

As the November election approaches, Republicans are beating the sound of a familiar drum from 2008 on President Obama– that he is a radical, bent on destroying the Catholic Church and Second Amendment, out to “fundamentally transform” America. On tonight’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart took a look at how well the predictions from 2008 have fared, and how absurd some of today’s predictions are in that context.

Jon Stewart had a few bones to pick with social conservatives today, and though he began attacking Chris Christie for vetoing the same-sex marriage bill, trying to explain to him that his take wasn’t much different from banning, say, fat people from getting married, but then moved on to the mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds proposed for women who want abortions in Virginia. His best guess at a comparison? Like something out of A Clockwork Orange.

PETA, everyone’s favorite animal rights group, is launching a new initiative to bring attention to the plight of enslaved and exploited celebrity sea mammals, and The Daily Show‘s Wyatt Cenac is totally on board. The group has filed a lawsuit against SeaWorld on behalf of five plaintiffs — Tiilikum, Katina, Corky, Kasatka and Ulises — accusing the water park of holding the orcas as slaves and arguing that they should be freed under the 13th Amendment.

If you just flipped over to Comedy Central to catch Stephen Colbert after a new episode of the Daily Show, you may have been surprised to catch Colbert talking about Herman Cain. Yes, there is a rerun of the show tonight, and it appears to be a new development, as those who had tickets to tonight’s taping received word that, due to “unforeseen reasons,” the show will be off for at least the week.

Taking a break from the 2012 campaign and the workings of the White House, Jon Stewart turned to the issue of Congressional insider trading– members of Congress privy to private information because of their committee assignments who can legally use that information for profit. As Stewart put it, it’s a system of checks and balances: “they deposit checks; it increases their balances.”

The always audacious Ricky Gervais pushed The Daily Show‘s TV-14 parental rating limits to its logical breaking-point in a panda-porn interview extravaganza Tuesday night.

On Tuesday, Daily Show host Jon Stewart seemed positively “horrortained” by both Rick Santorum and Fox News contributor Liz Trotta‘s reaction to news that the Pentagon is allowing women in the military to participate in front-line combat.

A lot of things have happened in the past week that Jon Stewart was off on vacation. The most recent and jarring, of course, was the death of Whitney Houston– which, if you were in New York, you may have found out about from a roving CNN reporter going around making people sad. But the biggest story of the week was definitely the rise of Rick Santorum, and with him a national debate on whether religious organizations should have to provide birth control to employees as part of their insurance.

On Thursday’s Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert reported that Newt Gingrich was playing Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger at his campaign events without the band’s permission prompting them to sue the former Speaker of the House. “The power anthem from Rocky 3…an obvious parallel for Newt. He’s an underdog, a born scrapper, and he’s fighting for the chance to be smacked around by a black guy!”

Mitt Romney was off to a bad start this morning, as he began the day telling CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that he was “not concerned about the very poor.” Jon Stewart happened upon this clip in horror, trying to understand what Romney was getting at. The best he could do was to imagine Romney as a doctor unconcerned about the “very sick because, you know, morphine.”

Jon Stewart came back from the weekend with little but the Florida primary to look forward too and a cluster of polls from various points of the Republican race that showed Mitt Romney in a heated battle with Newt Gingrich for the top spot. Such a heated battle, in fact, that Stewart compared the bloodbath to a level of Mortal Kombat, one that culminated with someone’s spine broken in a video game.

The State of the Union address is a once-in-a-year opportunity for mockery for Jon Stewart. With the President going over his past successes and future plans, there was plenty to go over: The Osama Bin Laden opening, the large amounts of tax credits, and the bad joke that made the First Lady force an awkward smile.

Jon Stewart came back from his weekend to find a pretty dramatic shift in the dynamics of the Republican primary. When he had left, Mitt Romney was a “juggernaut,” impossible to stop (see several movie posters Stewart apparently made to celebrate this fact). But now he’s back, and it’s all Newt Gingrich, all the time. And all because of a debate moment that makes Stewart completely flip out.

On Tuesday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart lampooned the overzealous conservative audience during Monday’s South Carolina GOP Debate held on Martin Luther King Day. “The real star of the debate was the South Carolina audience who made some revealing laudatory choices.”

How Jon Stewart got chef Mario Batali to feed him an omelet “mother bird” style in order to make a statement about Stephen Colbert‘s SuperPAC, we may never know, but that it happened is a fact on film. The new president of Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow took to the stage today wearing a tiara and spending money on insane and useless things, much like other SuperPACs have done for candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, and was legally unable to tell Colbert anything about it.

On Thursday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart put Newt Gingrich on blast for being — in correspondent Wyatt Cenac‘s terminology — “condescending and dickish” to African-Americans, making reference to his remarks to the NAACP that they should “demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” “Here is the great thing about Newton Leroy Gingrich, he is not being defensive. He’s truly bewildered that he is taking sh*t for saying something so incredibly altruistic!”

CNN’s new morning show Early Start has a segment where they call newspeople early in the morning as a surprise and get them live, possibly before they are awake. Needless to say, spontaneous segments have a way of going… awry, and Jon Stewart took a peek at just how wrong things can go– first, during a call to one of the Kennedys, and then mistakenly dialing the wrong number, then telling that person that they were talking to the FBI and not CNN.

Jon Stewart came into the office this Monday with four hours of Republicans shouting at each other to wade through, and the analysis of cable news pundits thereafter, given Saturday night’s Republican debate and the fact that Republicans “inexplicably reassembled at 9 AM for another debate.” There was much to talk about in these debates! Like what the candidates would be doing on Saturday night, and the fatherly advice of relatable Gov. George Romney to his son.

While most of the attention this week has been on the Iowa caucuses and development of the extended drama that has become the Republican primary, the GOP has taken some time to point out their disapproval of President Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “What kind of Monster… .com is he?” Jon Stewart asked, before noting that, not only are recess appointments common, the Senate wasn’t even in recess.

Last night on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert spent the better part of the first half of his show mocking a late-night failure by Erin Burnett to properly “flick” a graphic from one touchscreen to another. It quickly got Burnett’s attention, apparently, as she had a few corrections for the fake news host tonight– and a challenge for him to come flick along with her.

Jon Stewart had a lot on his plate today, with the Iowa caucuses cramming a week’s worth of news into the wee hours of the night early Wednesday morning. Stewart gave every candidate their turn, and praised everyone from Rick Santorum to Mitt Romney for sticking with it. One entity notably getting moans and groans from Stewart for its inanity: CNN, for its “weeble” cyber-illustration of the caucuses.

On Thursday’s Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert ribbed “Queen of Narnia” Fox News’s Megyn Kelly over her network’s chyron error, mixing up a photo of Mitt Romney with Barack Obama .