On Monday, CNN took a look at how the Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi became its “Senior Muslim Correspondent” (hard-hitting pieces on the “Terror Aisle,” for one) and allowed the comedian a chance to promote Today’s Special, a romantic comedy featuring a variety of Muslim characters.

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.

Newt Gingrich‘s moon mission idea got no love from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show Thursday night. Despite getting some earlier sympathy from astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson. Jon Stewart lit into him for having the audacity to propose such a lofty idea while dissing other candidate’s ideas as crazy. “A moon base?! Your solution to being accused of grandiosity is ‘give me eight years and I have have a f*cking moon base?!” Stewart seethed. “Did you start with Death Star and got kind of reigned in?”

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.

On Tuesday night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart lambasted Mitt Romney over the controversy brewing over the Republican hopeful’s tax returns. “Exciting news!” Stewart exclaimed. “Mitt Romney’s 560 page 2010 tax return has been made public! It’s an exciting topic that in no way needs zazzing up. So let’s get right to it in tonight’s segment!” Stewart then blasted up on the screen a chyron screaming ‘Happy Clown Tax Jubilee!’

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.

Jon Stewart went on the internet today and found, to his horror, that he would be forced to “go to the library, like a common masturbator”– Wikipedia was down. Why? The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA– the bill that proposes to shut down websites that allegedly help facilitate media piracy. Stewart gave his run-down of what SOPA was, how Congress was deliberating it, and, finally, interviewed one of its “victims.”

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 Early Start co-host Ashleigh Banfield, just hours after being skewered by the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, addressed the criticism of the show’s “Wake ‘Em Up” segment and pushed forward with a call to RuPaul early Wednesday morning, which — it’s fair to note — went off without a hitch.

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.

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.

While the Iowa caucus results are not entirely out– with merely hundreds of votes between frontrunners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, a previously-vacationing Jon Stewart came back to a completely different landscape than the Newt Gingrich-dominated race he left in December. And he had an analogy to compare what Republicans were doing with these candidates the whole time.

During his last week before vacation, Jon Stewart sat down the Republican Party and staged an intervention to get them to realize just how terrible nominating Newt Gingrich would be for their party. He may have been doing the GOP a favor, but Lawrence O’Donnell tonight had to stage his own intervention with Stewart to remind him of a very salient point: Newt Gingrich makes for great comedy.

Thursday, Daily Show host Jon Stewart had a bit of advice for Republican primary voters: “Don’t do this.” As in, please do not elect Newt Gingrich as the GOP nominee. “Seriously,” he continued. “I know you’re mad. I know you’re mad… der than usual. Country’s being run by a foreign-born Hawaiian radical Christian Muslim socialist who’s in the pocket of Wall Street. And sometimes Newt Gingrich can sound like the answer… But here’s the thing, here’s the thing. He’s not Reagan.

Wednesday, Daily Show host Jon Stewart introduced a new, ball-centric segment aimed at celebrating and/or denigrating public figures whose massive cojones propel them forward or trip them up, as massive cojones are wont to do. And it’s all sponsored by Lowe’s,* naturally.

TLC’s new show American Muslim has garnered some controversy after the Florida Family Association drove the hardware store Lowe’s to boycott the program– not because it depicted images of violent fundamentalist Muslims, but because it didn’t. On tonight’s Daily Show, host Jon Stewart tried to make sense of both the complaint and the boycott, while “senior Muslim correspondent” Aasif Mandvi called for a boycott, not of the program, but of Lowe’s, for selling everything anyone would need to put together a primitive bomb.

This Saturday marked yet another soundbite-riddled Republican presidential debate, one Jon Stewart recapped as one of the worst for Mitt Romney. From the grave mistake of attacking Newt Gingrich‘s “one awesome idea” (establishing a permanent lunar colony) to the bet heard around the blogosphere, it was not entirely Romney’s night in Stewart’s eyes.

Did you know that, in America, Jewish people celebrate a winter holiday that isn’t Christmas? It’s called the Republican Jewish Coalition Forum, Jon Stewart explained, and it helps Jewish Republicans decide who among the extremely Christian GOP candidates loves them the most.

Wednesday, Daily Show host Jon Stewart took a look at the passage of a bill that would allow the government to detain certain American prisoners indefinitely, without a trial. He noted what a brief amount of time it took to discuss such an important move, airing a clip of Sen. Rand Paul calling the bill “unamerican,” and of Sen. John McCain calling out Paul’s “opinion” for possibly allowing American terrorists to go free and continue trying to harm their fellow citizens.

‘Tis the season, Jon Stewart acknowledged today, as he caught the coverage on Fox News of Rhode Island governor “and part-time Steve Doocy impersonator” Lincoln Chafee referred to the plant one fills with lights and ornaments in December as a “holiday tree.” But this year, Stewart wasn’t going to take the Christmas assault lying down, instead opting to declare war on the holiday.