With all the recent surge in coverage of Rick Santorum following his Iowa success and the ongoing focus on his “Google problem,” it’s interesting to remember that that…other definition of the candidate’s last name was coined all the way back in 2003, when the White House was just a glint in the Senator’s eye. More than ever, though, the issue and definition is in the news and in his weekly column this week, the man behind the “santorum” (and wouldn’t anyone love that title?), Dan Savage, defended the coinage and its continued importance.

The ascendance of former Sen. Rick Santorum to a near-victory in the Iowa caucuses has Santorum on everyone’s lips, wondering how long the candidate can be a factor in the race for the GOP presidential nomination. On Wednesday night’s Countdown, activist and columnist Dan Savage reminded Keith Olbermann that Santorum doesn’t just have an anti-gay agenda, “he has an anti-straight agenda, too.”

Sex columnist Dan Savage has apparently decided that it has been too long since his political opinions mattered. Having already destroyed Rick Santorum‘s internet reputation, Savage is now taking aim at Herman Cain for repeatedly declaring that he believes sexual orientation to be a choice. If it is a choice, Savage demands, Cain should prove it by performing sex acts on Savage. Yes, it has come to this.

GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has, for a while now, had to contend with a rather unique PR problem: Dealing with columnist Dan Savage‘s overwhelmingly successful campaign to introduce a new, rather descriptive and very sexual meaning for his last name. The definition, which deals with a particularly messy side effect of partaking in anal [...]

Politico reports that Rick Santorum has contacted Google over the sexually explicit search results that come up when you enter his name through the website. “I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

Sex columnist Dan Savage has no intention of letting Rick Santorum get away with being a third-tier Presidential candidate who opposes gay marriage. After a decades long assault on the word “Santorum” (it has now, through Google, been turned into a gay sex euphemism), Savage released a video warning that he has brand new definitions for “Rick” at the ready should the former senator say something offensive enough about the LGBT community.

Rachel Maddow keeps finding herself in Republican politicians’ fundraising pleas. Her latest cameo appeared courtesy of Rick Santorum, who asked for money to help fight the “smut” she peddles against him, but she has been here before. Delighted to be mentioned yet again by someone she admits to thinking of “as kind of a bigger deal” than herself, Maddow took a trip down memory lane, to an Ohio GOP robocall calling her a “cross-dressing ultra-liberal lesbian from NYC.”

It was bound to happen sometime– Rick Santorum has been sex columnist Dan Savage‘s favorite punching bag for some time now, launching a Google campaign to turn his name into a gay sex euphemism and fantasizing aloud about having sex with him. Santorum took most of it in stride, or at least silence, but it appears Savage’s appearance on Real Time last Friday was the last straw. This week, Santorum sent out a fundraising email condemning “hate activist” Savage and went on a long tirade against him on The Steve Malzberg Show.

Bill Maher has found himself in a familiar place. Hosting a program that routinely indulges in off-color political humor and taunts the lines of decency in our public discourse, Real Time may have crossed its own lines. The highlights of the program are already well-known: calling Sarah Palin‘s family “inbred weirdos,” speculating as to what Rep. Michele Bachmann‘s sex life is like, wishing Congressional Republicans dead. Yet sad as it is, Maher can count at least one battle won in the war for vulgarity, as some on Fox News have taken to speculating about his sex life in retaliation.

Real Time host Bill Maher thought he had a good soundbite when he compared Congressional Republicans to late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but was quickly one-upped by “It gets better” LGBT activist Dan Savage, who said “Unfortunately not exactly like him. I wish they were all f**kin’ dead.”

Of course Bill Maher (and his Real Time panel) was going to have something to say on the controversial Bachmann Christian counseling clinic, but this much? Spurred on by a discussion of the clinic, Maher’s panel put together one of the raunchiest segments we’ve seen on his program…and for a show that’s on HBO and has done this, that’s saying something. And while it might have occasionally been uncomfortable to watch, it definitely wasn’t boring.

It happened fast. The organization I run, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation or GLAAD, posted on Twitter a statement that criticized the Washington Post’s decision to give a noted anti-gay activist an editorial platform in which he calls gay and lesbian youth ‘abnormal’ and ‘self-destructive’:

President Obama has joined the growing ranks of public personalities who have taped a personal message of “it gets better” in support of gay teens. The It Gets Better Project is a campaign started by Dan Savage, a Seattle-based columnist as a response to a string of recent teen suicides reportedly as a result of getting bullied for being gay. Thus far numerous entertainment and political luminaries have recorded messages including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Ellen Degeneres among hundreds of others.

If you haven’t watched Ft. Worth councilman Joel Burns‘ emotional speech about being a gay teen that he gave during a council meeting the other night I highly recommend you do. And get some tissues. The vid has been making the rounds on the web, and is the latest (unofficial) addition in a series of videos that gay adults have making to encourage gay teens to hang on “it will get better.”

And Dan Savage wants it every day. In his latest edition of “Savage Love,” the syndicated sex advisor that gave new meaning to the word “santorum” has asked Americans to treat everyday between now and November 2nd — midterm election day, of course — as Masturbate to Christine O’Donnell Day.

Andrés Duque–known to his Twitter and blog followers as Blabbeando–knew he was probably tweeting too much about the gay marriage vote in Argentina when Twitter cut him after only about three hours of translating the debate in the Argentina Senate.

On Countdown last night, Keith Olbermann had on author Dan Savage to discuss the opposition to the imminent repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the current policy that does not allow for openly gay members of the military. In opening the segment, Olbermann highlighted some of the most vocal (and insane?) opponents of the repeal of DADT portraying them as homophobic. And he’s absolutely right.

Some of the biggest names in the LGBT and progressive blog world participated Feb. 15 in a coordinated effort to encourage the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay rights organization in the country and a frequent object of blogger scorn, to put its heft behind efforts to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Flip on MSNBC and you see Rachel Maddow staring you in the face. Glance at your computer, and you will see wide-ranging opinion blogging by Andrew Sullivan, John Aravosis, Pam Spaulding, and others. But open up a big-city newpaper’s editorial pages and you will be faced with . . . well, almost nothing.

A top BBC official has apologized–sort of–for prompting an online discussion on the merits of executing gays, but the fallout has raised questions about the purpose of online discussions and whether you can really debate what some people consider a threatened genocide in Uganda.

HLN host Joy Behar somehow combined Mad Men and “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in a segment last night, talking to Bryan Batt, a gay actor from the show, and columnist Dan Savage.

But Behar threw another topic into the mix – the sexual orientation of Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.