Jon Stewart returned this weekend to a perfect Daily Show style scandal: the Secret Service hired prostitutes and some were kicked out of Colombia! The puns were ready, the jokes low hanging fruit, and yet he had to let it go to focus on what the media was paying attention to: “last week, some lady said a stupid thing.” The “full on media shit-tastrophe” after Democratic commentator Hilary Rosen said Ann Romney had not “worked a day in her life” yielded much to make fun of for Stewart, particularly at Fox News, where Sarah Palin even brought out a “hoohah” pin during the firestorm.

On Thursday night, Jon Stewart tackled “ZimDecision 2012″ — now that the George Zimmerman case is moving forward. Beginning with Wednesday’s announcement, Stewart moved on to criticizing the good old media. The segment descended into a over-the-top “report.” A sign of the chaotic media frenzy surrounding the trial that awaits us.

It’s always a party when Ricky Gervais drops by the Daily Show, but tonight was far more of a high end affair– at least as soon as Gervais called Jon Stewart and “intellectual” and the conversation veered toward the tragic story of Anne Frank. The two comics somehow ended up debating the logistics of Nazi anti-Jewish raids and, in the blink of an eye, moved on to Jesus.

Jon Stewart targeted CNN on his show Tuesday night, mocking their segments within segments (“Political Pop,” “R&R,” and so on). “Why?” he asked, noting that often their branded news segments, er, don’t actually apply that well to the stories within them. “I’m not against news organizations having fun,” Stewart said, but went on to note some segments that were mistakenly labeled — or just simply a bad idea.

NBC has gotten into a bit of a hole with a broadcast their aired editing the 911 tape of George Zimmerman calling to report Trayvon Martin before he shot him. Jon Stewart played the edited tape today and listened in awe as a pivotal bit of the conversation simply disappeared. How egregious was the editing? Stewart demonstrated by taking clips of “Jeopardy!” contestants and wondering why they kept asking what totally commonplace words are.

On Thursday night, Jon Stewart tackled the story about the GSA chief resigning in light of reports of lavish spending. Agreeing with the media outrage, Stewart went on to single out Bill O’Reilly, who, on his show, was particularly outraged about reports of them buying $4 shrimp. Stewart then played a game with him called, “Can You Make Bill O’Reilly Pay $4 For A Shrimp?”

The Daily Show has been relatively mum about the Trayvon Martin case since their first report on it more than a week ago, but today Jon Stewart didn’t have to navigate the waters of such a delicate case alone: he had Larry Wilmore, his Senior Black Correspondent, to call a “racist time out” where they could talk about the issue without anyone on any side being flatly accused of racism.

Following Sarah Palin‘s gig co-hosting Today, Jon Stewart zeroed in on her appearance — and particularly on Palin saying she was “infiltrating” the lamestream media. She’s acting like she’s “uncommonly ballsy,” he said, when really ” it’s just another place for you to tout your brand of homespun nonsense unchallenged!”

With the Republican Party slowly but surely coalescing around Mitt Romney, Jon Stewart began his show today looking for some semblance of enthusiasm for the frontrunner among Republicans, and finding not all that much– from former President George H.W. Bush to Sen. Marco Rubio to his wife, Ann. He found so little, he rewrote a few previous Republican campaign slogans to reflect this level of enthusiasm.

Rachel Maddow‘s new book, Drift, recently hit stores and has her out and about describing the process of writing her book and how she came to the conclusions she did. Maddow spoke to Jon Stewart on Thursday night, explaining how she didn’t think she was a particularly good writer and didn’t want to peddle conspiracies, but had a passion for the topic and found it amazing how a series of “understandable frustrations” led to such a large expansion of military power.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow stopped by The Daily Show to promote her new book Drift: The Unmooring Of The American Military. It covers a serious subject, for sure, but little did Jon Stewart know she came wielding the performance of a lifetime — a hilarious impersonation of a a dog scurrying on its hind legs.

As you may know, Spike Lee recently re-tweeted an address that he thought belonged to George Zimmerman — the one involved in the Trayon Martin shooting. Turns out, the address belonged to an older couple, the McClains, and they’ve since fled their home fearing their lives. On this show Thursday night, Jon Stewart went after Lee, sympathizing with the “adorable” couple. Give them a call, he told Lee. That’s what any retiree in Florida really wants.

On tonight’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart looked at a clip of President Obama that had made the rounds, of him in Russia speaking to President Dmitry Medvedev and telling him he needs to wait to be reelected to have “more flexibility.” “I will transmit this to Vladimir,” Medvedev replied, which Stewart joked was likely on the list of “things that should only be spoken into a shoe phone.”

Jon Stewart‘s back this week, and just in time to watch Lawrence O’Donnell interview an empty chair. On his show Tuesday, Stewart opened by poking fun at the O’Donnell interview — before deciding to do his own interview…with a fan.

In the week that Jon Stewart went on vacation, the Republican primary took a backseat to the killing of Trayvon Martin, a story he seemed to much rather have ignored in lieu of a million Dick Cheney heart transplant jokes. And he tried– with clips from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and a few homages to the “greatest joke set-up ever.” But he could not avoid the absurdity that resulted from cable news’ coverage of Martin, including last week’s hoodie madness, CNN’s “forensics” work, and the return of the New Black Panthers.

Where there’s a primary, there’s media coverage of said primary. And where there’s important media coverage, Jon Stewart is there to point out just how ridiculous it is. And last night’s coverage of the GOP primaries was no exception. Stewart had some fun with all three major cable networks for how they chose to cover the primaries, whether it was through sexual innuendo, completely obsessive up-to-the-minute coverage, or just ignoring them for regularly scheduled programming.

Jon Stewart began his show continuing the news narrative before it was rudely interrupted by another election night: “radio shock-blob Rush Limbaugh” saying something offensive on his radio show. A rare occurrence on what Stewart called his “Noon-3 Mouth Dump,” he joked, but he found the counterweight to the outrage– outrage over Bill Maher saying other stuff on his show– a bit too much, particularly when there are, he explained, consequences to the jokes you make.

Are the things that matter most to Southerners their accent and choosing the right breakfast starch? Such is the question Daily Show host Jon Stewart posed to his viewership, as if breakfast starches weren’t high on the priority lists of all Americans. Stewart was referring, of course, to Mitt Romney‘s “Southern strategy,” which has been colored, for better or worse (choose wisely), by his recent comments about biscuits and grits.

Jon Stewart encountered a viral video this weekend through various media outlets of varying gravitas, from YouTube to Rihanna‘s Twitter. Stewart was upset to find that “this guy [Joseph] Kony is probably dropping sick beats” was a wrong prediction on the man, and while he found the viral campaign’s power formidable, took some time to laugh at various newspeople for grumpily spending the week reminding people that they were covering Uganda all along.

Tonight, Daily Show host Jon Stewart promised to show viewers a tape that “they” don’t want you to see, a tape that will reveal the “real” Sean Hannity, a tape that will blow all our [bleep]ing minds. Stewart just didn’t see what was so radical, really, about the footage of a young Barack Obama introducing, then hugging, controversial Harvard professor Derrick Bell that Hannity had aired on his show to so much fanfare.

A fixture on the Daily Show during election season has become Jon Stewart watching CNN for the latest news, apparently only to make fun of whatever new gizmos, gadgets, and exasperated Anderson Cooper expressions may prevail. Last night, it was CNN’s “Virtual Convention,” a sort of simulation of little people holding up signs for their candidates.

On Turesday’s edition of The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart took on the rhetoric surrounding President Barack Obama‘s recent meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Iran’s commitment to taking a preemptive strike.

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.

On Thursday, Daily Show host Jon Stewart tore into the Blunt Amendment (so named, he joked, because of how high one must be to think it’ll pass) (You’ll see later on in the video that this joke is particularly appropriate for Stewart’s audience) (Triple parentheses!), particularly Mitt Romney‘s… complicated stance on it, as well as the GOP’s insistence that it has nothing to do with contraception.

The primaries last night didn’t last as long as the Iowa caucuses, but it did take some time for the tallies from Michigan to roll in. Thankfully for Jon Stewart, the delay meant that cable news networks had to find something– anything– to fill that time with, from talking about their hometowns to, as Anderson Cooper did, just wander around the studio and talk to some backstage producers, only to not really get any news.