President Barack Obama‘s appearance yesterday on the popular ABC show The View, was seen by many on the right (and some on the left) as somehow “beneath the Office of the President of the United States,” particularly since Obama reportedly passed on attending the Boy Scouts 100-year National Jamboree to tape the show. Last night Jon Stewart lampooned that line of thinking and briefly made a troubled nation forget its problems through laughter.

2009 definitely won’t be remembered as the year that the GOP triumphantly entered social media. After launching a website that featured an animated GIF of Michael Steele and a blog by Steele originally called “What Up,” a blank “future leaders” section, and a user-submitted Facebook photo page that soon got flooded with racist pictures, they’ve given it another crack, and launched … GOP.am, a URL shortener. How could that possibly go wrong? Plenty of ways, as it turns out: