Update (Ken Shepherd | May 9): Our good friend Mark Levin sent along an audio clip from his May 8 radio program wherein he addressed Jon Stewart's ludicrous comparison.You can access the audio here.

On Wednesday night’s edition of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, host Jon Stewart interviewed John McCain. As part of his ongoing outrage that the Reverend Wright issue would be raised against Barack Obama, Stewart sprung it on McCain that President Bush is his own Reverend Wright problem. He liked this “fascinating” analysis so much he repeated it, and suggested when it comes to Team Bush and al-Qaeda, “our policies are their Reverend Wright-- isn't he the guy they throw out there and inflame their base and get support? Don't you think he's actually been okay for al-Qaeda?” McCain answered by declaring the terrorists were a “transcendent evil” beyond one politician.

Stewart seemed to be citing an NBC poll (slightly wrongly) that found 32 percent of voters expressed concern about Obama’s relationship with Rev. Wright, but 43 percent were concerned by Sen. McCain’s relationship to President Bush. Stewart formulated his jokey question as if he were about to question McCain about being endorsed by harshly anti-Catholic minister John Hagee:

The Associated Press today wins first place for the most misleading headline in the MSM by saying that a study shows that Jon Stewart's Comedy Central "The Daily Show" show is somehow "a lot like" Bill O'Reilly's "The O'Reilly Factor." The Thursday May 8 report is flippantly headlined, "Study of 'Daily Show': It's a lot like O'Reilly," but the following report does not exactly confirm the headline. It appears that the AP's distorted headline was meant to equate "The O'Reilly Factor" to comedy in order to impugn the serious character of the hit Fox show and make of it but an exercise in comedy.

When it comes to the economy, "it's not good. Not good," according to Jon Stewart. "But don't take my word for it. Seriously, I'm actually doing very well."

On May 1, "The Daily Show" host was introducing a segment that made light of doom-and-gloom economic reporting on network and cable news. His mash-up highlighted CBS's own "Grim Reaper," Anthony Mason, ABC's Betsy Stark, NBC's Brian Williams and CNN's senior business correspondent Ali Velshi.

Stewart poked hardest at Velshi, whom he called that "Hairless Prophet of Doom."

"Who is that hairless prophet of doom and how can we appease his anger, please?" Stewart pleaded, "If we give you our hair will you give us back our money? Will you do it, sir? I beg of you - Velshi!"

Velshi responded to Stewart's charge on CNN Friday and in a column on CNN.com.

John Kass, a right-leaning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, asked the obvious question in a Wednesday column:

Obama can't worry about Clinton's troubles. He's got a few of his own. And he'll be thinking what every one of us would be thinking, if we were running for president as Barack Obama: How the heck will "Saturday Night Live" ridicule me and Jeremiah Wright?

Kass had a few ideas of how SNL should do it:

Wright, Obama's ridiculously controversial longtime pastor, torpedoed the Obama campaign by releasing copious amounts of natural gas in separate speeches, one at an NAACP meeting in Detroit and the other before the National Press Club this week in Washington.

Though SNL writers haven't asked me, I'd suggest a skit called "The Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Clapping School For White Liberal Folks."

On The Daily Show on Comedy Central Tuesday night, Jon Stewart pressed former Speaker Newt Gingrich to agree that Reverend Jeremiah Wright should not be a major story, that every candidate and president has a "preacher who’s said crazy things." Stewart professed he was "really stunned" by the media’s focus, and he asked, "Isn't the silliness of this now boiling down to the strategy of shouldn't we be focusing on whether this is truly an issue?" He also claimed Wright is like many ministers, black and white: "Don't white preachers have very similar beliefs, but when they counsel a candidate, nobody really focuses on them?"

Gingrich was playful, but firm: "I think if you replaced the word, the various things he said about white America, like Ku Klux Klan America, if you replace those with the word ‘black’ and you imagine a white racist preacher who was as vehement as Reverend Wright, he would literally be ostracized in this culture." He also raised Obama’s connection to Weather Underground figure William Ayers. But Stewart wasn’t budging: "I think if he played that game of six degrees of separation with other candidates you could probably find equally vile characters circling the universe."

For those interested in a political giggle this fine Saturday, I recommend a cute sketch done by Comedy Central's Jon Stewart Thursday evening (embedded right).

First, Stewart lampooned Chris Wallace for placing a "24"-style ticker on the screen to illustrate how long it's been since the host of "Fox News Sunday" challenged Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama to come on his program.

Next, Stewart went after "Hardball's" Chris Matthews for his shameless cheerleading for Obama.

Yet, in the end, Obama had the last laugh, deliciously at Matthews' expense (viewers are cautioned about mild vulgarity in the clip):

White House press secretary Dana Perino appeared on The Daily Show Thursday night, and host Jon Stewart disparaged former spokesman Ari Fleischer as looking like a caveman. When Perino protested that Fleischer had a female following, Stewart cracked "Is that like the women who visit murderers in prison? Like the serial killer kind of a thing?" Perino said most questions don’t fluster her, except when Helen Thomas will "ask a question that is not based on fact." Stewart asked:

"Now do you find, now that the mood has shifted, I mean, you went through a period where, I mean, they were going through press secretaries, Ari Fleischer, McClellan, Tony Snow, and then we always used to make a little attractiveness chart because it seemed like the evolution of man in terms of --

Perino: They wouldn’t wear pink.

Stewart: Because Fleischer was, let's face facts, tough to look at. (Laughter)

Look out! Here comes a liberal media feud. On his MSNBC program every night, host Dan Abrams hosts a media-criticism segment called "Beat the Press." On Thursday night, Abrams heavily implied ABC’s Jake Tapper is a plagiarist, stealing snarky lines from Jon Stewart. We dislike Tapper putting too much snark in the breakfast buffet. But if you’re going to level a serious charge like plagiarism, you better not take your target out of context. Guess what? Abrams did. Take a look:

ABRAMS: Finally, you have to wonder sometimes whether the folks at ABC News, they get all their material from their own heads, they come up with it. Here's Jon Stewart on CNN over two weeks ago talking about the Democrats and how they allocate delegates, and then ABC’s Jake Tapper.

STEWART: Feel better. Have a delegate and a trophy saying you're number one.

TAPPER: Democrats distribute them proportionately. It’s kinda like T-ball where every child gets a trophy.

As often happens when he’s interviewing a Democrat, Daily Show host Jon Stewart dropped most of his smart-aleck routine when he interviewed Hillary Clinton on Monday night. Instead, Stewart took the opportunity to hail the “historic race,” comparing Clinton and Barack Obama to baseball stars Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, and that the country might not appreciate “watching two historical figures battle it out.” He also hailed Clinton, Obama, and McCain as people who might serve in each other’s Cabinets, causing Clinton to claim mysteriously that she’d like to appoint a bipartisan Cabinet and thinks there are “good ideas across the political spectrum.”

As the interview wound to a close, Stewart declared that the American people ought to be gearing up to remember Hillary vs. Barack as this century's Lincoln-Douglas debates on the scale or sheer momentousness:

Given his penchant for comparing Republicans to Hitler, using such phrases as "slinging crap," and stating that the Bush presidency "has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush," you would think that Keith Olbermann, the buffoonish left-wing sportscaster-cum-newsreader would refrain from giving lectures on political civility or the limits of comedy. Not so, however.

On last night's edition of his program, the Obama-supporting anchor was horrified that Jon Stewart, the man he apes, dared to make a joke about the Illinois Democrat's unusual middle and last names. The hypocrisy is thick enough to cut with a knife and serve—assuming you could stand the stench.

Olbermann began the segment comparing Stewart to Ann Coulter (horrors!):

Barack Obama has been endorsed by The Nation magazine and MoveOn.org, and his most celebrated California voter is Markos Moulitsas, the purveyor of the hard-left Daily Kos blog. He’s promising to meet with dictators (Cuban, Iranian, North Korean) without preconditions. He’s taken a dramatic step to the hard left. But in his appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live on Wednesday night, comedian Jon Stewart tried to push the strange idea that Obama was a base-spurning maverick like John McCain, that they’re running "outside of traditional dogma." He was mocking how conservatives dislike McCain because they want rigid obedience to their party line:

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, during an hour-long appearance on CNN’s "Larry King Live," didn’t take the New York Times story on "the possibility of a relationship between John McCain some years back and a female lobbyist" seriously, which, as King put it, was "in the embryonic stages" during the show. "[T]his has an awfully tired and dusty feel to it, in terms of the way that political reporting has been going." Stewart went on to criticize some of the Times’ reporting. "You know, The New York Times does some pretty amazing reporting and The New York Times puts stuff out there that is as sort of spurious at times. You know, Judy Miller's reports in The New York Times were about as fictional as James Frey's, you know, ‘Million Little Pieces.’"

King began the second segment of his program, which started about 10 minutes into the 9 pm Eastern hour, by bringing up the Times story and after summarizing its contents, read a statement that had been issued by McCain’s campaign. He then asked for Stewart’s take on it. Stewart admitted that John McCain "is someone who I have great respect for" and thought that "this is a strange time to be injecting it into the race." He also lamented the entire situation. "It's just -- it's a shame and I feel badly for him and I feel badly for his family, because they're lovely people."

It's really frightening to imagine that people who get the bulk of their news from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" will be making what they probably think are educated decisions at the ballot box come Election Day.

Stewart, who is now a self-proclaimed economist, said on his January 23 show, "Our economy is tanking." And now you can add financial media critic to Stewart's list of titles.

"For insight, I turned to the two major financial networks to find out what is going on, or as they're known around here, ‘hot ladies talk economy with bald dudes,'" Stewart said.

Although a recent Sacred Heart University poll indicated 45.4 percent of respondents thought journalists and broadcasters are mostly or somewhat liberal - the bias isn't ideologically driven according to Newsweek editor Jon Meacham.

Meacham appeared on Comedy Central's January 21 "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and told viewers the media gear reporting toward conflict.

"I absolutely believe that the media is not ideologically driven, but conflict driven," Meacham said. "If we have a bias it's not that people are socially liberal, fiscally conservative or vice versa. It is that we are engaged in the storytelling business. And if you tell the same story again and again and again - it's kind of boring."

On his Daily Nightly blog, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams sent his happy-birthday wishes to liberal comedian Jon Stewart. In a Wednesday blog post playfully titled "Where Have You Gone, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz?", Williams mourned how the writers' strike has taken Stewart away from his "vital comedic work" trashing Bush. Just like Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams thinks Stewart is an American treasure:

The serious fact is that Jon Stewart and his colleagues in comedy -- along with the writers who support them -- serve an invaluable purpose by skewering the pompous and deflating the egos of the high and mighty. They function almost as a separate branch of government. We need them, and we miss them.

Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw took his publicity tour for his Sixties book "Boom!" into (at least somewhat) hostile territory on Monday’s Laura Ingraham show. Ingraham played an old clip in which Brokaw slapped talk radio as "instantly jingoistic and savagely critical" of people questioning war.

Like many other journalists who instantly let conservatives know they haven’t listened to Rush Limbaugh, Brokaw insisted Limbaugh "doesn’t want to hear another point of view, except his." Ingraham disagreed. Brokaw added: "The problem with talk radio is they only want to hear one note...The problem with talk radio is they mock anyone else’s point of view, and they do it often in a mindless fashion." This is rich talk coming from a man whose network hired Bill Moyers as his newscast’s only commentator in 1995, and a man who wrote a syrupy tribute to hot liberal mock-jock Jon Stewart for his "Athenian" ideals in Time magazine. Audio clip (5:05): MP3 audio

Radar Online reported Tuesday that before being signed as a contributor by Newsweek magazine, Rove was first shopped to Time, but that didn’t happen because "They think Karl is essentially an unindicted coconspirator in a whole string of felonies."

Wow, what a liberal smell Time puts out. For older media-watchers, this recalls the Washington bureau of Time sitting around on C-SPAN on the verge of the first Iraq war in 1991 dismissing John McCain and his "superpatriots" who marched around in "brown shirts." Radar media critic Charles Kaiser reported:

For its part, Time magazine said nothing publicly about Rove's arrival at Newsweek, but a well-placed source told me that Bob Barnett (every Washington literati's favorite lawyer, including Bill Clinton) had traveled to the Time-Life building on Sixth Avenue to offer Rove's services before Newsweek snared them. Time's editors apparently felt the cost/benefit analysis wouldn't be in their favor if they embraced the man who has done more than anyone to keep the spirit of Joe McCarthy alive and well in American politics. (Read Joshua Green's definitive profile from the Atlantic in 2004.) "Time thought this wouldn't be like hiring George Stephanopoulos," my source explained. "They think Karl is essentially like an unindicted coconspirator in a whole string of felonies."

Besides the obvious shock value, there was another reason Rove's arrival in the fourth estate was inevitable. In public, Rove is one of dozens of conservatives who assiduously bash the press. Last summer, channeling Agnew, Rove told Rush Limbaugh that "the people I see criticizing [Bush] are sort of elite effete snobs." But at the same time, Rove was constantly massaging big-time Washington journalists over long lunches at the Hay Adams Hotel.

In the November 15 Rolling Stone, the hippie mag interviews a pile of politicians, media stars, and rockers to celebrate its 40th anniversary. Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, was interviewed by Jeff Sharlet of The Revealer. In a strange interview he unloaded the usual criticism on Ann Coulter, but praised old American socialists Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. Coulter came up as Stewart tried to say that no one mocking the government today is a "Soviet dissident," that our discourse is free enough that "It's very difficult to shock anybody any more. I'm not even sure what the subversive edge is." This exchange followed:

ROLLING STONE: Ann Coulter suffered repercussions from calling John Edwards a faggot.

JON STEWART: As a businessperson, she has made a choice: "Even if I narrow my audience to true believers, there’s enough money there. I have to keep pushing until it’s just me and one other crazy person with a lot of money." Maybe she’ll be hired by a crazy billionaire, just her and him, and he’ll go, "Say something about lesbians! Heh-heh! 9/11 widows! Gimme another!"