Zagat reviewer and supposed Senate candidate Harold Ford did Colbert last night. He deftly met every joke with an inane talking point, just like a real Senate candidate!

Two pieces of incredible breaking news! Alaska Snow Empress Sarah Palin will tape a segment for The Colbert Report, and also she revealed the top-secret location of his upcoming "Persian Gulf" trip, on the Twitter!

Stephen Colbert welcomed Meghan McCain onto his show last night, where she refused to lick his face, talked endlessly about how much she loves fucking, and refused to discuss anything about Sarah Palin.

After a week of "Teabagging" jokes, Stephen Colbert finally got around to NOM's 2M4M anti-gay marriage campaign. He made his own parody, just like the internet did, except funnier! Watch out for the HOMOSTORM.

Insanely weepy Glenn Beck will probably cry over what it means for our country, but Stephen Colbert's thorough Tuesday-night takedown of the Fox News host is, in one way, a compliment.

Our old friend Monty got a shout-out tonight on the Colbert Report. Not only did this illustrate that his story has made that critical third leap — from blog to cable news to cable fake news — the segment also surfaced a highly plausible new theory as to what Earthly form Monty took before he became a demon hellspawn. Kiss the dog, raccoon, pig and vole theories goodbye! Click the video icon to view.

Now showing on NBC Universal and News Corp. Web video joint venture Hulu: the Daily Show's Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report's Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central. Viacom, which owns the Comedy Central network, has long hinted it might join Hulu — we heard rumors the deal was done in March — but until now had only announced agreements with Joost, the failing Internet video company founded by Skype founders Nikolas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

You know the Colbert Report, and how it's really successful? And how other forms of news are less popular and some are dying? CNN noticed that too! So their Headline News channel will soon be airing Not Just Another Cable News Show, a weekly program with a light take on hard news using memorable gaffes from the past week. Time.com Washington editor Ana Marie Cox, of Wonkette fame, and noted Canadian/Huffington Post contributor Rachel Sklar will be commenters. The show, whose concept is stolen from the first segment of the Daily Show and whose title is stolen from the Wayans brothers, begins April 5. [AP]

Ousted Obama aide Samantha Power will appear on the Colbert Report tonight. Just one piece of advice: there's no such thing as off the record, on tv. [FishbowlNY]

As Stephen Colbert revealed last night, Eliot Spitzer made his second appearance on The Colbert Report on February 12. Which would be the same day he called the Emperors' Club VIP to set up his date with "Kristen", and "just hours" before he traveled to Washington DC to testify before Congress and fuck the hooker who ended his career. He spoke with Colbert about Barack Obama's "trouble picking up working-class women" and his status as a superdelegate for Hillary. ("We have capes, we have leotards, we have special outfits that we wear.") The clip of the interview ("I love my job!") is after the jump. Someone should compare it to his post-whoring CNBC appearance and see if he looks more relaxed.

The writers strike ended! Stephen Colbert was so excited, he introduced his entire writing staff at the top of the show, inviting them on-stage and high-fiving each one. Tiki Barber, Mr. Met, Kevin Bacon, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and disgraced former Times star Judith Miller all ended up in the lineup too. We're just glad Judy's keeping busy!

On Tuesday's Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert offered what was perhaps the most moving pro-WGA moment we've seen in weeks, leading Malcolm Gladwell and the Harlem Gospel Choir in a lively rendition of the spiritual "Go Down Moses" as images of his beloved, absent colleagues scrolled across the screen; cue up the above clip and prepare to be stirred in a way you haven't been since Conan O'Brien gave us that first, utterly thrilling glimpse of his strike beard.

With Conan, Jay, Jimmy, and the rest of the late night gang announcing they're reluctantly headed to back to work without their striking writers, it seemed inevitable that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert wouldn't be far behind. They've released this joint statement on their January 7th return: "We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence." A more disappointed than ambivalent WGA has already issued a reminder that writerless versions of the shows aren't going to fill the Colbert and Stewart-shaped holes in our lives: "Comedy Central forcing Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert back on the air will not give the viewers the quality shows they've come to expect. The only way to get the writing staffs back on the job is for the AMPTP companies to come back to the table prepared to negotiate a fair deal with the Writers Guild." [AP, WGA.org]

Hatemongers like Media Matters, the watchdog site, take stories from the media out of context (the context of people speaking to like-minded people), our enemy Stephen Colbert of "The Colbert Report" points out. It's a compelling argument! For instance, for centuries, Gentile people have been addressing themselves to other good Christians—so is it somehow now their fault if the Jews overhear on the T.V. what they perceive to be antisemitism?

Subscribers to the Williamsburg "brooklynbabyhui" (hui? wha?) Yahoo group recently received a communique from the Colbert Report, which is looking to tape a group of moms for an upcoming segment. Despite the producer's earnestness, we have a hard time believing that the show has anything else in mind than to completely mock these moms to death, but perhaps that wouldn't be the worst thing:

• A group of Columbia journalism students allegedly cheated on an ethics exam. There go those cushy Voice gigs. [Radar]
  

Tonight's word: Rip-Off. "On one side, you've got analysts buzzing that Google's been ripped off spending $1.65 billion on another Napster dud..."

The relentless pursuit of scoop/exclusive credit is a die-hard pastime on this, our Internet. At Gawker, we tend to prefer a more squishy concept of content ownership; information wants to be free, or at least infinitely reproducible without cost, man. Nevertheless, we do try to provide credit where credit is due, and that's the subject of a witch hunt by the greasy gearheads at Jalopnik. Seems they managed to con some exclusive pre-release Chevrolet commercials out of General Motors, though unfortunately the "final" commercials did not feature the promised nuclear explosions. They did feature lots of patriotic imagery and the heartland musical stylings of John Mellon Cougarcamp, which apparently appealed enough to Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report that the show reproduced the video with no thanks to poor Jalopnik. "When a journalist or 'web logger' takes something not their own and slaps a pre-roll on the front of it with their name and puts it up on YouTube, that's as good as if they made it themselves," claims Jalopnik righteously. Typical mainstream media, surviving parasitically on blog content, just like always.

Arianna Huffington got some moderately effective pimp-time for her new book, On Becoming Fearless, on last night's Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert was surprisingly gentle in the face of Huffington's implacable demeanor and accent, but he did reminisce fondly about "nailing her" in the segment intro.

[via FishbowlNY]