The Comedic Influence on This Year's Election

What does it say about a presidential election when comedians, in the form of fake news show anchors and puppet animators, get more than their fair share of "buzz" among bloggers? It's true.

Over the weekend, the number of links and mentions of Jon Stewart's not-so-funny appearance on CNN's Crossfire increased on BlogPulse. "The Daily Show" host didn't play such a yuck-yuck to hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, instead calling their behavior "partisan hackery" and damaging to democracy.

Likewise, references to Matt Stone's and Trey Parker's new movie, "Team America: World Police" also picked up over the weekend, with the bloggers at Evilcon calling it a "laff riot."

It didn't take long for Sunday's New York Times endorsement of Sen. John Kerry to show up in the blogosphere. And accompanying it was Ron Suskind's article in the paper's Sunday magazine about Bush's intersection of faith and politics. Read the article here (registration required). Will moderate Republicans revolt starting Nov. 3 if the President is re-elected?

Friday's BlogPulse results also thrust into the spotlight at least seven U.S. military personnel, their relatives and their Congressman, all because a reservist unit in Iraq refused to go on a supply run because they felt their trucks and equipment were unsafe. In fact, seven of Friday's burstiest people are involved in the ongoing dispute.

On the technology front, Google's Desktop Search Download caught attention last week and continues to garner blog traffic and discussion. And if ongoing world events didn't make us jittery enough about stuff like safety and security, the shortage of flu vaccines is there to remind us that something is always out to get us.

TRACK THE CAMPAIGN NOW: Be sure to use Intelliseek's Campaign Radar 2004 to track the political campaign buzz now through Nov. 2 Election Day.