On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart covered the new cap and trade bill with a face-full of pie, a graphic of a man being sodomized by a donkey and an interview with Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Which is weird, because that's exactly how Jim Lehrer covered it too.

Discussion of the cap and trade bill continues after the jump.

The Daily Show airs Monday through Thursday at 11pm / 10c.

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T. Boone Pickens — the 117th-richest person in America, but only the 369th in the world — his creatively-titled Pickens Plan to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil, thereby saving it hundreds of billions of dollars, by filling our cars up with natural gas and erecting an untold number of windmills across Middle America. And he thinks we can do it all in ten years.

He wants us to believe that?! Hey, Pickens! Come back when you're the 115th-richest person in America. Then maybe we'll talk…

Somewhere toward the end of the video, he hints that, to bring his genius plan to fruition in ten short years, we'll need the right president. But he doesn't say who he thinks that right president is. And, his website isn't much more message…

On January 20th, 2009, a new President will take office. We're organizing behind the Pickens Plan now to ensure our voices will be heard by the next administration. Together we can raise a call for change and set a new course for America's energy future in the first hundred days of the new presidency — breaking the hammerlock of foreign oil and building a new domestic energy future for America with a focus on sustainability.

Something somewhere in the back of my head tells me his choice isn't gonna be the Democrat.

Alternative titles for The Daily Show's coverage of Obama saying he wished he "could wave a magic wand to solve the problem of rising gas prices," a sentiment almost verbatim to one Bush expressed a month earlier:

* Half-Black Magic

* Magical Realism

* The Illusionists

* Hoodoo the Right Thing

* Barrel Fever

* Fossil Fools

* The Year of Magical Talking

* Abracadumbass

* The Rift of the Magi

* Pass the Baton

* Gas Hex

Today John McCain is hangin' in California with the Governator, part of an effort to burnish his eco-credentials at a panel discussion on the environment.

Of course, it's entirely possible some tofu-eating tree-hugger will throw a vegan pie at the GOP candidate, because last week McCain announced his support for offshore oil drilling at states' discretion. That's part of an even more important effort to maybe bring gas prices down a little bit.

You'd think freeway-happy Californians would get behind this idea…

[McCain's] newfound support for allowing states to decide whether to drill offshore, announced last week in Texas, carries risk. Having spent much of his campaign trying to distance himself from the current President Bush and Republican orthodoxy, McCain has now changed his tune to theirs on a hugely symbolic issue that has long helped motivate the independent voters whose support he needs to claim the White House.

Diana Cuttrell of Santa Barbara is one of them, and she fiercely opposes McCain's new stance.

"It's not going to solve the problem," she said of McCain's proposal to lift the federal moratorium on sea drilling. "It's a Band-Aid, basically. It's just pretty idiotic."

Okay, Diana Cuttrell of Santa Barbara. So I guess if you ever wind up in the hospital with six broken ribs and a gaping head wound, you'll just turn down a Band-Aid when someone offers you one.

It's so weird how some people refuse to let you help them.

In a startlingly groundbreaking maneuver of Blofeldian proportions, John McCain is calling upon the nations super geniuses, mad scientists and talking brains in jars to help solve our energy crisis (assuming that Steve Jobs will let them out of their current contracts)…

The presumed Republican nominee is proposing a $300 million government prize to whoever can develop an automobile battery that far surpasses existing technology.

The bounty would equate to $1 for every man, woman and child in the country, "a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency," McCain said in remarks prepared for delivery Monday at Fresno State University in California.

McCain said such a device should deliver power at 30 percent of current costs and have "the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.

Yeah, because that's what's been keeping us from developing viable battery technology. That's what drives scientific breakthroughs: cash prizes. Such a better idea than taking that $300 million and actually putting it into developing something worthwhile.

And why aim so low? Why not ask for technology that delivers power at 130% percent of current costs and offer a $300 trillion prize? That'll really speak to the serious scientists out there.

Speaking of which, I am totally going to win this thing with the perpetual motion machine I've been developing in my downtime on the subway.