AM.MN: A death panel Sarah Palin could love

“Panel tells DNR moose hunting should be allowed.” Other news media also cover a new report from Minnesota’s Moose Advisory Committee to the state Department of Natural Resources, but only the Star Tribune’s headline hinted at the potential gallows humor in a Palinesque death panel for Minnesota’s biggest mammals. The committee proposes a moose harvest (sorry, Bullwinkle) whenever annual aerial population surveys (sorry, Rep. Bachmann) tally 100 cows for every 67 bulls. In setting a threshhold for inducing mortality in moose, this government death panel’s main criteria included “presumed levels of hunter satisfaction.”

Elsewhere in Minnesota headlines today … 

BEMIDJI: Collin Peterson holds another town hall. If the 25-percent-loon quotient that the congressman dreads was in attendance, those folks were booing long-winded questions and the guy who called Obama “the boy king” along with everybody else. [Bemidji Pioneer]

FIRST CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Tim Walz warms up with telephone town hall. It was like an old-fashioned party line as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the congressman took questions on health care Tuesday; he’ll hold an in-person town hall in Mankato on Thursday. [Rochester Post-Bulletin]

STATEWIDE: Honey, it’s Amy Klobuchar on the phone. Minnesota’s senior senator and a doctor from the Mayo Clinic will be taking your calls on health care this Sunday at 7 p.m. [West Central Tribune]

MINNEAPOLIS: Park-tax petitions sufficient. An amendment to give the park board independent levy authority will be on the ballot in November, as long as the charter commission agrees to meet on its “off week” to okay it. [Star Tribune]

KANDIYOHI COUNTY: Officials see ordinance as “tool” to halt homecoming pranks. A regular victim of such hijinks already greets pranksters with a tool of his own: a squirt gun loaded with fox urine. [West Central Tribune]

ALEXANDRIA: Big Ole gets helmet-wings reattached. It was only a coincidence that repairs to the wind-damaged 28-foot fiberglass viking took place the same day Brett Favre flew into Minnesota on the wings of Zygi Wilf’s purple-and-gold airplane. [Alexandria Echo Press]