The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart took on Republicans who are attempting to defund Planned Parenthood, and as an example he used Rep. Michele Bachmann. Bachmann condemned Planned Parenthood’s “express centers” in Minnesota saying that they offer abortion. According to Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, they don’t.

“They’re focused on becoming big business,” Bachmann said on the House floor last week. “Sarah Stoesz, who heads the Planned Parenthood operation in my state of Minnesota, said she recently opened three express centers in wealthy Minnesota suburbs and shopping centers and malls and places where women are doing their grocery shopping, picking up Starbucks, living their daily lives and stopping off for an abortion.”

It’s a regular refrain for Bachmann, who made the same claim in the summer of 2008.

A spokesperson for Planned Parenthood told the Minnesota Independent that those “express centers,” actually called PLAN Express Care centers, do not offer abortion services.

According to the group’s website, the centers offer “no-exam health services,” including birth control, emergency contraception, pregnancy testing, testing for sexually transmitted diseases and HPV vaccinations.

Here’s the clip from the Daily Show:

Reps. John Kline and Michele Bachmann are cosponsors of a bill that would allow faith-based hospitals and health care clinics to deny women emergency abortions, pro-choice advocates say. The Protect Life Act would prevent private health insurance policies offered in the health exchanges set up by last year’s health care reform from paying for abortion. It also OKs a “conscience clause” which allows religious people to deny care for women seeking an abortion.

According to the bill, the government “may not subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, or require any health plan created or regulated under this Act to subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, on the basis that the health care entity refuses to” perform abortions, train its staff to perform abortion, or provide referrals for abortions if the hospital or clinic won’t perform them.

As Talking Points Memo reports, the practical application of the bill would be to allow faith-based hospitals and clinics to refuse any and all abortions including when the mother’s life would be saved by an emergency abortion.

“I think a majority of Americans would agree with us that saving a woman’s life should be every hospital’s first priority,” Alexa Kolbi-Molina, an attorney with the ACLU told TPM. “We all know a woman who has faced a complication in her pregnancy … we would hope that when that woman goes to a hospital she would be protected and get the care that she needs.”

“I think a majority of Americans would believe that a hospital should not be imposing their religious beliefs when providing care, especially life-saving care,” she added.

The bill would also ban private health insurance policies that cover abortion from participating in the health insurance exchanges that are a part of the Affordable Care Act. And a part of that ban contains the same language related to “forcible rape” as another bill sponsored by Bachmann and Kline, as well as Reps. Chip Cravaack and Collin Peterson, that generated considerable controversy last week.

That bill would have changed the definition of rape to exclude many forms of non-consensual sex, including date rape and statutory rape. The bill’s author conceded that he would change that language.

The Daily Show’s Kristen Schaal uses humor to demonstrate how the change in the definition of rape in the bill might affect women who have been the victims of sexual assault:

Pawlenty vetoed the bill, authored by Kahn, which would have altered state statute so that people couldn’t be prosecuted for possession of bong water the same as they would for actual controlled substances. Pawlenty defended his veto saying law enforcement supported the use of bong water in prosecution. Kahn says that line of reasoning “doesn’t hold water.”

Here’s the Daily Show segment where host John Stewart mocked the Pawlenty’s veto of the bill:

“Jon Stewart gets it and I am sure most reasonable Minnesotans get it,” Kahn said in a statement on Friday. “We shouldn’t be penalizing the unkempt housewife who left something out on the counter top with a felony offense reserved for dangerous drug dealers.”

She continued, “We worked hand in hand with law enforcement and the criminal justice system to craft a bill that they supported and we succeeded. It was a common sense bill aimed at reducing unnecessary costs on our court systems. I still haven’t heard a logical reason for the veto.”

Kahn said she’ll be looking to pass the same bill in the next legislative session.

Both complaints involved Bachmann’s Nov. 5 rally against health-care reform in front of the U.S. Capitol.

Israel, of New York, used YouTube to voice his displeasure with prominent protest signs at the Bachmann event depicting Holocaust victims. A statement Bachmann released this week contains an apology of a sort.

On his TV show, Stewart took Hannity to task for inserting footage from another, larger rally into scenes from Bachmann’s event. Here’s Stewart’s take on Hannity’s sort-of apology.

“Oh is it now? …It’s been in the Utne Reader? It’s in the Paris Review. Literally tens of people have heard about it. We almost got it into McSweeney’s.”

Watch it here (fast-forward to 5:50).

“You can’t re-educate them in camps,” retorts Stewart. “You have to educate them first!”

Then the show cuts to a recent Bachmann interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who thanked Bachmann for “doing a great job”:

Hannity: …I have no doubt they’ll keep attacking you, ’cause you’re so effective…

Bachmann: Thank you, we’re going to fight for our freedom.

Hannity: Absolutely. Against tyranny.

Stewart: Yes. Tyranny. AKA, our democratically elected president… I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing.

Jon Stewart and former Reagan/Bush I speechwriter (and current WSJ columnist) Peggy Noonan discuss the economy and the presidential race. Video’s below the jump; highly recommended.

An excerpt of Noonan’s remarks:

I think we are in an epic political moment… We are in a real economic crisis, and the American political establishment said we must do A, B and C to deal with it, And the American people looked at the entire establishment–the president, the speaker of the House, the secretary of the Treasury–and said no, we don’t trust you to handle this. We don’t trust you to do the right thing. The fact is, the American people, I believe, were right, but we’re still going to need a plan. But I think all of this lack of faith in Washington, lack of leadership in Washington, lack of impressive people in Washington, has left some candidates able to say essentially, vote for me–I never had anything to do with Washington. I don’t know a thing about it. Which is really not the best qualification.

I think it is also an epic moment in that we’ve never had a president before who, in the midst of a crisis, couldn’t come forward and talk to us. This is an amazing thing. I cannot help thinking that the president these days, as he talks about the economic crisis and the bill that was up for [a vote], that he seems more like a commentator on the event than a leader of the event. It is worrying.

Progressive Media USA, “Out of Touch,” :30

And speaking of elitism, Jon Stewart, about seven minutes into this clip, makes a good point about the much-blogged “bitter” comment by Barack Obama: Maybe an “elite” president isn’t such a bad idea. He addresses the candidates:

“I know ‘elite’ is a bad word in politics and you want to go bowling or throw back a few beers, but the job you’re applying for, if you get it and it goes well, they might carve your head into a mountain. If you don’t think you’re better than us then what the [bleep] are you doing? …Not only do I want an elite president, I want someone who’s embarrassingly superior to me.”