A truly odd intro, but far more disturbing was the weather outside the downtown Minneapolis TV studio from which Pawlenty’s arguments against the health care reform bill were being transmitted to the heavens.

Less than an hour earlier and only three blocks away, a freak tornado had wreaked havoc on downtown. A church spire was twisted, a convention-center roof sheltering a convention of Lutherans started letting in rain, and — echoes of “The Exorcist” — a woman on the sidewalk was lifted into the air before being set down again unharmed. (No one was hurt but property damage was widespread.)

The storm had taken Minnesota’s biggest city by surprise. As sirens wailed belatedly, debris closed a freeway and south Minneapolis — where garages slid into alleys, and walls at the Electric Fetus record store caved in — was cruelly deforested. In the suburbs, the winds vandalized a middle school and ransacked a residential street.

But the backdrop behind the governor on the video uplink from Ascent Media studios gave Fox News viewers a view of downtown Minneapolis under unchanging, placid skies.

The local airwaves crackled with damage reports and weather warnings, but the governor carried on his national cable-news conversation with Cavuto as if nothing was the matter — except, according to Pawlenty, everything to do with public assistance in this country:

The federal government has run every entitlement program they have essentially into the ground: Medicare is broke; Medicaid is broke; Social Security is broke. They have run every program they have in that nature into the ground. Why would we give them another one to run and manage into the ground?

Seeing the governor wax cranky about government while first responders rushed to a variety of disaster scenes all around him struck some viewers as strangely dissonant, suggesting a variation on Cavuto’s question: Where is Tim Pawlenty when you need him?

At 3:05 p.m., the Associated Press’ Brian Bakst observed via Twitter: “Pawlenty live on Fox News now ripping Obama on health care. Bad timing given tornadoes all over metro?”

The day was momentous enough that an hour later Pawlenty was moved to send his first Twitter message since June 24. But it wasn’t about the storm: “Was on Neil Cavuto’s show today. Here’s the link: http://is.gd/2oTf4.”

After the local news channels had shown off their footage of the wreckage that evening, Dusty Trice, a partisan Democratic blogger, let loose on the governor with a posting titled, “Maybe Someone Should Tell Tim Pawlenty There Was A Tornado In Minneapolis.” Trice faulted Pawlenty for not being “willing to break an appearance on FOX when a tornado tears through one of his home state’s major metropolitan areas.”

Bob Collins of Minnesota Public Radio picked up on that point the next morning, tweeting first, “Someone should do a story about the debate at the gov’s office over whether to wake him to tell him about the tornadoes.” Then, after Pawlenty’s appearance over national airwaves, on another right-leaning program, “Gov was on Bill Bennett’s show this morning on health care. Still no proclamation order for MnDOT to supply help with tornado cleanup.”

According to Pawlenty spokesman Brian McClung, the governor hasn’t declared an emergency because no one has asked:

Governor Pawlenty was in downtown Minneapolis when the tornado was passing through and he saw some of the storm’s impact around the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Our Emergency Management personnel closely monitored the storm and the Governor was provided with regular updates throughout the afternoon on Wednesday.

Homeland Security and Emergency Management staff reached out to the City of Minneapolis and offered state assistance.  Minneapolis has not requested any assistance at this time.

While it was a significant storm it has been handled well.

Indeed, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak’s spokesman, Jeremy Hanson, told the Minnesota Independent that such a request was unlikely. Rybak is a potential contender to succeed Pawlenty, with whom he regularly locks horns. On his blog, Rybak lauded the actions of emergency responders and ordinary citizens.

Here’s the video clip of Pawlenty on Cavuto’s program:

On The Daily Show yesterday, Stewart shows how conservative rhetoric on Fox has flipped. As Gawker puts it:

Stewart and his staff dug deep into the archives to find some great footage of various Fox News personalities vehemently condemning the very behaviors that they’re now so enthusiastically championing, like criticizing the president during a time of war and taking to the streets in protests. These are the types of things that liberals do! So Fox News = the new liberals!

Then comes Rep. Bachmann, whose logic about health care would seem to also apply to reproductive health. She told Sean Hannity on his Tuesday radio show that “people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress and let them know, under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions.”

As Matthew DeLong puts it at our sister site in Washington, “Somebody call Planned Parenthood. Looks like they’ve got a surprising new spokesperson.”

While it is surprising, it’s not the first time Bachmann’s used this kind of logic. During a July 22 floor speech, she tested out an appeal to pro-choicers, citing how complicated she feels reformed health care would be:

On this issue of women making a decision about whether or not to have an abortion, one of the main arguments that was proffered was: No government should get between a woman and her doctor. The government should not get between the woman and her doctor when she comes to making that decision.

Yet it’s so curious. When you look at these 33 new bureaucracies that are created, when it comes to that decision about an abortion, you’ve got 33 new bureaucracies now that are created… The government is going to be between them and their doctor in a whole new way, a big way, a 33-bureaucracy way.

That’s the conclusion of Eric Ostermeier, who blogs at Smart Politics for the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

Ostermeier counted Bachmann’s appearances on cable shows since she took office in 2007. That first year: zero appearances. Over the past year: 43 appearances.

So by Ostermeier’s reckoning, Bachmann is on national TV every nine days. At that rate, you can set your Tivo for next Thursday and have a good shot at catching the representative from Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District.

And at that rate, isn’t Bachmann proving she could handle her own weekly show, a la Huckabee?

By the way, Ostermeier confirms what you may suspect: Bachmann is increasingly leaning toward right-leaning networks like Fox. She hasn’t, for example, shown her face on MSNBC since Oct. 17, 2008, the day she told Chris of her suspicions about colleagues in Congress harboring “anti-American” beliefs.

Her latest appearance, as of this writing, was Tuesday, when she told Fox News host Sean Hannity that reforming the nation’s health care system is unconstitutional.

All that airtime is not an accident; it’s by design. Bachmann has mobilized an exceptionally large squadron of public-relations staffers to pursue “an aggressive plan” for more media exposure. Among other benefits, Ostermeier figures that strategy is reaping Bachmann campaign-fundraising rewards.

“[I]t is not within our power as members of Congress, it’s not within the enumerated powers of the Constitution for us to design and create a national takeover of health care. Nor is it within our ability to be able to delegate that responsibility to the executive.”

According to the United States Constitution, Congress does have the power to provide for the general welfare of the nation. “The Congress shall have power to … provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States.”

Hannity followed up, “All right, Congresswoman. Still haven’t figured out why liberals don’t like you so much. I think it’s because you actually believe in the Constitution. But we’re honored to have you here.”

Pawlenty introduced a question about what the United States should do about Iran with his view that “it’s inevitable that that situation is going to come to a head.” Powell said recent political turmoil has revealed “fissures,” as people press their desire for “liberalized government.”

Regarding Iran’s nuclear program, Powell said the United States had two choices: Take out nukes militarily, or warn them, Cold War style, that any nuclear aggression on their part would bring greater retribution against them.

One area of shared interest wasn’t touched on in Pawlenty’s talk with Powell: the future of the Republican Party.

Also left unmentioned: Powell’s views on the recent arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, and President Obama’s nationally-televised response in which he referenced racial profiling.

Only last week, the NAACP centenary brought Powell together with Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, whose “nation of cowards” speech in February marked the Administration’s other rhetorical milestone on race.

(Idle question: Would Minnesota DFL Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller have broached that timely issue of race with Powell, given the equal time from WCCO that he has asked for?)

Here’s the video of Pawlenty on Fox on Thursday, responding to Obama on health care:

[Via Political Animal]

The WSJ editorial page has consistently proven itself rich soil for baseless critiques of Minnesota’s election and recount process. But your television set still provides the best, terrarium-like conditions in which words may flourish independently of their meanings, as Media Matters demonstrates in its take on Fox News coverage of Tuesday’s Norm Coleman-Al Franken denouement.

[Via Election Law Blog]

As Media Matters points out, Fox IDs von Spakovsky only by his current affiliation with the conservative Heritage Foundation, but he gets a fuller introduction in mainstream media outlets like the Star Tribune. The newspaper called him “a former Federal Elections commissioner and point man on voting rights in the Bush administration’s Justice Department.”

Here is the video clip from Fox News’ “Special Report” on Monday:

Partial transcript (see full transcript at Media Matters):

FOX’S SHANNON BREAM: … If Coleman ultimately loses there, heading into the federal court system on a constitutional challenge will certainly be an option. And though getting to the U.S. Supreme Court is a long shot that could take years, election law experts say it may be the only way to satisfy everyone.

VON SPAKOVSKY: If you don’t deal with all of the issues that have been raised in this case, then, you know, a lot of people are going to be questioning whether the real winner, who actually ends up with the seat, was the person who really won the race. And that’s not good for the kind of election process that we have.

“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.

Video and text excerpts after the jump.

Greenwald:

In one sense, all of this drooling rage is nothing more than the familiar face of extreme right-wing paranoia … But it’s now inflamed by declining imperial power, genuine economic crises, an exotic Other occupying the White House, and potent technology harnessed by right-wing corporations such as Fox News to broadcast and disseminate it widely and continuously.

The United Kingdom’s Guardian:

Britain’s most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming “footsoldiers” in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become “viable targets”. So too had the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.

Beck, tracing the origins of a future American civil war to a Republican governor’s refusal to take federal stimulus funds:

We have military exercises going on in Iowa right now. We have a battalion, I believe, in Maryland. People are training for civil unrest all over the country. I believe the answers they give, and they say: “This is for this sort of this kind of unrest or this kind of unrest.” Except, we just had in our stimulus package, a way for, if your governor says no to the money, the legislature can go around the governor and go right to the feds. It’s this kind of thing that would make the federal government say, you know what, we can call up the National Guard. We don’t need your governor to do it. Do you believe those scenarios or is this crackpot stuff?

Video and transcribed excerpts after the jump.

Coleman:

All votes that are validly cast should be counted, particularly when it comes to absentee ballots — not just those in Democrat areas, and that’s what’s happened so far. …

There are a number of votes that have been double-counted … and a number of them, by the way, in Democrat areas … It was more than 25 precincts, in predominantly Democrat areas. …

The biggest pool of votes … were the absentee ballots. There were about 953 that were counted from heavily Democrat areas. …

Hannity:

The absentee ballots, they only went to the canvassing board and their decisions were conflicting. And they literally only allowed the recount for districts that would, or precincts that would tend to favor Al Franken. But they didn’t apply the same standards to districts where you did very well.

In his response to Hannity’s remarks, Coleman doesn’t say that the recount was statewide; that the state Supreme Court gave his campaign (and Franken’s) the power to reject any absentee ballots that local officials decided (on review) to count; or that the State Canvassing Board had two judges appointed by Republicans, outnumbering known affiliations for any other party on the panel.

The segment ends with a pitch for viewers to donate to Coleman’s cause.