The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart appeared as a guest on Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor last night and ran down his take on GOP presidential candidates. While Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann got mention, more as a punchline — “If Sarah Palin doesn’t run, Michele Bachmann could definitely put on that blazer” — Tim Pawlenty got props for seeming “like a reasonable guy.” But, Stewart added, Pawlenty has left Minnesota in worse shape than did, say, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Stewart acknowledged some frustration with President Barack Obama’s performance and said he’d be open to voting for a Republican should the right one come along. But none seemed to make the cut.

Still, when asked by O’Reilly if there are any Republican candidates he likes or respects, Pawlenty was the first mention.

“I would imagine that Tim Pawlenty seems like a reasonably logical individual. I think he seems like a reasonable guy.”

A minute later, however, he added, “I thought that he [Romney] didn’t do terribly for Massachusetts. I think Pawlenty actually was a little worse for Minnesota than maybe Romney was for Massachusetts. I look at their executive experience, I tend to think executives tend to make good presidents.”

Still it’s more love than Pawlenty has gotten from Stewart’s Comedy Central cohort Stephen Colbert, who riffed on Pawlenty’s premature announcement of his candidacy to CNN in April and the Minnesota Republican’s attempt to “attract the kidses” in Iowa with pop culture references to Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga.

Watch part one:

Watch part two:

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:

“‘You broke it, you bought it’ isn’t extortion,” he said.

Watch it:

Pawlenty would not say whether he would run for the 2012 nomination, but admitted he is considering it. “I might, but I might not. I don’t know,” he told host Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show.” That didn’t stop him from taking subtle jabs at his potential opponents. “Mostly to run nationally you have to be rich, famous, or you have to have some kind of schtick or novelty,” he said.

Pawlenty got the special extended interview treatment from Stewart, with the first eight minutes of the interview airing last night, and the full interview posted online. The total conversation lasted almost half an hour, and barring a few divergences in the third segment (a presidential candidate has probably never been caught saying “bong water” that many times) the interview largely lacked typical “Daily Show” humor, instead focusing on a Pawlenty’s governing philosophy.

His message throughout the interview was making government smaller but more effective. One area he mentioned when asked for examples was reforming higher education, suggesting new technological possibilities such as “iColleges.” The second part of the interview was primarily spent discussing the importance of entitlement reform.

Pawlenty is a two-term governor and was a finalist for John McCain’s vice-presidential pick in 2008, but his national profile is still relatively low. In a poll released Friday from The Des Moines Register, 53 percent of likely voters in Iowa’s Republican caucus were “unsure” about Pawlenty, far behind bigger name possibilities such as Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich. Pawlenty’s media blitz over the past day should help raise that profile, laying groundwork for his spot as the “Sam’s Club” Republican candidate.

Though Pawlenty appears to be angling for a national audience, he didn’t completely abandon his Minnesota base, bringing up the Stanley Cup finals near the end of the interview.

Watch all three parts of the interview below.

Part I:

Part 2:

Part 3:

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.

Media Matters has a rundown of Fox’s past video trickery.

Here is Hannity’s original Fox News segment about Bachmann’s rally:

Update: On Wednesday’s show, Hannity acknowledged that Fox used the wrong footage.

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.

“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.