Pawlenty is in line with conventional conservative wisdom on that, but out of step with one of the state’s leading experts on Iran. University of Minnesota anthropology Prof. William Beemon told Minnesota Public Radio this week there’s no evidence that Iran is trying to manufacture nuclear arms.

As for the governor’s sudden interest in pronouncing the names of foreign leaders correctly … who could have been prodding Pawlenty on that? Maybe it was some the new advisors for his Freedom First PAC who don’t want to see their presidential hopeful repeat the pronunciation struggles of their old bosses, President George W. Bush and U.S. Sen. John McCain.

Pawlenty, who keeps his passport current with international hobnobbing, corrected sidekick Brian McClung’s pronunciation of the Iran leader’s name.

But, as sometimes happens, the governor was also slightly off his upbeat game, offering a couple unhelpful interjections during the show’s opening patter about football rivalries with Wisconsin. McClung suggested Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle might “defect” and move to Minnesota.

McClung: He’s not running for another term.

Pawlenty: Neither am I.

McClung then tried to defend Minnesota against a Doyle jab (“We’re all intrigued by what ‘Minnesota beer’ might be,” Doyle said, a comment Pawlenty termed “fairly snarky”):

McClung: Minnesota is one of the great brewing states in the country.

Pawlenty: Was.

Pawlenty maintained his three-week streak of trashing (but not naming) Republicans who participated in a budget summit that the governor boycotted last month. Again he used his radio platform (now secure from DFL balance) to attack former House Speaker David Jennings, also a former Minneapolis school superintendent. When enrollment declined in Minneapolis several years ago, Pawlenty said, “leadership in the district at that time didn’t act very boldly.”

Photos: WDCpix

Absentee voters complaining their ballots went uncounted. Charges of ballots disappearing in the rear of a vehicle. Suspicions that the top election official skewed the system to benefit his favorite. Minnesota’s senate contest? Sure. But over the weekend, gripes long familiar to observers of the Coleman-Franken fracas got a fresh airing in Iran’s disputed presidential election.

Thousands of Iranians outside of the country voted by absentee ballot and were not confident their votes were counted, and that issue has also been a worry for supporters of both Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman during their six-month election dispute.

The disproven claim that Minneapolis election officials carelessly or corruptly kept ballots in a car trunk had an echo in one of the Twitter messages emanating from inside Iran during the early hours after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner over Hossein Moussavi in Iran. ”My Father has a truck load of ballot boxes that were to be burned in the back of his truck,” wrote Raymond Jahan, who has the unequivocal Twitter handle StopAhmadi.

In both elections, critics threw a harsh light on the possibility that partisan politics had twisted the administrative efforts of the top  election officials: Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, and Iran’s Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli, a top aide who answers directly to Ahmadinejad.

Then there is the chameleon character of one player in each drama. Coleman ran against his former Democratic Party to gain the Senate seat that’s still in dispute. Moussavi was a prime minister allied with Iran’s revolutionary hard-liners in the 1980s now running as a reformer.