Is this how the term of Gov. Tim Pawlenty ends — not with a bang, but with a Friday the 13th joke? Our governor doesn't have very much time left before he becomes our former governor, and one imagines this is not how he thought he'd be spending his final days — embroiled in a tax fight in a state that's looking at the very real likelihood of going broke. No, he's stuck by his principles (or principle, at least), which is that he'd never raise taxes, since 2003, and now Democrats want to raise taxes? Yes they do, as the Associated Press reports.

Specifically, they want to increase taxes on the highest earners: Couples making $200,000 would pay more, as would individuals making more than $131,100 and heads of households who make more than $170,350. There's more to the Democrats proposal, including a lot of cuts (outlined by the AP here), but it's the increase in taxes that got Pawleny's goat, so we'll address that. Specifically, Pawlenty complained the proposal "is like Jason in 'Friday the 13th' — it's scary and it keeps coming back."

That's his other legacy, by the way: badly dated and unhumorous quips, rather than reasoned discourse. But who needs discourse when you've got a veto? The House and Senate passed the Democrats' proposal without much enthusiasm, and Pawlenty promised to veto it, and that's where we stand, all of us, slouching toward going broke, and our state government is locked in a stalemate.

It's worth discussing Pawlenty and the veto, for a moment. In a 2008 piece by Smart Politics, Pawlenty was in third place as having used vetoes the most times of any Minnesota governor — he had then used his veto power 37 times, which put him behind Jesse Ventura and Arne Carlson, the latter of whom had managed a whopping 179 vetos. By February of this year, Pawlenty was up to 101 vetoes, putting him ahead of Ventura, who stopped at 54. At this moment, Pawlenty and Carlson are singlehandedly responsible for more than half of all the vetoes in the history of Minnesota. And Smart Politics hasn't published anything new about Pawlenty's vetoing lately; it will be curious to see his final total.

After all, he got another veto in this week: As the AP reports, the governor vetoed a bill intended to create a statewide health insurance pool for educators; it's the third time he's vetoed this sort of bill.

And that's not all: He also vetoed a bill that sought to make it illegal to intimidate people who are thinking of running for office, also reported by the AP. When thing settle down enough for Pawlenty to get back to running for president, it will be interesting to see how he squares his long history of vetoing things with the current Republican rebranding, in which they are trying to counter accusations that they are the "party of no."

Speaking of rebranding problems, Rep. Michele Bachmann, who has been repeatedly pilloried for having sponsored or co-sponsored very little effective legislation (particularly in regards to her district, where the housing crisis hit especially hard). Well, Bachmann went ahead and organized a series of jobs forums in her district, which seemed like a useful gesture.

Unfortunately for her, Andrew Romano, a reporter for Newsweek, decided to follow her around and tweet a lot of what she has been saying, fact-checking her on the fly; from his descriptions, Bachmann's "job forums" sound like just more opportunities for her to engage in her typically aspersive rhetoric. City Pages has a selection of his tweets, as does the Minnesota Independent. The rest of Romano's tweets can be found on his Twitter page.

But, then, there's no actual evidence that Bachmann is seeking to rebrand herself. She is, after all, preparing to host a virtual town hall through the Ensuring Liberty Caucus, as reported by Andy Birkey of the Minnesota Independent. And who is the Ensuring Liberty Caucus? In its own words: "The Ensuring Liberty Corporation, a 501(c)4, and its affiliated PAC, the Ensuring Liberty PAC (ELPAC) were formed to address the next step in the growing impact of the TEA Party movement."

Sometimes we at the Glean hear complaints that we focus overmuch on Republicans and not enough on Democrats. That's probably fair — we tend to look at the stories that are grabbing the headlines, and people like Bachmann are especially good at nabbing those slots — there were 11 Bachmann stories Monday in our feed, and none about Ellison; Pawlenty clocked in at an astonishing 23 stories in the past 24 hours, while, say, Franken was only mentioned four times, two of them offering up Franken's enthusiastic but unremarkable response to Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court ("I think this is a very good nomination"). Also, in our defense, if you were to count up the number of stories we have done and compare it with the actual amount of ink stories should be getting, we have probably really focused too much on our occasional vampire candidate for governor.

But fair is fair. Franken might not grab headlines, but it's not like he's doing nothing, and so it would behoove us to look further afield and check in on him, and other Democrats, every so often, even when they're not really catching the attention of the newspaper's front page editors. Franken and Amy Klobuchar, for instance, have been busily amending the Senate's financial reform bill, pushing for more federal oversight of the financial sector. These amendments are potential thorns in the bill — they're pretty much exactly the opposite of the right wing mantra of deregulation, but if you want to read about them, you're going to have to get away from the mainstream headlines. In fact, the tale only showed up in two places in our feed in the past day, first in a story by MinnPost's Derek Wallbank.

Minnesota Independent's Paul Schmelzer touched on the story as well, mostly to offer up a video showing Franken using a Washinton Post cartoon to illustrate a point. Through a series of hyperlinks, the Independent also leads us to an interview with Franken regarding the credit rating agencies, which are the subject of Franken's amendment, published by Ezra Klein of WaPo.

In sports: Bob Shaw of the Pioneer Press reports that Minnesotans aren't golfing as much as they used to; the state auditor reported last week that "75 percent of the state's 43 city-owned golf courses lost money in 2008." We look forward to Tim Pawlenty's take on this discouraging fact, which will no doubt be a quote from the movie "Caddyshack."