‘Saturday Night Live’ parodies Michele Bachmann

MORNING EDITION

I’ve seen funnier, but you know you’re a national commodity when “Saturday Night Live” lampoons you for the opening of the show. Kristen Wiig plays Congresswoman Michele Bachmann struggling to get her “response” speech right, the second time around. The real zinger line is where she concedes, “A child did my makeup.”

Punditry on Bachmann’s “gaffe” continues, with TIME’s James Poniewozik trying to make the case for “genius”: “I’m not a political expert, but I am guessing that, if she runs, even Bachmann knows she would be a very long shot to win. That’s fine; there are different reasons to run for President, one of which is to establish one’s self as the leader of one’s own political constituency, and thus raise one’s standing after the campaign. If that’s the case, pleasing your base is much more important than impressing the general public and the media. In fact, the latter could even hurt your cred with the former. So what better message to send than to say: ‘I had a choice to look directly at the lamestream media, but instead I decided to give my attention to you’? What better result than to have an audience of your most dedicated followers see you give an impassioned speech that they agree with, speaking directly to the camera like any normal person — and then hear outsiders and pundits mocking you, for some reason, as having seemed unsettling and cockeyed? What better metaphor than to have your followers and the mainstream media literally see you from two different perspectives, one straight and true, one literally slanted?” Considering how far down the rabbit hole we are with the congresswoman, he may be on to something.

Senate and Congress are one thing, but apparently women in the mayor’s office isn’t an idea whose time has come yet, so much. The Strib runs a story out of the St. Cloud Times that says: “[T]here are fewer than 130 female mayors out of 854 mayoralties in Minnesota, or not quite 15 percent. The years 1990 to 2002 were peak for growth by female mayors. During that 12-year-period, the number of female mayors went from 75 to an all-time high of 131 in 2002. Since then the number has hovered steadily in the 120s.”

The Des Moines Register runs a tidbit on a Tim Pawlenty book-signing in Ankeny Sunday. The paper’s Katie Obradovich writes: “Pawlenty … signed books for an hour at the Family Christian book store in Ankeny. Pawlenty made a few comments about entitlement reform after the book-signing. He called entitlement spending ‘out of control and mathematically doomed to fail.’ He’s in favor of means-testing for future Social Security cost-of-living increases, so wealthier Americans may get smaller or less frequent raises. He’d also increase the retirement age. He also said he’s willing to consider personal savings accounts as an option for new entrants in the future. He criticized President Obama’s domestic spending freeze and discussion of deficit reduction in last week’s State of the Union message. ‘He stepped to the plate, he swung the [bat] and he whiffed, badly,’ Pawlenty said.”

MnSCU will announce several finalists for its top job, unlike the U of M, which famously interviewed and chose one last fall. Jenna Ross of the Strib reports: “Bill Funk, the U’s consultant for its past two searches for a president, offered this ‘rule of thumb’: Schools that are part of the research-oriented Association of American Universities pick just one finalist for a public interview, he said in a July e-mail to U regents. In contrast, ‘most non-AAU schools like the MnSCU group will always do campus, multi-candidate interviews. ‘It is simply part of their culture.’ ” Oh, I see … not.

Jana Shortal at KARE-TV reports the story of the Cottage Grove husband who pocketed $15,000 in lottery winnings months after his wife, who bought the ticket, died of cancer: “Last November, Ginny died of cancer after a very brief but hard fought battle. ‘I was very fortunate, I had her for 45 years,’ Paul said. But Ginny was holding a secret when she left her husband. She, along with her two best friends, worked for thirty some years at Cub Foods. The three of them, from the deli counter they ran, played the lottery every week. Even after she got sick, Ginny sent her friend Bernie the money and they kept playing, that was the pact. A pact, broken this past Christmas for one darn good reason. ‘Bernie called me over Christmas and said are you sitting down? Well sit down because you just won a third of $45,000,’ Paul said.”

The Strib offers a pro and con on the voter ID/ “voter fraud” question. The “con” comes from Jason Marisam, a fellow at the Harvard Law School: “The Minnetonka-based Datacard Group makes some pretty nifty machines that can scan voter identification cards and upload voter data to a centralized database. Republicans want to fight voter fraud by installing these machines in precincts throughout Minnesota and requiring poll workers to scan voters’ ID cards before allowing them to cast ballots. Perhaps the best that can be said about this proposal is that it would be a waste of the estimated $20 million needed to purchase the scanning machines.”

Jeff Davis of the Minnesota Majority delivers the “pro,” more or less thusly: “For all the hand-wringing exhibited by liberal Democratic politicians about the introduction of the bill, even they publicly acknowledged that it’s a foregone conclusion that it will be passed by the Legislature and end up on the governor’s desk. Dayton is politically astute enough to understand that if he vetoes the bill, there will be a stiff political price to be paid. Just ask those Democrats who were recently ousted from the Legislature largely due to their votes against voter ID. It would be much wiser for the governor to bargain with Republicans for something he wants in return for supporting this legislation.” The DFLers lost because of voter ID?

I can never help but wonder what it’d be like if Jim DeMint “discovered” global climate change, and not Al Gore? What would noted, peer-reviewed climatologists like John Hinderaker at Power Line say then? As it is, he tosses off stuff like this: “There are a number of things wrong with the data produced by NOAA and NASA, but one of the most basic involves the urban heat island effect. It it commonly understood that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside; you see that every day in weather reports. Thus, weather stations located in urban areas, as many of them are, tend to show increasing temperatures as urbanization and changing land use make the immediate area of the weather station warmer. One study indicated that even a tiny village of 1,000 people can warm temperatures by up to 3.8 degrees F. NOAA and NASA used to acknowledge the urban heat island effect and try to correct for it, but that didn’t produce the sort of alarming temperature increases that warmists are looking for.” In other words, the “experts” only take temperatures off the July asphalt in downtown Phoenix.