By proposing a ban on toy guns, unless they’re painted pink, white or orange.

Welcome to life in a one-party town.

The city of St. Paul is moving to ban realistic toy guns, which give police officers nightmares and have led to several deaths in the Twin Cities and across the nation.

Under a draft ordinance, the City Council would outlaw the public display of weaponry that substantially duplicates a real firearm — unless the toy is completely white, pink, yellow or some other bright color.

The ordinance, expected to be introduced next week, also would require toys to have a blaze orange extension extending at least six millimeters beyond the muzzle. The extensions are required by federal law, but are frequently removed.

The measure would ban laser pointers on toy guns.

The rationale, of course, is that cops might mistake a toy gun for a real one, or vice versa.

Of course, banning toy guns or restricting their colors isn’t even a stopgap measure for the “problem” (and the scare quotes aren’t entirely appropriate – every so often someone does get shot while holding a toy gun). 

Councilman Lee Helgen skirts perilously close to an answer:

“I think we will really be leading the nation in how we deal with these non-lethal firearms,” said Council Member Lee Helgen, who is sponsoring the measure. “We have to treat them with the exact same care you would any other firearm. … You can’t tell the difference between a real weapon and these toy handguns.”

And the answer to that is education.  Teaching kids how to act around guns – in a society where kids know the John Woo grip before they know their ABCs, thanks to a liberal Hollywood that glorifies violence even as it pours megabucks into gun control advocacy groups – would help a lot.  But thanks to post-Columbine hysteria, whispering “gun” in a school is likely to get the place locked down and a SWAT team going medieval on your tush – and the political hysteria over the gun issue has meant that the one non-military group in America with a long, successful history of teaching kids about gun safety, the NRA, is frozen out of the picture.

And so we make sure kids carry pink guns.

I feel safer already.

Molly Ivins dead at 62.

It’s best not to speak ill of the dead.  So what I’ll do is display this quote…:

“She was magical in her writing,” said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ms. Ivins at the newspaper’s Austin bureau in 1992, a few months after the Times-Herald ceased publication. “She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn’t hurt so bad.”

…and note that Ms. Ivins’ writing was in fact the exact opposite of what Mr. Blackman wrote.  Snarky and cliche-driven enough to make Jeff Fecke blanche (although better than Duncan “Atrios” Black, at least), devoid of logic or, usually, fact, embrace for “plain speaking” that was in fact generally ill-informed babble…

…well, again, it’s best not to speak ill of the dead and all that. 

UPDATE:  Brian Ward – who notes the second career that Ivins made out of attacking Bush – notes the President’s response to Ivins’ death:

She’s made a second career out of bashing him, attaching her name to no less than four books on the subject. And the President of the United States, who could have justifiably let her death pass withouth official notice, went out of his way to say this:

Molly Ivins was a Texas original. She was loved by her readers and by her many friends, particularly in Central Texas. I respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase. She fought her illness with that same passion. Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed. Laura and I send our condolences to Molly Ivins’ family and friends.

A measure of forgiveness, tolerance, and class that we can all aspire too. George Bush took office saying he wanted to improve the tone in DC. Unfortunately, you can’t do that dance with an unwilling partner.

I can’t imagine Ivins returning the favor.

UPDATE 2: Let me be clear about this, since the tone of my post above isn’t; I’m sorry Ivins died.  I dont wish cancer on anyone.  And Ivins was a good writer.  One I disagree with on virtually everything, one whose standard of proof and logic were frequently dismal, and one whose public persona irritated me (and did so long before bashing George W. Bush became her meal ticket), but perfectly capable of writing excellent stuff nonetheless. 

Prof. David Bell, in his piece “Was 9/11 really that bad?”, shows us, yet again, why the left can’t really be trusted with national security:

IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

On the one hand, he’s right, in the sense that there’ve been wars that have killed hundreds, even thousands of times as many people as 9/11.

It also raises several questions. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

It might indeed – we’ll get back to that in a moment – but a more interesting question is “if fighting a war over 3,000 is an “overreaction”, where exactly is the threshold.  How many lives are too many to lose before we as a nation act?

We learned in the eighties that one paraplegic in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer (murdered on the Achille Lauro by boatjackers) wasn’t enough. We learned that six (first WTC bombing), dozens (Khobar Towers, USS Cole, Kenyan and Tanzanian Embassies) and even hundreds (the Beirut Marine barracks) weren’t enough to push this nation to take serious, concerted action against terrorists.

So is 3,000 still too low?

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies’ objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Now we’re making progress; the “existence of the United States” is too high a price to pay.  It’s a start.

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the “Islamo-fascist” enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler’s implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

True.  But damage to a nation isn’t purely measured in lives and property, even though our peoples’ lives are of paramount importance.

Let’s act like liberals for a moment:  if we assume the fringe left is really correct about Bush’s infringements on civil liberties, then isn’t our nation irreparably harmed?  And if you remember who actually started the war, you can see where the damage is coming from – right?

To move into the rational world; it’s possible that terrorists could cause immense damage to this nation without killing a single person.  As the threat, or perception of a threat, escalates then the liberties that make this nation more than just Germany with better cable can erode to the point where a terrorist “takeover” would be more or less irrelevant.  Worried about attacks, the government could mangle the Constitution, infringing free speech, free worship, confiscating firearms, violate equal protection over ethnic differences, change the rules of evidence to speed up terror trials…

This isn’t even partisan; even if you do accept every fringe-left claim about the Administration’s record on civil liberties in the war on terror (and no rational person should), it is a fact that war is hell on liberty; the “War on Drugs”, a bipartisan effort, caused immense erosion in civil liberties, against a threat that is a piker compared to terror (more people die in drug turf wars in a month than die from overdosing on all illegal drugs).

It is overreacting, to counterattack a foe who wants us to either adopt Sharia under duress, or something just as bad out of bipartisan contingency?

Even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties of the war against terrorism, which brings us to about 6,500, we should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every two months in automobile accidents.

But the only rights we’ve lost to that toll are the ones to drive drunk and without seatbelts.  As absolutist about liberty as I am, even I don’t mourn either.

Terrorism is different, no?

Of course, the 9/11 attacks also conjured up the possibility of far deadlier attacks to come. But then, we were hardly ignorant of these threats before, as a glance at just about any thriller from the 1990s will testify. And despite the even more nightmarish fantasies of the post-9/11 era (e.g. the TV show “24’s” nuclear attack on Los Angeles), Islamist terrorists have not come close to deploying weapons other than knives, guns and conventional explosives. A war it may be, but does it really deserve comparison to World War II and its 50 million dead? Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat.

In the early 1930’s, a news article in the New York Times noted that a certain political movement had perhaps a few thousand members in a population of 80 million, that their impact was minimal and long-term outlook not very interesting.  They were writing, of course, about Hitler’s Nazis.  In 1932, they were not an “apocalyptic threat”.  Seven years later, after tapping into the hatreds and bigotries of a first-world nation, they were. 

So no.  Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat.  Yet.

So why has there been such an overreaction? Unfortunately, the commentators who detect one have generally explained it in a tired, predictably ideological way: calling the United States a uniquely paranoid aggressor that always overreacts to provocation.

The World Trade Center I (1993).  The Khobar Towers. The Embassy Bombings. The USS Cole.  All passed without riposte.  Hardly “always overreacting”. 

The author’s claim is patently absurd, and the rest of his article should be viewed with that in mind.

Or, for that matter, this next bit here:

In a recent book, for instance, political scientist John Mueller evaluated the threat that terrorists pose to the United States and convincingly concluded that it has been, to quote his title, “Overblown.” But he undercut his own argument by adding that the United States has overreacted to every threat in its recent history, including even Pearl Harbor (rather than trying to defeat Japan, he argued, we should have tried containment!).

Which is a plainly silly argument.  Containment would have left us with an intractable enemy (who killed thousands of Americans in Hawaii and the Phillippines in the weeks after December 7) in control of most of the Pacific Rim, able to conquer and exploit China and Indonesia with impunity, able eventually to challenge us in the two areas that failed it during the war we actually had – resources and industry…

…but what’s the point of arguing when one is dealing with those invested in such deep silliness?From The American Mind

The pundits are crowing – yet again – about the decay and (they say, voices quivering with joyful hope) demise of conservative talk radio as a market-beating format.

They even pant about the notion that Limbaugh…might…be…flagging!

Apparently not so:

For the first time in recent memory, El Rushbo is not only fending off four competitors during his 9am – noon timeslot, he’s beating every news and talk show heard anywhere in the region, liberal or conservative and regardless of the time slot.With a staggering 116% percent surge in the key adults aged 25-54 demographic, Rush clobbered everything the Puget Sound Area had to offer, with an enormous 5.4 share of the audience.

This in liberal Seattle, a place where even Air America had a fighting chance. 

Here in the Twin Cities, it’s interesting to note that on the largely non-conservative, milquetoast-oriented KTLK-FM, here in the ultraliberal Twin Cities, Limbaugh is pretty much carrying the entire station.

Nope.  Not dead yet.

I love the lede in this story about the word of rumors of a possibility of Al Franken’s long-awaited (hahaha) announcement  of his impending candidacy:

Comedian and national radio commentator Al Franken will run for the U.S. Senate in 2008, according to a source with Minnesotas Democratic congressional delegation.

“Comedian and talk show host”?

Uh, yeah.  And now, bar-band guitarist and English major Mitch Berg will respond.

Franken told a Democratic congressman days ago that he intends to run for the seat now held by Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, a high-ranking staffer of the delegation member confirmed Wednesday.

The staffer declined to be identified or directly quoted for fear of ruining the relationship between the congressman and Franken.

Riiiiiight.

Additionally, a senior Democratic official from Minnesota told the Associated Press on Wednesday that Franken also told her of his intentions. That official, who did not want to be identified because Franken has not made an announcement, said the discussion was recent.

For the moment, at least, those close to Franken officially are remaining mum.

No, those close to Franken are doing his bidding, firing off semi-official trial balloons to a compliant, nudging-and-winking local media that is already at least partly in the bag for him.

Jay Reding on the minimum wage:

The left wants to argue that the minimum wage is a transfer of assets from the rich (business owners) to the poor. The reality of the minimum wage is that it ends up being an asset transfer between poor people — or more likely an asset transfer between disadvantaged people and less disadvantaged people. Any increase in the marginal cost of labor tends to be felt most strongly at the bottom — if labor costs rise, businesses are less likely to hire workers who have a higher likelihood of producing less value for their costs. That means people who have families, less reliable access to transportation, or other personal problems. Single mothers, ex-convicts, people on drug treatment, all of those groups that are the most disadvantaged.

Increasing the minimum wage is pure political theater. All it does is assuage the guilt of wealthy white liberals while doing little to nothing to help people.

On the upside – how many of those “first 100 hours” did Pelosi and Company waste on this “lack of wealth” transfer?