This American Life is a guity…well, occasionally pleasure.  Sometimes just guilt.

But every once in a while – twice a year – they run an episode that’s so good, I wind up driving around the Midway and Roseville for half an hour waiting for it to finish.

This past weekend was one of them –  partly because it was just so good, and partly because the timing was perfect.

Part 1 (they call them “Act 1” and “Act 2”, and so on, which is far fron the twee-est, most precious and pretentious thing about TAL) is a story with, by Public Radio standards, a real “Man Bites Dog” is a nice apertif – a story about a young feminist Youtube “star” who discovers – try not to be shocked – that her fellow travelers on the left are really really intolerant of dissent.   Give the whole thing a listen.

Part 2?  After all the  gumflapping this week about Republicans’ in Minnesota and their relationship with Muslims – including my own go-arounds with members of the GOP over this issue – “Act 2” goes over the problems a staunchly pro-gun legislator in one of Louisiana’s most conservative parishes had when she proposed a bijll that would have banned realistic replica guns in schools.  The bill was neither an attack on the 2nd Amendment nor an especially good idea (it should be a local ordinance, not a state statute for starters), but the tendency of people to get wrapped around the axle over surface terminology without really understanding an issue is pretty astounding.   The TAL reporter, by the way, did a credible job of explaining the pro-gun side (although I don’t suspect she understands it all that well).

Worth a listen.