weinraub’s words

Man, can that Garrison Keillor turn a phrase.

Consider his piece in today’s NY Times Op-Ed containing the following:

Here are mobs of flannel-mouthed robots denouncing Socialist Gummint Takeover as Medicare goes rolling along rather tidily and the private schemes resemble railroads of the early 19th century, when each line decided its own gauge and each stationmaster decided what time it is. Anyone who has tried to coax authorization for payment from Federated Amalgamated Health knows that, for incomprehensible standards and voluminous rules and implacable bureaucrats, the health insurance industry carries on where the Italian postal service left off.

“Flannel-mouthed robots denouncing Soclialist Gummint Takeover”. LOL…

Looking through some old mail and found a link I had sent around. It was a NY Times Op-Ed piece about the troubling use of illegal as a noun.

Every last bit of the article is right on, and despite being nearly two years old, it’s is still just as relevant today. For example:

Since the word modifies not the crime but the whole person, it goes too far. It spreads, like a stain that cannot wash out. It leaves its target diminished as a human, a lifetime member of a presumptive criminal class. People are often surprised to learn that illegal immigrants have rights. Really? Constitutional rights? But aren’t they illegal? Of course they have rights: they have the presumption of innocence and the civil liberties that the Constitution wisely bestows on all people, not just citizens.

Right on.

Read the whole article.