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Quote Unquote “I’ve heard things like, ‘We don’t want to send
our kids back to school because we’re afraid people don’t like Mexicans.”
Mayor Thomas O’Neill of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania speaking of the death of
Luis Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant. Four teenage members of the high school
football team have been charged in his death. Ramirez’s death has reignited
a regional debate over immigration that began two years ago when the town of
Hazelton, about 20 miles from Shenandoah, enacted an ordinance that sought
to discourage people from hiring or renting to illegal immigrants. – The New
York Times
 “Going through that traumatic time of being heartbroken and then being
pregnant turned my whole life upside down and inside out and just knocked
the wind out of me. But I got so much out of that. It’s golden and it’s
tough and it was f----ed up. But now I have a child, and it’s the best thing
in the world.”
Bridget Moynahan talking to Marshall Heyman about finding herself three
months pregnant but no longer in a relationship with football star Tom
Brady. Her son Jack turned one in August.
 “I so didn’t want to be a poet. I came from sort of a self-contained people
who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart
was rather repugnant to me.” But in the end “I couldn’t resist. It was in a
strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and
rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”
Kay Ryan, who was named the country’s poet laureate on July 17, talking to
Patricia Cohen. – The New York Times
“Have fun and do things together.”
Advice from Peter S. Lynch, vice chairman of Fidelity Investments, to Tommy
Hilfiger and his fiancée Dee Ocleppo. Lynch, who has been married for 40
years and has three daughters, attended an engagement party in New York for
the couple and urged Hilfiger to spend a lot of time with Ocleppo. Lynch
added that his wife, Carolyn, chairwoman of the Lynch Foundation, “never
played golf, and now she plays golf. I never played bridge; now I play
bridge. She never went to a hockey game, now she does hockey.” – The New
York Times
 “It’s just one of those countries that I’ve always felt, hey, I belong
there. There’s a sense of humor that I relate to instantly. And, sure
enough, it hasn’t let me down.
Me and Rob went out on the town last night, had quite a few Guinness – 12 is
quite a few, right? – and I haven’t laughed so hard in a long, long time.”
Adam Sandler who made a trip to Ireland to promote You Don’t Mess with the
Zohan. Sandler is Irish on his mother Anne Meara’s side. – The Irish Voice
 “You’re devastated if your wife or one of your kids is terminally ill. I was
not devastated last year after that game. Maybe I used a poor choice of
words. People thought it didn’t bother me. It was just my perspective. . . I
won’t be devastated if I find out my career is over.”
Tom Glavine, on why he chose not to use the word “devastated” to describe
his feelings after his last game for the Mets which ended in defeat and
caused them to miss the playoff last season, or the possibility of an elbow
injury ending his career. Glavine has since had successful surgery on his
left elbow and is expected to be ready for spring training next year with
the Atlanta Braves.
– The New York Times
 “We [Jon Stewart and I] often discuss satire – the sort of thing he does and
to a certain extent I do – as distillery. You have an enormous amount of
material and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So
much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the
point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last
couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t
that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that
gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience[as
well as] discipline and focus.”
Stephen Colbert compares the production of satire to distilling a story down
to ‘one shot of pure whiskey.” – The New York Times
“We don’t happen to believe that it’s good public policy in public housing
sites where guns and violence is the highest in our city and, for that
matter, in cities across America, to say ‘Hey, come on in; let’s everybody
get guns.’”
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newson reacting to the Supreme Court’s affirmation
of the right to bear arms. The National Rifle Association sued San Francisco
and its housing authority to invalidate a ban on handguns in public housing.
– The New York Times
“Postville, Iowa, May 12: Federal immigration agents raided the
Agriprocessors factory, arresting nearly 400 workers, most of them men, for
being in the U.S. illegally. Within minutes of the raid, with surveillance
helicopters buzzing about the leafy street, the wives and children of
Mexican and Guatemalan families began trickling into St. Bridget’s Church,
the safest place they knew. St. Bridget’s parish, which has only about 350
members, is spending $500,000 in the relief effort. . . . Sister Mary
McCauley, the pastor administrator at St. Bridget’s, received an unsigned
letter stating ‘You are as far as possible from being the image of Mother
Teresa. May you rot in hell.’
“… [They] filled the rotunda and social hall of St. Bridget’s. They occupied
every pew, every aisle, every folding chair, every inch of floor. Children
clutched mothers. One girl shook uncontrollably.
“A few volunteers from the old Postville, descendants of the Irish and
Norwegian immigrants who settled here more than a century ago, set out food.
Others took turns standing watch at the church door, as if the sight of an
Anglo might somehow dissuade the feared Migra, as the immigrants call
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, from invading their sanctuary.”
– Samuel G. Freedman in The New York Times
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