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I spotted this unfortunate headline on Salon.com and thought it was funny so I grabbed a screenshot.

Garrison Keillor, the "Lake Wobegon" author and National Public Radio icon, is offering a solution to a couple of the nation's problems with one swoop: Give members of the GOP "aspirin and hand sanitizer" but if they have more complicated health issues, let them die. The comments come virtually at the same time voices are being raised in Washington over an assertion by U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., that Republicans' health care plan for the sick is to "die quickly." "The Republican plan," the Democrat said on the House floor, "Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die...

... one starts to wonder if the country wouldn't be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the health-care system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off health care to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.

Garrison Keillor, author and host of the folksy radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," was being treated Wednesday for a minor stroke he suffered over the weekend, a hospital spokesman said. Keillor, who turned 67 last month, was admitted to St. Mary's Hospital at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, on Sunday night, spokesman Karl Oestreich said in a news release. "He is up and moving around, speaking sensibly, working at a laptop, and it's expected he'll be released on Friday," Oestreich said. "He plans to resume a normal schedule next week." The live variety show "A Prairie Home Companion"...

Pastor Inqvist of the Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church would be shocked: Thieves have struck author Garrison Keillor's St. Paul, Minn., bookstore, officials say. Video surveillance tapes showed a man and woman entering Keillor's store about 1:20 a.m. Thursday, making off with $3,000 from the safe of Common Good Books, store manager Martin Schmutterer told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "They were very calm about it," he said after posting still photos of the burglars online on the bookstore's blog page. Schmutterer said the pair smashed a window in a coffee shop above the store, then made their way downstairs to...

From NPR Welfare Radio: Garrison Keillor (A Prairie Home Companion) recites a sonnet followed by a song for Barack Obama. January 24, 2009 "This week on A Prairie Home Companion, we're embracing the winter cold and heading up to the DECC auditorium in Duluth, Minnesota. We'll fight the frigid temperatures with some smoldering honky-tonk from Joe Ely and Joel Guzmán, and singer-songwriter Heather Masse will melt our hearts with a song or two. As always, we'll have the Royal Academy of Radio Actors with us: Sue Scott, Tim Russell, and Tom Keith; and of course, Rich Dworsky and The Guy's...

Garrison Keillor tries to enjoy Memorial Day at the National Gallery, honoring our fallen heroes by going to an art exhibit ... ...on we went to show our patriotism by looking at exhibits at the Smithsonian or, in my case, hiking around the National Gallery, which, after you've watched a few thousand Harleys pass, seems like an outpost of civilization. There stood Renoir's ballerina in pale blue chiffon and Monet's children in the garden of sunflowers. And Mary Cassatt's The Boating Party, which I stood and stared at for a long time. A lady in a white bonnet sits in...

Three hundred thousand bikers spent Memorial Day weekend roaring around Washington in tribute to our war dead, and I stood on Constitution Avenue Sunday afternoon watching a river of them go by, waiting for a gap in the procession so I could cross over to the Mall and look at pictures. The street had been closed off for them and they motored on by, some flying the Stars and Stripes and the black MIA-POW flag, honking, revving their engines, an endless celebration of internal combustion. A patriotic bike rally is sort of like a patriotic toilet-papering or patriotic graffiti—the patriotism...

ST. PAUL, MN -- Sure, Barack Obama got Maria Shriver's backing at Sunday's big rally with Oprah Winfrey and Stevie Wonder in Los Angeles, adding another Kennedy cousin to his list of endorsers -- and this one the wife of the Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Perhaps Shriver's backing will help a bit in California, where he is locked in a tight Democratic primary contest With New York Sen. Hillary Clinton going into tomorrow's Super Tuesday voting. But the senator from Illinois, who is working hard to color in the map of the 20-plus states that will hold primaries...

ST. PAUL, Minn.: Garrison Keillor, host of public radio's "A Prairie Home Companion," has endorsed Democratic Sen. Barack Obama for president, Obama's campaign announced Sunday. Obama also won backing from a key backer of former candidate John Edwards. "I'm happy to support your candidacy, which is so full of promise for our country," Keillor, the best-selling author and humorist wrote in a letter declaring his support.

Here’s a Prairie Home Companion episode you’ll never hear: It’s been a quiet week here at Lake Wobegon. Aunt Tillie had to cut short her big vacation in Paris – she got caught in a riot at the train station and you’ll never believe it, she got tear-gassed. She’s all right, but you can imagine the mood she was in when she arrived at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Poor thing, she went straight to a duty-free shop and bought a big bottle of Merlot. After that, believe it or not, it got even worse. The airport cab driver told...

Serenaded by Joe Ely and Garrison Keillor and saluted by characters spanning the globe of liberal politics, Molly Ivins raised money Sunday night for her beloved Texas Observer. Over dinner with about 800 fans at the Capitol Marriott, the liberal columnist and former Observer co-editor sported a wispy mohawk of regrowing hair, reflecting her looking-good battle against recurrent breast cancer. She was hailed by 18 speakers. They were led off by Keillor, the Minnesota radio man, who, with Ely, sang "Today I Started Loving You Again" and "Waltz Across Texas." Keillor said, "It's good to be in a roomful of...

One of the paragraphs in Keillor's article: Having been called names, one looks back at one's own angry outbursts over the years, and I recall having once referred to Republicans as "hairy-backed swamp developers, fundamentalist bullies, freelance racists, hobby cops, sweatshop tycoons, line jumpers, marsupial moms and aluminum-siding salesmen, misanthropic frat boys, ninja dittoheads, shrieking midgets, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, pill pushers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, the grand pooh-bahs of Percodan, mouth breathers, testosterone junkies and brownshirts in pinstripes." I look at those words now, and "cat stranglers" seems excessive to me. The number of cat...

It's been a quiet week in St. Paul, Minnesota, our hometown. The mayor turned on his police lights to halt a fleeing citizen after a fender-bender. The Senate Tax Committee is turning everything to mush. Bodies so naked they don't even have skin are on display at the Science Museum of Minnesota. We welcome the world-class actors who will be cruising down Wabasha Street this evening for the opening of the movie version of "A Prairie Home Companion." This is a pretty big deal for St. Paul — not like the high school wrestling tournament, but pretty big all the...

The way to put military service back in the picture is to pass a constitutional amendment requiring that a candidate for president have at least two years of full-time military service. It would be a boon to the country, to the military and to the young. It would confirm the importance of service. The 42-year-old governor who discovers that he wants to be president would need to go down to the recruiting office and enlist. It'd be a big moment, like when Elvis went off to basic training. Think of Newt Gingrich climbing on a bus and going off to...

A few weeks after The Boston Globe called The Writer’s Almanac radio program “a confection of poetry and history wrapped in the down comforter voice of producer and host Garrison Keillor,” WUKY-91.3 FM canceled the daily featurette for offensive content. The five-minute segments aired on the University of Kentucky’s public radio station at 11 a.m. until Aug. 1. It opened with soft piano music and the voice of A Prairie Home Companion’s Keillor remembering major moments in writing history. It was a break for history between news broadcasts and pop music, each day ending with a poem and the wish...

I am old enough to be nostalgic about radio, having grown up when it was a stately medium and we listened to Journeys in Musicland with Professor E.B. "Pop" Gordon teaching us the musical scale, and the guest on The Poetry Corner was Anna Hempstead Branch, who read her sonnet cycle, "Ere the Golden Bowl Is Broken," and the gospel station brought us Gleanings From the Word, with the whispery Reverend Riley trudging patiently through the second chapter of Leviticus, and at night there were Fibber and Molly and Amos and Andy and the Sunset Valley Barn Dance with Pop...

NOT LONG AGO, THE belligerently-mannered New York radio personality Jonathan Schwartz confided in his listeners that he could not go on living without being able to hear Frank Sinatra's memorable version of "Our Love Is Here to Stay" at least one more time. I have to admit that the unforgettable selection in question may have been "Embraceable You" or "Softly As I Leave You"--memory fails me. What caught my attention here was not the deejay's predictable, self-congratulatory homage to the obviously great (let the public be damned; I'm still in Johann Sebastian Bach's corner!) nor even his manicured sincerity. Rather,...

NBC news anchor Brian Williams will broadcast live from the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul on Thursday night during a stop in the Twin Cities area to take Minnesota's political pulse and visit with Garrison Keillor. "We think your state is fascinating,"NBC Nightly News" executive director Steve Capus said in an interview Monday. "Minnesota seems to be going through a political identity change." As part of its run-up to the presidential inauguration, Williams and staff will swing this week through three cities Capus described as "classic American cities," starting with Dallas on Wednesday, the Twin Cities area on Thursday and...

Tonight as usual, Keillor always slips a political dig in.

Four days after the election, Democratic partisan and comedian Garrison Keillor announced on his national radio show that he was recovering from his Election Day shock by embracing a new purpose: "to pass a constitutional amendment to take the right to vote away from born-again Christians." Amid laughter and applause from his audience, Keillor said, "Born-again people are citizens of heaven," not of America. "If you feel that … tribulation and suffering are just the natural conditions of life, that higher education is vanity, that there is only one book that you need to read … if you feel that...

Garrison Keillor: Homegrown Idiot By George Shadroui FrontPageMagazine.com | December 3, 2004 It is at times remarkable to behold the commentary that attaches to the liberal view of conservatives and Republicans. One is reminded of an out-of-body experience, as if one is viewing oneself from a ceiling but not quite sure how you got there or how you came to see yourself from that particular vantage point. But if you are a conservative who might enjoy this sensation, I recommend a recent book by Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat. Keillor is in many ways a national treasure. He is great storyteller....

It is at times remarkable to behold the commentary that attaches to the liberal view of conservatives and Republicans. One is reminded of an out-of-body experience, as if one is viewing oneself from a ceiling but not quite sure how you got there or how you came to see yourself from that particular vantage point. But if you are a conservative who might enjoy this sensation, I recommend a recent book by Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat. Keillor is in many ways a national treasure. He is great storyteller. I have read several of his books, but I have relished his audio...

Garrison Keillor Stated: "I am now the chairman of a national campaign to pass a constitutional amendment to take the right to vote away from born-again Christians. [enthusiastic audience applause] Just a little project of mine. My feeling is that born-again people are citizens of heaven, that is where there citizenship is, [laughter] is in heaven, it's not here among us in America. ..."

Speaking in the aftermath of the presidential election, Democrat radio host Garrison Keillor says he is on a quest to take away the right of born-again Christians to vote, saying their citizenship is actually in heaven, not the United States. Keillor, host of the popular National Public Radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," made the comments during a speech at Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel and during his radio monologue the Saturday after the election.

A year of passion has come to a boil. Every morning my emailbox is full of forwarded political diatribes and manifestos. I order a sign, 4 ft. by 6 ft.--I am actually going to stand by the side of the road and hold it, that's how nuts I am. I take my face to a suburb where Democrats are a sort of alien life-form, and I stand on a bench on a deck in the dark and talk to 80 people shivering in the cold like boat refugees, and I excoriate and extol and exhort in uplifting cadences about this...

Pat Boone wants to know what has happened to Garrison Keillor, the bard of fictional Lake Wobegon, who recently penned an angry, invective-ridden tirade at Republicans and President Bush that reads as if it were written by Michael Moore. What appalled Boone, long an admirer of Keillor - he called him "the Mark Twain of this century" - was an article in the far left-wing "In These Times" on the Web, which borrowed heavily from Keillor's book, "Homegrown Democrat." In it, Keillor at first praised Republicans of past times as good hearted, "pragmatic, Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles...

Keillor is above-average fundraiser for state DFL Party Jill Burcum, Star Tribune September 19, 2004 KEILLOR0919 AUSTIN, MINN. -- Dusty road trips in the family minivan, hot afternoons working small-town parades and long hours on the phone drumming up enthusiasm, publicity and money have been the unglamorous realities of DFLer Leigh Pomeroy's quest to unseat Rep. Gil Gutknecht in southern Minnesota's First Congressional District. But on Monday night at Austin's Paramount Theater, Pomeroy played to a packed house, pulled in $13,000 in contributions and basked in the media spotlight, all thanks to a fundraiser performance by Garrison Keillor of "Prairie...

We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?

At the end of their discussion [most of which I missed] O'Reilly asked Keillor what he thought of his show.Keillor said he doesn't know much about the show.Then Keillor said he leads a very limited life, with no cable, in MN.O'Reilly suggested that Keillor might want to keep in touch with what's going on, if he wants to comment on what's happening in the world.Keillor had that MN deer in the headlights look on his face.

I wrote a brief amazon.com review of Garrison Keillor's "Homegrown Democrat," one of the most vile, bigoted tracts published by a major publisher this year. Apparently the lefties have been voting against my review in droves! Please stop by and vote for it. Muchos Gracias!

Garrison Keillor doesn't beat about the Bush when he explains why he wrote "Homegrown Democrat.'' "I want to strengthen and encourage my fellow Democrats because I think they have been so extensively beaten up on, especially on radio, with Rush Limbaugh and 10,000 imitators,'' Keillor said in an interview before he left town for season-ending performances of his "A Prairie Home Companion" radio show. "There are people in this country who cannot comprehend why anyone would vote for a candidate other than George W. Bush. My book is addressed to that. This is an intuitive book, not a closely reasoned...

ST. PAUL - Minnesota Public Radio star Garrison Keillor will head the bill for a state House DFL fundraiser as a pivotal legislative election campaign opens next month. Keillor will host an evening of music and comedy July 1 at the O'Shaughnessy Auditorium at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, preceded by a $250-a-person reception. Rep. Nora Slawik recruited Keillor for the fundraiser when she attended a local DFL dinner this spring in Rochester, where he was the guest speaker. "He's obviously interested in helping Democrats," Slawik said. "He agreed to do it on the spot." Tickets for...

Just before Christmas last year, Garrison Keillor, Garry Trudeau and Al Franken met for dinner at a New York hotel. Despite the absence of Michael Moore, this informal meeting of friends was in effect the high command of the American satiric opposition in session. Trudeau's treatment of the Bush administration in his Doonesbury cartoon strip is well known to Guardian readers and the thesis behind Franken's best selling book, Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (2003), needs little further explanation. However, to many people in the UK, Keillor would not...

Posted on Wed, Nov. 20, 2002 Garrison may have burned a few bridges with folks in Lake Wobegon BY CHUCK CHALBERG Guest Columnist Poor Garrison Keillor. Having worked himself into such a snit over Norm Coleman's victory, will he ever again be taken seriously as a man of calming good humor? For that matter, will he ever be able to go home to Lake Wobegon again? And if he does, what can he and fellas at the Side Track Tap possibly have to say to one another? After all these years of genial folksiness, it's finally come to this: stunned...

Minnesota's shame Republicans don't like my criticism? Too bad. They have to answer for Norm Coleman's campaign, which exploited 9/11 in a way that was truly evil. Nov. 13, 2002 The hoots and cackles of Republicans reacting to my screed against Norman Coleman, the ex-radical, former Democratic, now compassionate conservative senator-elect from Minnesota, was all to be expected, given the state of the Republican Party today. Its entire ideology, top to bottom, is We-are-not-Democrats, We-are-the-unClinton, and if it can elect an empty suit like Coleman, on a campaign as cheap and cynical and unpatriotic as what he waged right up...

Just caught the beginning of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion on NPR. As you may know, Keillor wrote a rather nasty piece for Salon on Minnesota's new senator, Norm Coleman. Guy's a staunch leftie. But he mentioned the election today with a minimum of nastiness and a good deal of wit. After opening the show, Keillor asked to be excused for being a little off his game that day, but he couldn't take his eyes off a guy in the front row of the theatre who was a dead ringer for Dubya. Keillor asked the guy to turn around, and...

Empty victory for a hollow man How Norm Coleman sold his soul for a Senate seat. http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/11/07/minnesota/index_np.html By Garrison Keillor Nov. 7, 2002 | Norm Coleman won Minnesota because he was well-financed and well-packaged. Norm is a slick retail campaigner, the grabbiest and touchingest and feelingest politician in Minnesota history, a hugger and baby-kisser, and he's a genuine boomer candidate who reinvents himself at will. The guy is a Brooklyn boy who became a left-wing student radical at Hofstra University with hair down to his shoulders, organized antiwar marches, said vile things about Richard Nixon, etc. Then he came west,...