Free Republic

BANGOR, Maine — On Thursday afternoon, Dale Duff and Clem LaBree were preparing for their 4 to 6 p.m. sports talk show on Bangor radio station WZON-AM 620. At 1:30 p.m., Duff was editing and cutting highlights of Wednesday night’s Boston Red Sox and Boston Celtics games. Fifteen minutes later, Duff and LaBree were told they were out of their jobs immediately. Duff, who writes a blog for Bangor Daily News, was the sports director and sportscaster and LaBree was a reporter and sportscaster. Duff was hired by station owner and best-selling author Stephen King 19 years ago to be...

Stephen King is offering an antidote to what he sees as the biases of right-wing radio talk shows by hiring a former Green Party vice presidential candidate to co-host a morning talk show on two stations he owns. In a rare public appearance, the horror writer held a news conference Tuesday in Bangor, Maine, at the headquarters of his three-station Zone Radio network. "The Pulse Morning Show" will be co-hosted by 50-year-old Pat LaMarche and 43-year-old Don Cookson, a former television reporter. LaMarche ran for vice president as a member of the Green Party in 2004. During the news conference...

Who better to weigh in on the issue of nightmarish debt spending and the blood-curdling notion that a country can tax its way to prosperity than one of the masters of the horror genre? In Florida recently, author Stephen King, out of concern for the well-being of the middle and lower classes, expressed a willingness to financially martyr himself when he said, “As a rich person, I pay 28 percent tax… what I want to ask you is, why am I not paying 50?” The crowd applauded in appreciation at King’s willingness to throw more of his income down the...

<p>SARASOTA — Horror novel writer Stephen King is no fan of Florida Gov. Rick Scott.</p> <p>Speaking at a rally Tuesday in Sarasota against state budget cuts, King bashed Scott's leadership. King criticized Scott's rejection of federal dollars for a high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando.</p>

Javier Bardem is apparently the strong contender to play Roland Deshain in "The Dark Tower". After he was mentioned as frontrunner along with Viggo Mortensen, he is now reported to have been officially offered the lead role. Deadline Hollywood says formal negotiations haven't yet begun but the filmmakers have shown great enthusiasm that they have found the right actor.

EXCLUSIVE: In a whopping deal coming together quickly, Stephen King, Imagine Entertainment and Weed Road are in discussions to make a screen trilogy and TV series out of King's epic novel series The Dark Tower. Akiva Goldsman will write the script, Ron Howard will direct it, and his Imagine Entertainment partner Brian Grazer will produce with Goldsman and King.Universal is in talks to acquire a package that included the books, and the attachment of the team behind the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code. Both Universal –where Imagine is based—and Warner Bros—where Goldsman’s Weed Road banner...

15 Pet Sematary 14 Storm of the Century 13 1408 12 Children of the Corn 11 It 10 Rose Red 9 Secret Window 8 Hearts in Atlantis 7 The Green Mile 6 The Shining 5 The Mist 4 The Stand 3 Stand by Me 2 Misery 1 The Shawshank Redemption

BANGOR, Maine — Author Stephen King and his wife are donating money so 150 soldiers from the Maine Army National Guard can come home for the holidays. King and his wife, Tabitha, who live in Bangor, are paying $13,000 toward the cost of two bus trips so that members of the 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry Unit can travel from Camp Atterbury in Indiana to Maine for Christmas. The soldiers left Maine last week for training at Camp Atterbury. They are scheduled to depart for Afghanistan in January -snip-

Sarah Palin's memoir "Going Rogue" shot to the top of the US bestseller list the week after it was published, easily beating new blockbusters by James Patterson and Stephen King. According to Nielsen BookScan, with more than half a million copies sold, "Going Rogue: An American Life" has become the highest-selling book in the country. Mrs Palin ran for vice-president last year on John McCain's losing ticket and is seen as a potential Republican presidential contender in 2012. She launched the memoir, published November 16 by HarperCollins, with a blitz of media appearances and a political campaign-style book tour. Her...

Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption, has words for the millions of people who believe his 1994 prison drama is the greatest film of all time. “I think that’s a little crackers, to be honest, especially when you think of the other films on the list.” He means films such as The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Lolita, Vertigo and foreign-language contenders like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. But, hey, pointy-headed film critics can have their high­falutin’ crushes. There’s no getting round...

This is what would happen if Hollywood decided to recut "The Shining" and release it as a romantic comedy.

When Amazon.com hosts its much anticipated Monday morning e-book event, one of the highlights could be an exclusive deal for the Kindle with horror story master Stephen King.The Amazon event, taking place at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, is widely expected to feature the unveiling of a next-generation Kindle e-book reader. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon also will say it has acquired a new work by King that would be exclusively for the Kindle.

Hasn't the MSM learned anything from the unfortunate episodes of John "stuck in Iraq" Kerry and Stephen "if you don't read you've got the Army" King? Apparently not. Once again, the liberal media, this time in the form of the AFP, has perpetrated the canard that the our military is the last resort of the poor and uneducated. An AFP article of May 16 reported the story of Army sergeant Matthis Chiroux, who has refused deployment to Iraq, claiming he considers it "an illegal war." Chiroux has said that he was "from a poor, white family from the south, and...

Horror novelist Stephen King talking to High School students had this to say about literacy: "The fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's not as bright." Now literacy is critically important and I applaud efforts to get people to read. But it’s the example he uses that is offensive. He assumes that people who go into the military do so because they have no other choices and because they are illiterate. This is clearly not true. If...

Schlock-shockmeister, Stephen King, recently told a group of high school kids, "The fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's not as bright." Not as bright? The military requires the ability to read texts at and around the 1200 Lexile mark. For those not in the education field, the Lexile measure is a text difficulty score. The measure is based on semantic difficulty and syntactic complexity. 1200, for instance, is the measure of a novel such as War...

Conservatives are jumping on author Stephen King for his remarks at a recent Library of Congress event...

In a wave of ignorance, famed horror novelist Stephen King inserted foot in mouth:

Who knew that promoting literacy could cause such a firestorm?

<p>BANGOR, Maine â€” Stephen King has fired back at conservative critics who attacked him over a remark he made a month ago at a writers symposium for high school students.</p> <p>A blogger jumped on King’s statement at the Library of Congress about the importance of reading in which he suggested poor readers have limited prospects, including service in the Army.</p>

Stephen King fires back after blogger attacks remarks BANGOR, Maine (AP) Stephen King has fired back at conservative critics who attacked him over a remark he made a month ago at a writers symposium for high school students. A blogger jumped on King's statement at the Library of Congress about the importance of reading in which he suggested poor readers have limited prospects, including service in the Army. ''I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you...