Free Republic

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...