Red Meat

--Nihar Patel

That's what Sarah Palin's convention speech was described as -- red meat. But the guy who worked with her on it, a journalist and former George W. Bush speechwriter, once penned a well-received book about animal suffering and cruelty called Dominion. You can buy it on Amazon. He doesn't, surprisingly, share Governor Palin's fondness for hunting.

But it just goes to show that even vegetarian Republicans like Matthew Scully know a thing or two about grillin'.

Tags: Matthew Scully | Palin | vegan

Wassila vs. The World

--Madeleine Brand

After last night's speech, here's how Sarah Palin has re-ignited the culture wars:

Sarah Palin = Wassila
Wassila = Small Town, USA
Small Town, USA = the Heartland
The Heartland = guns/religion
Guns/religion = "Bitter"
"Bitter" = Barack
Barack = foreigner
Foreigner = other countries
Other countries do not ≠ America
Wassila vs. The World

Is that math adding up for you?

Tags: Palin | culture war | election

Your Education Worries?

--Gary Dauphin

School is back in session, and parents, students, teachers and policy makers are gearing up for another year of challenges, questions and cafeteria mystery-meat.

Over the next few months, Day to Day will be doing a series of reports on education, and we'd like your help thinking through what sorts of issues we should be looking at.

So what are your top education-related concerns? Paying for college? Violence? Sex education? Test scores? Drugs? Too much homework? Too little homework? Over-scheduling? Lack of afterschool programs? Tracking? The achievement gap? Technology in the classroom? Charter schools? Vouchers?

You can leave your suggestions in the comments field below, or you can use the Contact Day to Day form if you'd like to leave us a private note. Please make sure you use a working email when you comment, though, as we may want to do a follow-up on your idea. If we generate a segment out of a listener suggestion or story, we'd love to be able to give you a shout-out, but we can't do that if we can't contact you.

So what are your thoughts?

Tags: education

Men Like Her

--Alex Chadwick

According to Madeleine's interview with a Gallup pollster, Sarah Palin hasn't really affected the race. Of course, this is before she speaks at the RNC tonight.

But here's one interesting tidbit: men are much more interested in McCain than women.

According to Gallup, among Independents (who both sides are coveting), men prefer McCain 47 to 42 percent. Women prefer Obama 46 to 39 percent.

And a CBS poll notes that in response to Palin nomination, 17% of men now say they are more likely to vote for McCain. Indeed, Bill Tancer, general manager of research at web-metrics firm Hitwise, notes that interest in Palin is at an all-time high overall:

If you compare the number of searches for "John McCain," "Barack Obama" or "Joe Biden" with those for "Sarah Palin," there's no contest. In just two days, the number of U.S. Internet searches for "Sarah Palin" reached a peak greater than any other political personality in the past three years. [full item]

Now....why would that be?

A Day to Day poll for my brothers:

Tags: Palin | elections

And The California Dreaming Winner Is ....

Courtesy Quinn Kiesow

We wanted a grand finale for Day to Day's California Dreaming series, so we asked artists to send their musical takes on the California Dream. Among the dozens of submissions, one track stood out from the rest because of its unique approach; the instruments are urban sounds.

Quinn Kiesow, 25, created his entry Los Angeles, entirely out of noises he recorded in that city. The track follows him through a day in L.A., from a construction site to a coffee shop, past kids on skate boards, chirping birds and whistling pedestrians. He blends the click-clack of a woman's high heels, the swoosh of a public bus' brakes and the thrash of a jack-hammer to make music.

This morning, Alex Chadwick and Madeleine Brand speak with him on Day to Day.You can find the interview here, along with full versions of his sound-songs of Los Angeles, Barcelona, Madrid and New York.

In his submission entry, he wrote that though his California dream may not have panned out the way he had hoped when he first left Wisconsin, he's found a place that inspires him to "actually do the things I want to do." Ultimately, he finds this "less glamorous" but "more fulfilling than I could have ever expected."

And if you sent in your favorite California song of all-time -- we didn't forget you! We got so many submissions that it was hard to pick the top five. But we did it. Our (unscientific) formula: if song was nominated tons of times or was just plain amazing it had a good chance of making it on the list. Here you go with comments and in some cases -- listening instructions.

Tags: California Dream | music

Sarah Palin: Boon or Bust for McCain?

--Madeleine Brand

Here's how the McCain campaign is spinning the Palin pregnancy problem: she's a normal mom with normal problems just like all those working-class-former-Hillary-voters-who-don't-like-Barack.

But here's the thing: how many working moms with a four-month-old baby, who has special needs, and a teenage daughter--who now also has special needs--could also be in a position to run the most powerful nation on earth?

Slate's XX Factor says the Republicans are elevating the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Which raises the question -- why do we need our leaders to at least pretend that they're ordinary?

Tags: Palin | election | motherhood

What the Well-Dressed Cop Wears at the RNC

-- Steve Proffitt

A variety of groups, most identifying themselves as anarchists, are promising to do what they can to disrupt the Republican National Convention. Yesterday there were sporadic incidents of violence in St. Paul. Along with a large group of peaceful protesters, agitators broke windows, hurled bottles at police and generally tried to cause trouble.

The police here are prepared. With temperatures yesterday in the 90's, they were clad in an amazing array of riot gear. Black vests, shoulder pads, legs pads and helmets form the basis of their protection. They carried long, ominous-looking clubs, plastic ties to cuff suspects and gas masks. And yesterday they employed mace, pepper spray and tear gas on several occasions. Below, a shot I caught of an officer releasing some spray on demonstrators who were gathered just outside our workspace, in the offices of Minnesota Public Radio.

Police officials here said they made around 300 arrests yesterday. Of those, some 130 people were charged with felonies. Both the police and the agitators say they expect the confrontations to continue, and perhaps escalate, as the convention proceeds towards its Thursday night conclusion.

10:44 AM ET | 09- 2-2008 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

Gustav Blows Through LA...and St. Paul...and Culver City

--Alex Chadwick

Labor Day--three years ago. I was sitting in our Culver City studios at NPR West, and the word was spreading that New Orleans was in real trouble. Hurricane Katrina had come and gone, but, a couple of days later, the surge of water was just beginning to really take down the levees. Trying to cover something like this is part tightrope act, part Rolodex. It's enormously complicated by the infrastructure damage--the phones go down; the power goes down; it's tough to file for the radio.

I reached my friend John Burnett, the NPR reporter who is normally based in Austin, TX. John had a working phone somehow, and he fed live reports to our show of the devastation that was truly beginning to emerge. It was riveting to hear.

We are fortunate that unlike Katrina--which grew bigger and stronger than most expected--Gustav seems to be turning out to be not as bad as was feared. It arrived on land as a Category Two storm, and pretty soon was downgraded to Category One.

That was still big enough to derail plans for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. We covered Senator McCain's hasty scramble to re-do his schedule, and decisions by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to forego their planned appearances. No one wanted to send any "we-weren't-paying-attention-to-Katrina" reminders. But that still left the problem of how to get storm coverage from the area.

We thought of trying to call some evacuees, and then reconsidered to go after some of the people who stayed behind. The Associated Press mentioned a conversation with a local man sipping whiskey and Diet Coke outside a place called Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. We found the number and called. The interview opened the show and we went back to them a couple of more times today.

At the end of he show I declared Johnny's the New Orleans news bureau for Day to Day.

The next time I get to the city, I'm going to stop in and buy them a round. You need help telling a hurricane story, and we got it there.

Tags: Alex Chadwick | Gustav | editorial notebook

Gustav Online Resources

Image courtesy the American Red Cross Flickr photostream

--Gary Dauphin

For those of you following news of Gustav's landfall at home, here's a list of online resources put together by Metblog's Sean Bonner:

http://neworleans.metblogs.com - The main New Orleans Metblogs site
http://gustav08.ning.com - Ning network about Gustav
http://ventana.cerado.com/gustav08/ - Mobile info center
http://gustavpets.com/ - Pets and hurricane information
http://gustavwiki.com/wiki/ - A wiki for gustav information
http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/27698339.html - The Advocate Gustav Link Page
http://www.2theadvocate.com/weather/maps/27670594.html Evacuation Contraflow maps
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/graphics_at2.shtml?5day#content - Gustav tracking
https://asd.fema.gov/inter/nefrls/home.htm - National Emergency Family Registry and Locator System (NEFRLS)
http://www.fema.gov/hazard/hurricane/2008/gustav/index.shtm - FEMA official Gstav page
http://laughingsquid.com/hurricane-gustav-information-resources/ - Laughing Squid collection of resources
[full story]

[Tip of the hat to Boing Boing, which is also tracking how the web is reacting to Gustav.]

If you have any good links or observations, send them along.

12:09 PM ET | 09- 1-2008 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Wayne Kramer's DNC Diary

Alex Cohen, whose coverage of last week's Democratic National Convention can be found here and here and here, also got a chance to sit down Wayne Kramer, one of the founders of Detroit's seminal rock band MC5. MC5 played at the 1968 Democratic convention and Kramer got a chance to play this week in Denver with Rage Against the Machine. Alex's piece on Wayne didn't make it on air, but you can listen to it here via the link at the top of this page. Wayne was also kind enough to share some impressions of the Denver conclave with us, as well as the only surviving footage of his 1968 performance. It turns out that that concert was recorded for posterity by employees of the Department of Defense in Chicago to monitor the crowd.

Continue reading "Wayne Kramer's DNC Diary" »

Tags: Alex Cohen | DNC Convention