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'.

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?

--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?

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:

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.

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?

-- 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.

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.

--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.

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.

I'm a producer here at NPR, but I also like to do some reporting from time to time. There's no shortage of interesting people in Los Angeles, but I knew the moment I first heard about J. Michael Walker's exhibit at the Autry National Center that I wanted to do a story about him.

Walker realized that there were a whole lot of streets in Los Angeles named for saints -- 103 to be exact -- when he was looking through what has long been a second bible to Angelenos, a spiral-bound book of maps called the Thomas Guide. He recognized the importance of these saints in L.A.'s cultural history. He began exploring the histories of the saints and the nooks and crannies of the streets. Then he created new saint portraits based on the people he met.

I've never seen anyone approach a city the way J. Michael Walker does. And the result -- now on the walls of the Autry and in book form too (title: All the Saints of the City of the Angels) -- is fascinating. I spent many hours with Walker over the last few months, talking with him about his art and our city and the "road trip through the cultural history of Los Angeles" that he created. My radio piece airs this afternoon on All Things Considered. I know this is the Day to Day blog, but hey: It's a great California story!

There have been lots of questions about Sarah Palin's experience. She's been governor for less than two years. Would she be able to run the country if John McCain (aged 72 as of today) were to die or become incapacitated? That's a legitimate concern. But what I'm also wondering is: would she be able to run the country effectively as a mother of five children, two of whom are really young: seven years old and four months? (And, the four-month-old baby has Down Syndrome.)

I know I could not do my job if I didn't have help with my two small children. My husband gets them up, feeds them breakfast and takes them to school every morning because I'm here before dawn, preparing for the show. And still I wonder--would I be better at my job if I didn't have kids? (And the opposite, too: would I be a better mother if I didn't have a job?)

I'd like to know how Sarah Palin handles being Governor and a mom. Does her husband take care of the children? Does she have full-time help? Does she skip meetings, stint on reading a policy brief, or forgo traveling to spend time with her kids?

It's also interesting that these questions have never come up for Barack Obama, who has two young girls. No one wonders (at least I haven't) whether he'd be less effective as president because he's a father.

What do you think?

John McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate is obviously the story of the day, after Shereen abandoning us. Any thoughts, reactions, first impressions?

The Atlantic's James Fallows has an interesting read:

The Palin pick is not like the choice of Dan Quayle

But it is exactly like the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. That is, an unbelievably obvious but potentially effective attempt to jiu-jitsu the standard identity politics of the moment in a way that flummoxes the Democrats. I would spell out the logic but I think it's obvious and am at a computer for only sixty seconds.

The image to have in mind is not Dan Quayle: a person with quite a bit of grounding in national issues who was added to the ticket in an attempt to jazz it up. Always and only the comparison should be with Clarence Thomas -- with this one interesting difference. Thomas was a shrewd choice not simply because his race made it more complicated for Democrats to oppose him but also because, once confirmed, all evidence suggested to conservatives that he'd be the kind of Justice they were looking for. In Palin's case, this seems to be a choice that looks forward to Election Day, and not one day beyond that.

She was here five years ago when Day to Day began.

She'd been looking for a job--she had a couple of part-time things going up in the Bay Area, but she wanted to try working for NPR, and here was this new show starting up in L.A. She came down for a job interview, and got this question: "What DON'T you like about NPR?"

"That's easy," she said right away, "blah, blah, blah."

We might not have put it quite that way ourselves, but we knew exactly what she meant. That's what we were tired of, too. And someone with the ability to put it just like that, and the nerve to offer it up in a job interview? I think it was the next day we offered her a temp position--all we had at the time.

Shereen Marisol Meraji got hired full-time very quickly. Then promoted. Then promoted again. Within a year she had one of the key positions on the show -- she was the director...she ran everything in the studio while we were on the air. It's a very stressful and important job...coordinating what the hosts are saying, what the engineers are doing to play the right interview, bringing in live feeds or phone calls from overseas, on a special talk-back constantly to the production unit down the hall to make sure everything is coming in on time. She was always the youngest person there -- by a lot in my case. But there was never any question who was in charge.

Even so, she began to bump her head, as people do in their first real jobs, no matter how good they are. She went off to report from Lebanon for several months. She came back and got restless again. She finally dragged us into the 21st Century by first insisting the show must have a blog, and then creating it -- DayDreaming, the blog you're reading here - around a project she ran called California Dreaming.

This summer was coming to an end, and we wondered what she'd do next...and now we learn that she is going to try a new media job in public television. It is wonderful news for a very smart and capable woman. And it's a dagger to the heart.

My friend Steve Proffitt, a senior producer here, wrote and produced and performed this song about Shereen:

If you listen to the show much, you should get most of it, and leave a comment if you want parts explained.

Here is Shereen:

And here is Steve--he may take over for some of her work on the blog.

Boy, I'm really going to miss her.

The Hillary people should read this.

I did, and I've been talking to everybody at NPR West about Relentless: How Barack Obama Outsmarted Hillary Clinton by Roger Stone. He's the chief political columnist at Politico.com, a long-time reporter with Chicago roots. (Click over to his bio and check out the last line on where he's going to be buried.)

For Relentless, Simon talked to two-dozen top people from both campaigns. It feels very thorough and revealing--the best summation coverage I've seen on how Barack won, and why she lost. I've been trying to get an interview with Roger on the show since I read Relentless on Monday, but we couldn't catch up with him in Denver until late yesterday. I'm really glad we got this on today; given news cycles, this is probably the last day we could run it. The interview I did with him is good; you can listen to a longer version of our conversation using the audio link above. But his full pieces are better.

What say you, though? What's your take on Simon's analysis--and the larger question of how Obama won?