Did Limbaugh Minions Sully Indy Vote?

Copyright © 2009 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

RACHEL MARTIN, host:

Hey there, welcome back to the Bryant Park Project from NPR News. We are online all the time at npr.org/bryantpark. You know what else is online? Lots of interesting stuff, distractions, you could call them, even. You know, when your Aunt Catherine forwards you some random article in the middle of the day.

And ordinarily you would just dismiss Aunt Catherine's email, but you look at it because you're at work, and you want a distraction, and then you forward it to someone else, and someone else, and someone else, and all that stuff, emails from Aunt Catherine, other interesting things you find on the Internet, we put it together. We put it in a package, and we call it The Most.

(Soundbite of music)

MARTIN: Mike Pesca.

MIKE PESCA, host:

I will start off with the most-viewed article on auntcatherine.com. Actually, no, it is the most-viewed article on the Washington Post. "Did Rush Limbaugh Tilt Results in Indiana?" I don't know. That's why I'm asking you, Washington Post. Well, Mr. Senor Limbaugh, the most-listened-to radio show in America, number two is Morning Edition, had this campaign, and he called it Operation Chaos.

And the idea was let's send everyone to the polls in Indiana, where they had an open primary, and vote for Hillary Clinton and the idea was you prolong the Democratic race, and bloody up the Democratic candidates. At least this is what Limbaugh was telling his minions, more known as the "ditto-heads." Well, I guess enough ditto-heads did it to raise the question.

Some Obama supporters are saying, for instance, that perhaps we would have won Indiana were it not for Limbaugh. Well, who really knows? Except you have to love the crazy radio stunt being the number-one story on the Washington Post. I think in a way, it's good for our industry. Maybe not. Ian, what do you have?

IAN CHILLAG: I have a most-popular from my hometown paper in West Virginia, the Charleston Daily Mail. The primary there is coming up.

MARTIN: Yeah, I hope you're going to get us some inside scoop.

CHILLAG: Yeah, well, here's a little bit of it. This is Don Surber. He's a columnist there. He has some advice...

PESCA: Is he the dean? Is he the dean of West Virginia political columnists?

CHILLAG: That's a really tight race actually for the dean of West Virginia politics.

PESCA: Does he have tenure?

CHILLAG: Yes. That's the thing is nobody really leaves, so everybody's got tenure in West Virginia. Anyway, he's got a few pieces of advice for the candidates vying for the nomination. First is pronunciation advice. We talked about hurricane the other day, which is actually pronounced "hurrican" (ph).

PESCA: Hurrican, West Virginia.

CHILLAG: Another thing, Fayetteville is in North Caroline. Fayetteville is spelled the same in West Virginia, "Fet-Ville" (ph).

MARTIN: "Fet-Ville."

CHILLAG: "Fet-Ville."

MARTIN: Got to get that stuff right.

CHILLAG: The big river, spelled Kanawha, "Kanah" (ph).

MARTIN: Everything is kind of just pushed together.

PESCA: Just mumble, mumble. You can't go wrong in West Virginia!

CHILLAG: Well, you know, you want to save time? Eliminate a syllable.

JEANNE BARON: Lose those syllables, yeah.

CHILLAG: We move fast in West Virginia.

PESCA: Very efficient.

DAN PASHMAN: This must be the Most efficient state in the union.

CHILLAG: Yeah.

PESCA: Yeah.

CHILLAG: If you look at the stats, yeah.

MARTIN: When I think West Virginia, I think fast people, fast.

CHILLAG: All right, come on, come on, people.

MARTIN: Sorry, sorry.

CHILLAG: You know, candidates, when they go to Philly, they want to eat cheesesteaks, you know, represent with some of the local cuisine. Do not do that in West Virginia. Do not eat ramps. Are you familiar with "ramps"?

MARTIN: No.

PESCA: Aren't they like a, I don't know, a vegetable, celery?

CHILLAG: No, it's kind of the onion family of leeks.

PESCA: Yeah, yeah, I've had them.

BARRON: What will happen to you?

CHILLAG: You will stink for days. It's like an onion-times-garlic-times-hate. They are just nasty.

MARTIN: Times hate!

CHILLAG: Ride an ATV, OK?

BARON: You do need to do that one? That's a must do?

CHILLAG: Do that. To Barack Obama, do not complain about growing up in Hawaii. But then he takes it kind of serious at the end, you know, don't try and be one of us. The one time - we don't really want one of us. The one time a West Virginian was nominated for president, Democrat John Davis in 1920, he failed to carry West Virginia. So just be yourself, everybody.

MARTIN: It's a good lesson.

CHILLAG: And don't eat ramps.

PESCA: Be yourself and don't eat ramps. Jeanne, what do you have?

BARON: All right, this was most-emailed on Yahoo!. OK, guys, there are two kinds of fat. All right, there is visceral fat. That's what you carry around on your abdomen, and I guess scientists have known for a long time that people with a lot of this fat - fat, belly fat...

MARTIN: Beer belly.

BARON: Beer belly. You'll get - you have a higher risk of diabetes and heart disease, but now they have found out that subcutaneous fat, which is the kind on your hips and your rear end...

MARTIN: Feminine fat, it's called.

BARON: Actually has sort of a health effect on these very same disorders, and they figured this out by taking subcutaneous fat and putting it on the abdomen of little mice, and they started to slim down, and they started to have better blood-sugar levels.

MARTIN: Even with the extra fat on their tummies?

BARON: They put it on their tummies.

PASHMAN: They actually rubbed fat on these mice?

BARON: Needle, thick needles.

MARTIN: They injected cellulose.

PASHMAN: Oh.

BARON: They put it right into their belly, and their blood-sugar level stabilized, and their insulin level started to have better regulation of insulin level.

MARTIN: Weird.

BARON: So, they are saying this is theirs. Good fat and bad fat, and some new reasons to respect that big rear end, which is something that I guess Spinal Tap has appreciated all along.

(Soundbite of song "Big Bottom")

Mr. CHRISTOPHER GUEST: (As Nigel Tufnel) (Singing) Big bottom, big bottom, Talk about bum cakes, my girl's got them. Big bottom drive me out of my mind. How could I leave this behind?

PASHMAN: That's a classic.

BARON: They knew it all along.

PESCA: The subtle intonations of Nigel Tufnel and company. Dan Pashman, who do you have?

PASHMAN: Jeanne talked about two kinds of fat. She left out bacon fat. That's another important kind of fat.

MARTIN: It's its own kind.

PASHMAN: Yes, it has a lot of powerful properties...

PESCA: Start injecting that into mice.

PASHMAN: That I like to explore. We've got a most-emailed here from the New York Times science section. "Platypus Looks Strange on the Inside, Too." We all know duckbilled platypus has a bill and webbed feet like a duck. It lays eggs like a bird or a reptile. It produces milk, and has a coat of fur like a mammal. So...

MARTIN: Crazy!

PASHMAN: This bizarre vortex of different types of animals all come together in one, and scientists have decoded its genome to learn more about it. And the idea is by learning about the genetic makeup of the platypus that they can sort of learn about the order that other animals and species, including humans, evolved in. And the most interesting fact I found from this article, the platypus shares 82 percent of its genes with the human, the mouse, the dog, the possum and the chicken. So we are - does that mean that we are 82-percent platypus?

PESCA: The duckbilled among us are, yes.

PASHMAN: Yeah, exactly.

PESCA: And I believe, Dan, you come to us with an update on another story?

PASHMAN: An update on a story we did the other day about these sea lions that were shot dead in the Columbia River, right along the border with Washington State in Oregon. We thought they were shot dead. That was the story we were discussing. Well, it turns out it starting to look like they weren't shot.

MARTIN: We were wrong?

PASHMAN: It's now a mystery. Well, everyone was wrong. The story was reported that they had been shot, and now it looks like they were not shot. Six of them, endangered sea lions, were killed. They were lying in open traps. The traps were closed. We don't know who closed the traps. We don't know yet how they died. They did find some metal fragments in a couple of the animals. They did find a slug in one of the other ones, but none of those appear to have been the cause of death. It could have been old injuries.

PESCA: Interesting. So, who knows where that happened, or why that happened? Fisheries are on it, and Matt, what do you have?

MATT MARTINEZ: I have one of the most-emailed at npr.org right now We're also doing most-viewed at npr.org now, which we didn't do before. It's very exciting for me.

PASHMAN: Do we get both?

MARTINEZ: We have both.

PASHMAN: All right.

MARTINEZ: That's fantastic. Anyway, one of the most-emailed. I'm the only person who gets excited about this.

PESCA: Simple minds...

MARTINEZ: One of the most-emailed stories at npr.org is by reporter Vicki Barker, very, very - we like the Vicki Barker. It's a profile of the highest concentration of lesbians in Britain, and it's in a small, former mill town deep in rural Yorkshire, and here's Vicki Barker.

(Soundbite of NPR's "All Things Considered")

(Soundbite of stomping feet)

VICKI BARKER: Late night at the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge. Local group Rakish Paddy has feet stomping in the darkened room. Look closely and you'll see some of the couples here are single-sex. They are the tip of a demographic iceberg, because it is this former mill town, nestled among the Yorkshire moors, which has, statistics show, the greatest density of lesbians in all of Great Britain.

About one out of every five adults walking the steep and winding streets outside is a gay woman. With its jumbly, slate-roofed houses jammed into a long river valley, Hebden Bridge could be practically any Yorkshire town. If you're familiar with the BBC series, "Last of the Summer Wine," you'd definitely recognize the scenery, but maybe not some of the local inhabitants.

Ms. KAREN TAYLOR (Resident, Hebden Bridge, England): I'm Karen, and this is baby Florence. This is my partner Fiona, and our eldest one is (inaudible).

BARKER: Karen Taylor (ph) and her partner, Fiona Winder (ph), treat their children to an early dinner at a local bistro. They moved here 18 months ago. Like so many of the gay women here, they wanted to raise a family in a place where a family like theirs is not unusual.

Ms. TAYLOR: It's been great, we've met lots of other lesbian mothers and...

(Soundbite of baby crying)

Ms. TAYLOR: All sorts of straight mothers as well, which is really cool, and it's basically not a big deal. We don't get so much, oh, right, when we explain that the girls have got two mommies, which it makes such a difference to us.

BARKER: Houseboats line the Rochdale Canal, which zigzags through the town. The old mills and warehouses are mostly condos now, but the locks are still operated by hand. On the moors high above, you can walk some of the ancient pathways, which crisscross the Pennines and the Yorkshire Dales.

But more than the beauty, it is the tolerance of the locals that has drawn the lesbians. If there are people here who object to that lifestyle, they are keeping it to themselves. But then, the gay women are just following in the footsteps of hippies who settled here after the mills closed down in the 1960s. Hebden Bridge has had plenty of time to get used to alternative lifestyles.

At the Ladies and Gents Hairdressers on Market Street on a weekday afternoon, most of the hair they sweep up is gray.

Ms. RITA BAXTER (Patron, Ladies and Gents Hairdressers) You get some nice people of the gay.

BARKER: Longtime customer Rita Baxter (ph).

Ms. BAXTER: I know we've got quite the few gay women around, but it don't bother me because, you know, they keep themselves to themselves.

BARKER: Why do you think these gay women...

Ms. BAXTER: They can't find the right fellow.

BARKER: Nikki Simmons (ph), standing among the other mothers as the local primary school gets out, agrees the lesbian influx is no big deal.

Ms. NIKKI SIMMONS (Resident, Hebden Bridge, England): My kids know who's got two mums, and it's just par for the course, really. Holly (ph) definitely will say that she's going to marry her friend Romy (ph), and she'll add at the end of it, because girls can marry girls, mum. And I'll say, yes, dear, I know.

Mr. DAVID FLETCHER (Resident, Hebden Bridge, England): The present generation of lesbians in Hebden Bridge seem to think that they've invented something new.

BARKER: David Fletcher, a 75-year-old academic, grew up in Hebden Bridge. He says women in these parts have gone their own way ever since the Industrial Revolution. That's when many men, all handloom weavers, lost their livelihood, and the women became the breadwinners, working in the new textile factories.

Mr. FLETCHER: The women in this part of the world from about 1820, 1830, onwards, had this independent economic power, which gave them independence in many other ways. Even when I went to school here, it wasn't unusual to find families of, say, five children that have different surnames because they'd been fathered by a different man. It wasn't a problem.

BARKER: Another long accepted practice, says David Fletcher, women choosing to live with other women.

Mr. FLETCHER: Economically, it's a lot cheaper if two people live in the same house, and share the same bills, and if they are fond of each other, well, they get their satisfaction in other ways, perhaps.

BARKER: Some in Hebden Bridge worry that property prices are staring to creep beyond the reach of the town's original inhabitants. But just as many people will tell you the women have bolstered the local economy, and their children filling the local schools have given this once dying mill town a future.

(Soundbite of children yelling)

BARKER: For NPR News, I'm Vicki Barker in Hebden Bridge, England.

MARTIN: You can get links to this and all the stories you heard on The Most by going to our website, npr.org.

Copyright ©2009 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.