Is there a general recommended bitrate (or bitrate range) that is used for recording radio talk shows? I want to record A Prairie Home Companion weekly, and I have never done this sort of thing before. Any tips?

LAME do have special presets for speeches

it should be similar to Preset ABR 56kbps, mono, 44100Hz

A Prairie Home Companion is in stereo and is broadcast on FM, usually. Understanding that would make me want to record it at --preset-standard or its current equivalent. In fact, that is how I do it when I record FM stereo broadcasts. For crappy mono, LAME defaults to 128 KBps when recording at --preset-standard.

You can stick to 128kbps or downsample to 32Khz if you want to use a lower bitrate such as 112/96kbps.

Anything recorded from FM should be sampled at a rate no higher than 32K. No need to waste bits on the multiplex pilot at 19KHz.

I just remembered. You might want to consider simply downloading Prarie Home Companion from their archive web site:
http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/archive.php

The archives are RealAudio, so a download manager which supports rtsp protocol would be necessary. Something like Net Transport.
http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/pa...Net%20Transport

Don't be put off by the 32K bit-rate. Listen, then decide if acceptable.