Below is the cloud generated based on the text of the speech delivered by President Obama on 6 September at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, NC.

As mentioned at the outset, I am still sorting out what to do with this project, but I wanted to publish the word clouds now so that I can look at them together and ponder what they may or may not tell us.

It leaves a bitter taste, I must say.  However, there is at least an effort to map the twitter traffic for context and posterity and a candlelight vigil to counter the retrograde image projected to the world from Oxford, MS.  There is still an immense mountain to climb in this country to lay this to rest, but the reelection of our first black/mixed-race President suggests that we are still climbing, at least.

As I write this on Thursday morning Florida is still counting votes from the election this past Tuesday, denying closure to what has been a rather transformative election.  And yet we still do not even know the final outcome.  What was obvious, from the beginning of early voting was that the process itself was going to be a disaster, and a disaster purposely manufactured by the state GOP when they cut early voting hours in half.  Not only were the lines exceedingly long, the GOP establishment in the state refused to mitigate the problem, unlike their GOP predecessors in 2008 and 2004.  As a result, the last vote in Dade County was cast at 1:30 AM on Wednesday morning, after Romney had conceded the election. That’s right, 1:30 AM, when the polls closed at 7:00 PM. That is how long the lines were. Twelve years after the debacle of 2000 this state still cannot run an election.  Couple that with a study showing that the “friction” created in the voting process disproportionately effects minority voters and what we may be constructing in real-time is a new Jim Crow system designed to defend white political privilege at the expense of the integrity of the ballot itself.  It is shameful and must be fixed, and that must be a bi-partisan commitment.

[Addition: As is often the case, the Naked Politics blog from the Miami Herald nails the assessment of the political context in the state of Florida.]

Well, according to the London School of Economics I should be paying way more attention to my blog than I do.   I’ll try to work on that.

“He originally developed the Meta-Analysis in 2004 to help think about how to allocate campaign contributions. He was originally motivated by the fact that in a close race, one can make the biggest difference by donating at the margin, where probabilities for success are 20-80%. The Meta-Analysis has subsequently been found to be useful as a highly sensitive tracking tool over time.”

If you are interested in using statistical information to better inform yourself about the looming election cycle I encourage you to visit Dr. Wang’s site and read deeply in the application of his Meta Analysis of polling data that you will not find reflected in the simple “horse race” accounting you will receive from the media, broadcast or print.

As an added bonus, I write this while the winds of Tropical Storm Beryl are howling outside my window on this, 28 May. Hurricane season does not begin until Friday but, as Florida used to tout in its advertising campaigns, “the rules

My current state is back in the news of the crazy (does it ever leave?) with two, count ‘um, two recent round-ups of potentially violent political groups. First, the arrest of now 13 members of the “American Front” neo-Nazi group who were training for a race war and accused of planning an attack on the Orlando City Hall. That was followed closely by the arrest of two “anarchists” from Florida but in Chicago over the weekend for the NATO meeting and accused of planning wide-spread mayhem, including the use of molotov cocktails to disrupt the proceedings. You may be able to find more salient examples of America in Extremis than that from another state in the recent news headlines, but I doubt it.