On the Road Again... Part 8

A pastoral scene of cars, trucks and cattle stops us along U.S. 85. (Photos by Bonnie J. Schupp)

 

In the tiniest of towns,

we meet the Postmaster

REDIG, South Dakota – The sparkle of sunshine reflecting off some of maybe 150 cars and trucks out beyond the cow pasture catches my eye along U.S. 85, a dot of a place about three inches below the Dakotas’ border on our Triple-A map. The vehicles outnumber the grazing black cattle.

Redig Post Office

We stopped for a moment, then turned around on the two-lane ribbon where

... and its postmaster, Edgar Kumley

a high speed limit could render this tiny outpost invisible to passers-by. Across the road stands the Redig Post Office – a shack-like building next to a small patch of sunflowers and vegetables, and front yard to a small cluster of seemingly junked mobile homes. There’s a trio of old gas pumps on the front lot.

At the counter stands Edgar Kumley, folksy postmaster and proprietor of the pastoral salvage yard, farmer and native – and likely longest-term resident -- of Redig, whose population he puts at “ten today, maybe five tomorrow, one next week.”

“How long have you been postmaster?” I ask.

“More than 70 years,” he replies.

“But you don’t look a day over 72,” I lie.

He chuckles. He’ll be 95, come October.

There’s a computer hard drive atop a row of old dry-goods drawers, and Bonnie asks if that’s his computer. “No,” he says. “My granddaughter’s.” He says her computer equipment is all over the place.

And that raises another question, about what kind of impact an old man like Edgar Kumley makes in a wider world. Numbers help define it: Ten children that he and his wife put through college, and 35 grandchildren.

“How many great-grandchildren are there?”

“I’ve got no idea.”

The children and grandchildren and beyond are spread out across the nation, among them at least one doctor and lawyer... and probably more.

People from a wide area around Redig pick up their mail at the post office, where slots for each resident are filled with letters, magazines and, more than likely, junk advertising. But the postmaster says he gets little mail himself.

There’s a lot in the outside world that bothers him, starting with the U.S. Postal Service itself – that since its conversion to an independent agency back in the Nixon administration, it is not managed by the U.S.  government. “I voted for Richard Nixon,” he says, blaming him for giving away the postal service. “He was a thief.”  And no matter how the independent agency views it, he says, “the people own this post office, the people paid for it.”

Edgar is a Republican, but not bound up by party lines in his thinking. “That man in the White House,” he says, as I begin to hold my breath, “is the smartest and most cautious we’ve ever had.”

And in the slow-moving world of a 94-year-old postmaster, that’s excellent. He says Barack Obama is not jumping into war with Russia. Conflict like that, he fears, could ultimately go nuclear and that just three bombs could end the world as we know it.

A fan whirrs near a cracked window. There’s no air-conditioning. Afternoon temperatures outside are well into the humid 80s, and he wears a long-sleeve plaid shirt despite the heat. He slips on a pair of dark-lens glasses to ease the strain of bright light, just a few weeks after eye surgery. He’d badly injured an eye decades ago when a belt snapped as he and a son were working on a car, but surgery repaired it. Much more recently, he said, something flew out of a mailbag and damaged the eye again and now he was recovering from another repair job.

A postal patron walks in to pick up mail and exchange pleasantries. And it’s time for us to go. I reach out to shake Edgar’s hand. His fingers are thick, his hand rough, his grip stronger than a 72-year-old’s.

On buying a presidency

Ten bucks at a time,

my political donations

prove well-spent

I donated $58 to the Barack Obama campaign.

In return, I received three bumper stickers, a VoteObama car magnet, and a barrage of email messages thanking me for my support – and asking for more.

I also got this: The re-election of a president who largely shares my values and will, I believe, make the United States and the world outside it a better place.

I have never met Barack Obama, or even seen him in the flesh – and don’t expect to.

 But I got more bang for the buck than any of the millionaires and billionaires who pumped far more money into the campaign of Mitt Romney – although their financial backing of some conservative causes on local ballots around the nation may not have been so futile.

Money can buy an election, no doubt. That’s why, a few dollars at a time, I joined millions of other small donors backing Obama. The suggested minimum donation in most of the emailed appeals was $13 – although many had click-on options starting at $10. And by “saving your payment information,” the process would be a lot quicker – and, trusting soul, I let the campaign site have my credit card number.

Not that rich folks weren’t backing Democrats. I’d love to know the statistical breakdown in the money behind the two campaigns, through both reportable direct donations and the hidden money funneled through Super PAC organizations.

My $58 was a droplet in the hurricane of cash that blew well beyond a billion bucks in the cost of the 2012  presidential election.

The emails asking for money landed almost daily in my in-box, the senders varying – campaign officials Jim Messina,  Yohannes Abraham, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Rufus Gifford. Sometimes it would be Joe Biden (my favorite email subject line was his one-word “Malarkey”), Michelle Obama, or Barack himself.

At 12:45 this morning, 10 minutes before Romney’s concession speech and about 45 minutes before Obama’s victory speech, I received my last email from the President:

David --

I'm about to go speak to the crowd here in Chicago, but I wanted to thank you first.

I want you to know that this wasn't fate, and it wasn't an accident. You made this happen.

You organized yourselves block by block. You took ownership of this campaign five and ten dollars at a time. And when it wasn't easy, you pressed forward.

I will spend the rest of my presidency honoring your support, and doing what I can to finish what we started.

But I want you to take real pride, as I do, in how we got the chance in the first place.

Today is the clearest proof yet that, against the odds, ordinary Americans can overcome powerful interests.

There's a lot more work to do.

But for right now: Thank you.

Barack

Obama probably didn’t write that message. But I like to think that’s what he would have said – and I hope he keeps the promise, and keeps in touch.

  

Election 2010: A Frank Farewell

Not much room
for a moderate
in 2010 America


I mourn the political passing of Frank Kratovil -- not so much for who he was, a conservative Democrat pandering as best he could to a Republican-leaning Maryland congressional district, but for the loss of his party's seat in the House of Representatives.

Not that it was unexpected. His election in 2008 was a fluke brought on by the first political earthquake tremors of the GOP's rightward swerve, as the respected moderate incumbent Republican Wayne Gilchrest lost in the primary to the extremely conservative state Sen. Andy Harris.

Hard feelings? In the general election, Gilchrest, a former high school teacher, crossed party lines and endorsed Democrat Kratovil to succeed him in the First District -- which covers Maryland's entire and largely rural Eastern Shore, but is overwhelmed in population by a largely affluent strip of Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Harford counties on the western side of the Chesapeake Bay.

Kratovil, a county prosecutor from the eastern side, won by a margin of less than 1 percent, and evidently not on the coattails of Barack Obama -- the district favored by a much wider margin the GOP presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Two years later, the Gilchrest Effect seems to have faded. According to the unofficial election night tally, Harris took nearly 55 percent of the votes -- 146,272 to 111,237 -- in making Kratovil a one-term congressman.

It was one of the most expensive congressional races in the nation, as Democratic supporters put up millions of dollars in an attempt to save Kratovil's seat -- and Republican supporters similarly fueled Harris' campaign.

Harris, an anesthesiologist whose right-wing views set him apart even from others in the state legislature's minority party, among other things opposes gay rights and abortion, wants to roll back the Democrat-pushed health care reforms, and wants to make sure tax rates for rich folks remain low.

His television ads were subtly ugly -- the one that seemed to air most frequently even had a racist feel to it. Three figures shrouded in darkness, but one with distinctive-looking ears seems obvious... and as the scene slowly brightens, we see it is Obama, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Kratovil.

Kratovil voted with Pelosi, voted for Pelosi, voted with Obama, the ads hammered, despite Kratovil's reputation as a conservative Democrat and his own ads stressing a political independence that had dampened the enthusiasm of liberal Democrats for him.

Overall, voter registration in this congressional district is almost even divided between the two major parties... a few more Democrats, but just a few. This in a state that is solidly Democratic, by a 2-1 margin, and one of the most liberal in the United States. Yet the district has usually leaned toward Republicans.

So party affiliation is not the key determinant here. And it makes you wonder why Kratovil could suffer so major a swing from his narrow win in 2008 to so great a loss two years later.

The outcome leaves Maryland's entire Eastern Shore without its own congressman. The area, whose nine counties include some with the lowest per-capita income in Maryland, can look forward to representation by a defender of the rich from the other side of the water.

The poorest county in Maryland, Somerset, voted only narrowly for Kratovil (3,436-3,265). And the Democrat's home county, the much more affluent Queen Anne's, easily preferred Harris (9,410-8,537).

So what were the voters thinking? Is it an Obama thing -- two years down the road, they flip-flop back to the right -- or a money thing? Is it the rich wanting to keep on getting richer while the poor get poorer? Is it simply a matter of who came out to vote on election day? Was it the vanishing of the Gilchrest Effect?

Is it the magic of the boiling Tea Kettle, and the ability of Republican strategists to brand the enemy... voted for Pelosi, voted with Pelosi, voted with Obama... even if, sometimes, he didn't.

There was no room for independence in 2010 America, no safe middle ground for a Democrat like Kratovil. He should have seen it coming from two years away -- having been tarred and targeted as a one-termer by opponents from the day he was narrowly elected.

In trying to tiptoe through the middle, Kratovil failed to establish a brand for himself -- much as the Obama administration wasted time in its first few months trying to work with Republicans, only to lose its post-election momentum and the potential of its once-overwhelming legislative majority.

Kratovil could have embraced being a Democrat. Instead, he hunkered down and pandered as best he could to an unforgiving political right.

In my 30 years living in Anne Arundel County, on the western side of the Chesapeake, Kratovil was the only congressional candidate to knock on my door and personally ask for my vote. That was back around October, 2007, when the Queen Anne's County state's attorney had just embarked on his congressional quest.

Without hinting at my views, I asked for his on two of what I consider liberal bellwether issues -- gay marriage and, on abortion, a woman's right to choose. His answers were as vague as he could make them.

I voted for him, without enthusiasm, because having Andy Harris as my congressman was unthinkable.

Not much has changed two years later. But this time around, the unthinkable has happened and Harris is heading to Washington.

Elsewhere, Maryland election results ran counter to the national trend. Six of its eight House seats were easily retained by liberal Democrats (one district, in Western Maryland, remains a Republican stronghold); ultra-liberal Barbara Mikulski overwhelmingly won a fourth term in the U.S. Senate, declared the victor even as the earliest returns showed unknown GOP opponent Eric Wargotz leading by 1,000 votes; and Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley won an even bigger victory than polls had predicted in a rematch against Republican former Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr.

O'Malley is already being talked about as a rising star in the Democratic pantheon.

Kratovil, meanwhile, is packing up his stuff and looking for a new job.

Maryland's Obama?

Among the keynote speakers at Gov. Martin O'Malley's re-election party Tuesday night, at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, was his African-American lieutenant governor, Anthony G. Brown -- a man of charm and eloquence, but apparently a little lacking in his geographic acumen when it comes to Maryland.

Brown, almost 49, told of his pleasure at traveling across the state over the past four years as lieutenant governor, from the mountains of Western Maryland to the sandy shores of Wicomico County.

Trouble is, Wicomico is a little lacking in sandy shores. It's Worcester, one county to the east, that includes Maryland's ocean beaches. And you could see a few people in the crowd below the stage turning to each other, open-mouthed, at the gaffe.

Brown proudly introduced his parents -- his Swiss-immigrant mother and Jamaican-immigrant father -- and embraced his daughter and son, who seem close in age to the children of President Obama. A colonel in the Army Reserves, he is the highest-ranking elected official to have served on active duty in Iraq.

There's a strong chance, some observers believe, that O'Malley could resign to take another job -- on the national stage in the Obama administration, or as successor to Barbara Mikulski should she not complete her next term. In January, she will become the longest-serving female member of the U.S. Senate.

And Anthony Brown would become governor.

If not then, he could run for the job in 2014 -- but he likely won't be the only state official looking to move into the governor's mansion.

Among the other elected Democrats crowding on stage at the O'Malley celebration was another 2014 possible, Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, who was unopposed for reelection. "Doug'' Gansler, 48, seems to style himself much like the late Bobby Kennedy, who was U.S. attorney general in his brother John's administration.

Look for both of them to make as much noise as possible the next two years, jockeying for position.

Help for Haiti

Obama pledges $100 million;
a million Americans
could easily match it

I’ve got a cup of tea, some bread just out of the oven, a roof overhead, and a high-def, wide-screen TV which for hours has given me a window on the tragedy of a nation with virtually none of the above – just destruction and death.

I noticed on the CNN news-crawler at the bottom of the horrible scenes from Haiti that President Obama just pledged $100 million for emergency assistance.

The amount – well, it’s good start.

But I bet folks all cozy, like me, can add at least that much to the cause of helping a poor, besieged neighbor in the wake of an earthquake that is clearly among the worst natural disasters in recorded history.

Raising the money would be a snap – just a million Americans, donating at least $100 each, would match Obama’s $100 million. You can find a list at www.cnn.com of organizations engaged in relief efforts in Haiti, and pick one or more to receive your contribution – or find another from any of the many listings compiled by the print and broadcast media.

I chose the American Red Cross (http://www.redcross.org) , Catholic Relief Services (http://www.crs.org), IMA World Health (http://www.imaworldhealth.org), and Doctors Without Borders (http://doctorswithoutborders.org).

Now, if just another 999,999 folks could join in this little effort – well, we’ll all be contributing members of an enormous organization: Humanity.

There’s no membership card, but gifts to most if not all of the relief organizations are tax-deductible. And when you figure out how much your tax savings amounts to, use that money for another gift later.

Your turn: Emails, we get emails...

Malware, grocery surprises,
word clouds are among topics
drawing amusing responses

I've been accumulating reader comment, thinking it would make for a lazy-day blog -- then spent a lot of lazy days neither posting fresh stuff nor putting out your messages.

True, your comments can already be found under the relevant postings, but how many folks actually read the comments? Hard enough getting folks just to read my blog!

And this way, I not only get to put your thoughts front and center, but to make my own, hopefully entertaining, comments on your comments. So here goes, in reverse chronological order, time to open the email/comment in-box.

The Muck account of Edgar Allan Poe’s bicentennial celebration, and the mystery surrounding his death in 1849 brought this offering from a reader identified only as “Jupiter”:

FYI - A novel entitled "Imp: Being the Lost Notebooks of Rufus Wilmot Griswold in the Matter of the Death of Edgar Allan Poe," relates the last mysterious week of the tortured soul's life. It draws on many of Poe's short stories and portrays the poet himself as "The Imp of the Perverse," and reveals his fate to be much the same as Mr. V. Unfortunately it seems to be unavailable though it won a British literary award from the London Crime Writers Association.

Well, Jupiter, the important thing to know about Griswold is that his account of Poe’s demise was quickly discredited – and that he tried to cash in on Poe’s death by marketing his literary works for his own benefit. Griswold, alas, was a lying scumbag.

The posting on Barack Obama’s speech as a “word cloud” and its link to the fuller version in the Journeys blog of Muck-in-Chief’s s wife/art director Bonnie Schupp, brought this from our friend Rosemary the Journalism Professor:

Pretty interesting. I may just switch to reading her blog, David.

No comment.


“When less is more,” the rant on deceptive shrinking of the contents of consumer goods sold in supermarkets, brought this from the Muck-in-Chief’s second ex-wife Kathleen:

I remember you joyously picking up extra copies of the newspaper on coupon day, trying to get Maxwell House 3 oz coffee for free, and just having a great time digging up bargains. Thanks for the memory.

Well, I’ve always been cheap. The only thing better than getting it free is making a profit in purchasing an item. But as far as I can tell, even the self-checkout register won’t ring up a minus-total and spill out money like a slot machine. Damn.

And “anonymous” wrote:

Yogurt. No more 8oz containers -- now it's in 6oz micro-mini-buckets. Same price ... a 33% increase on a per-oz basis. I shop at the food outlet now, and the supposedly middle-class folks there are in about equal numbers with the obvious poor. The upscale supermarket owners can go jump in a lake.

But mostly it’s not the supermarkets shrinking the goods – it’s the manufacturers. Supermarkets supposedly have operated for years on profit margins as low as 1 percent. I suspect that figure is bogus, however, since major chains also make out on their own custom-brand products. But competition is fierce, and keeps prices from getting out of hand in areas where consumers have the widest choices of where to spend their money. I feel sorry for folks living in areas where there’s little or no competition, however.


Mitchell, adding his thought to the issue of shrinking rolls of toilet tissue:

My ass may be the same size; it's hard to look behind you, and my wife knows better than to give an honest opinion. However the issue with toilet paper is not the size of the ass as much as the size of the... output.

That’s a lot of crap.

And Rosemary observes:

As to your conclusion here -- actually our asses might be getting smaller. Simply by eating the same as usual -- you've shown we are eating less -- so the shrinkage could transfer.

On what to do with that extra second added on New Year’s Eve to 2008 on the planet’s official atomic clock, I was saddened to find that it was ticked off earlier in the evening than I supposed – not at the stroke of midnight. So I probably wasted it. Mitchell had a good idea for his second, however – in fact, you may have noticed that Mitchell has a good idea (or at least a funny idea) on any subject:

I used the extra second to feel sympathetic toward George W. Bush. Seemed like the longest second of my life. Get out of town, Dubya!

He did.

And another “anonymous,” who on this comment signed off as my regular reader and old pal Barry, seconded this way:

I'm starting my 25 volume life history, oops the second is over. Well maybe next time. Back to my eggnog.

Ellroon left a laudatory comment on Bonnie’s ‘Blogistic” guest posting here, on her successful battle to purge her computer of malware:

My daughter wants to know what kind of scented candle you like so she can light it in your honor. I have just reformatted my computer because of the Vundo and Virtumonde viruses and she had just gotten a new motherboard and freshing reloaded XP and found to her horror her computer already was infected. We used Malwarebytes and it cleaned her computer right up! Thanks for raging against the idiots who love to create these things. They need to be blindfolded and bound in a room full of angry mothers with red hot kitchen utensils...

Bonnie’s computer has been humming along since then. Alas, her workhorse Epson Stylus Photo 1270 printer (which we used for everything except Bonnie’s quality photo printing) seems to be fried. All the warning lights blink, and nothing happens – a problem that arose this week, a short time after an ink canister was replaced. It printed normally for a few pages, then decided it was not going to function anymore. Blink, blink, blink... guess that’s what designers consider a cute way of saying the machine is on the blink. Anyone need a very large paperweight?

The malware posting is the most-visited in this blog, and Ellroon was just one of several readers who credited Bonnie and Malwarebytes with solving identical problems.

On my blog introduction early last month of fortune cookie messages, Mitchell offers a trip down memory lane:

Here's a fortune cookie story you might not remember: My girlfriend (Garnetta?) and I met you for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Glen Burnie. As a gag gift, we brought you a box of MISFortune Cookies, guaranteed to have a buzz-kill of a message in each cookie. Just then a young female colleague of yours showed up, fresh from a vacation to somewhere in South America. As she stood there and described in glorious detail the young stud she hooked up with while she was there, you silently handed her one of the aforementioned MISFortune Cookies. She opened it, read the fortune, and her face turned deathly pale. You picked up the slip of paper, read it, and handed it to me; on it was printed a single word: "FERTILITY."

I remember it well, except the restaurant was a few miles south, in Severna Park. It is long closed, and for the young lady in question, who met the guy at Machu Picchu, the fortune could just as well have read “DIVORCE.”

Happily, the young lady went on to a fine career as a foreign correspondent for another newspaper – one that still has a strong commitment to international reporting.

And now, what you've all been waiting for:

Today's fortune cookie message

You have an unusually magnetic personality.
(As long as it don't erase the hard drive....)

Daily number: 754

Obama speech as 'Word Cloud'

(By Bonnie Schupp)

Obama "Wordle": Word size shows frequency of use.

Compare their speeches:
Obama, Lincoln, FDR, King

Bonnie Schupp's blog Journeys offers "Wordle" depictions of Barack Obama's inaugural address, as well as those of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural, FDR's "The only thing we have to fear...." and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream."

For the comparison, visit Bonnie's blog for an explanation of how it works and to click on the image there to see larger views.

And her observation for today: Great day for gardening! We pulled up a Bush and sowed seeds of hope!

Inauguration Day

America awakens to hope,
promise as long national
nightmare ends

Well, maybe that’s premature. You hope the nightmare is at least beginning to end. For the mess that Barack Obama inherited just past noon today is not going to disappear anytime soon.

But as Obama observed in his inaugural speech before a crowd that could have been the largest ever assembled on the planet, the ground underfoot surely has shifted. You could sense, if not literally feel, the earth move.

Watching George W. Bush & Co. stride down the back steps of the Capitol to the waiting helicopter, and the Strangelovian image of Dick Cheney in a wheelchair – putting a large glove on his hand to complete the picture – in their departure from the world stage was stunning.

For all the joy experienced by the uncountable hundreds of thousands who endured the cold to watch the inauguration from the packed National Mall facing the elevated stage below the Capitol, my living room was a great place to witness history, too, on a wide-screen, high-def TV.

It’s a tradition, if a far cry from the tiny black-and-white TV on which I watched the first inauguration I can sort of remember – that of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. I recall we were sent home early from school for the occasion; I was in second grade then, at Baltimore’s old Louisa May Alcott School No. 59. I can’t really remember Eisenhower taking the oath, but I at least have the dim memory of watching the parade.

How much, after all, does one remember from being a 7-year-old sitting on the floor in front of a fuzzy, low-def, small-screen TV. But there’s just enough there to make the pomp and pageantry seem familiar and comforting, and now all the more powerful emotionally when the inauguration represents so clearly a fork in the road of history.

America is continuing its journey. A fork is not a right turn, or a left. It is a bearing of direction, a shift.

But this fork seems wider than others.

There’s no map, no way to see ahead – only hope that we’re finally on the right path.

JFK: 45 Years

Photo of ill-fated Dallas motorcade, by Victor Hugo King. (Wikipedia)

A day seared in memory
seemed little remembered

Feels a little odd, so little fanfare of remembrance over the JFK assassination – despite an anniversary divisible by 5.

Likely more than half of the world’s current population wasn’t yet born when Lee Harvey Oswald took aim from the Dallas schoolbook depository building and popped off some of the most disputed rifle shots in the history of humankind.

The spot where the presidential convertible was passing, top down, when the bullets took down John F. Kennedy and wounded Texas Gov. John Connally, has become a bizarre testament to history – marked by an X where tourists wait for a lull in traffic to pose for pictures.

The nearby “grassy knoll” became an equally odd landmark – a little berm at the roadside from which, conspiracy theorists maintained, other shots were fired.

Forty-five years ago today: I vividly remember exactly where I was – walking to my American history class at what was then Baltimore Junior College – when I heard the news from a fellow student, a Greek immigrant named Gus I recall as rather right-wing in his politics.

“They shot Kennedy, they shouldn’t have shot him,” he said, rushing in the opposite direction from the cluster of portable classroom buildings where I was headed.

A powerful word: They.

And in using it, Gus – wittingly or not – was certainly one of the first to give voice to there having been a conspiracy behind the killing.

My professor, Dr. Wilson Valentine, a retired naval commander, was in tears. He told us all to go home and watch the unfolding events on TV, saying: “I can’t teach history on a day like this.”

I noticed Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theory movie, “JFK,” was airing on a cable TV channel tonight. Heard a mention of the anniversary sometime during the day on National Public Radio.

Forty-five years.

Can’t help but wonder how different the world might have been had the top been up on Kennedy’s car as he rode through the center of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, or in the long haul of history, how much the same.

There’s been a lot of harking to Kennedy lately in the election of Barack Obama – the first senator since JFK to win the presidency, with the youngest family since those “Camelot” days about to take up residency in the White House.

Maybe that has something to do with it: Why, on the 45th anniversary of that horrible day, the remembrance seems so unremembered of a tragedy we must never forget.

Bonnie Blogistic Again: A Cloudy Turn-On

Word clouds give new look

to McCain, Obama speeches

But they're not up in the air

Think of these political speeches as art: Barack Obama's victory, John McCain's concession. But they're not so much for listening as seeing -- as "word clouds."

What in the world is a “word cloud,” you ask? Well, if you go to http://www.wordle.net/, you will read that “Wordle is a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

Here is a word cloud created from President-Elect Obama’s victory speech.

The text of the speech can be found here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-t_n_92077.html

And here is a word cloud created from Senator McCain’s concession speech.

The text for this speech can be found here:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hmJfimrZW3jBur_BmaFtqj7mfFgQD948JFJG5

And then I was curious about how David’s blog post, the letter to Barack Obama, would form as a word cloud. Here it is:

After I created these, I discovered that I wasn’t the only person to do this type of political art. A blogger created word clouds from the vice-presidential debate transcript (again, using Wordle). You can see the word clouds of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin’s here:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/3/0223/35665/837/618518

You can draw your own conclusions. Or you can go to http://www.wordle.net/ and "draw" your own -- having fun with whatever text you want to "cloud."

Enjoy!