We know something’s afoot when the BBC runs one of these for Obama’s Cairo speech, and a client asks for an automated version the same day. So we thought we’d stuff FlyingChainSaw’s recent Rush Limbaugh post into the word blender and see what pours out.

Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds

Every month, in an assembly that must be as dreadful to present as it is to attend, students at Peninsula High School in Tacoma, Washington, gather for “Rhetoric Revels,” where they read their essay assignments aloud to each other.

But dashing our prejudice against Flamboyant Nerdism is a 17-year-old student who saw Tuesday morning’s session as a teachable moment. Following his paper advocating marijuana legalization, he pulled out a joint and lit up.

And then he ate the evidence.

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• China Pays for Hummer
• Happy Ending for Hummer?
• Americans Lose Taste for Hummers

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhijqQVjlFI

Words in segment: 574

Words condemning murderer: 49

Words condemning victim: 133

Words condemning critics: 327

Words apologizing for previous words: 0

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We weren’t aware that Politico was in the business of contriving wingnut memes, but they took a Chrysler-worthy stab at the market last week with their report that the White House flack has a disturbingly healthy sense of humor.

Politico’s unassailable methodology: Count the number of times “[Laughter.]” appears in briefing transcripts. More than 600, apparently, dwarfing also-ran Tony Snow’s 217 larfs during his first four months.

We’ll grant that this approach has a glorious tradition behind it, from tallying Nixon’s expletives deleted on an abacus, to harnessing the latest supercomputer for a statistical analysis of Blago’s fuckfests. We’ll even allow a passing amusement in calculating Robert Gibbs’ Word/Chortle Ratio.

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Since Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network saw fit to bring up Plessy v. Ferguson in relation to the Sotomayor nomination (after we brought it up in relation to the Prop 8 decision), we thought we’d take a moment to revisit this week’s featured Supreme Court decision.

Long, shouting at Chris Matthews, was trying to demonstrate that justice doesn’t require a diverse court:

An all-male white court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson in Brown v. Board of Education.

As our own Serolf Divad noted, this overlooks the historical curiosity that an all-male white court gave us Plessy in the first place — a legacy that lasted almost sixty years.

But what caught our attention was her additional remark:

What happened was, Plessy was a lawless decision. Brown is what the Constitution, and all men being created equal, and the aspirations of our Declaration of Independence, are all about.

Lawless?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhK-f3GE1nE

For this morning’s seminar, we welcome Congressman Tom Price of the Republican Study Committee. Congressman Price has graciously accepted our invitation to create a hypothetical ad illustrating yesterday’s topic, “If you’re going quote someone out of context, remember to omit the context.”

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