The other day I actually heard a radio spot for Meg Whitman that wasn’t just a scurrilous attack on her Republican primary opponent Steve Poizner. I was taken aback. I nearly had to pull over. You see, Mrs. Whitman put out a forty-eight page “plan for California” outlining how she’s going to fix our state government. Previously all I knew about her campaign is that she historically hasn’t participated in politics even as a voter and that Steve Poizner is the anti-Christ or something.

I checked out her site this morning and found a PDF version of the document. I wasn’t sure what I expected, exactly, but it had a fair amount of stuff in it. Being the lazy citizen than I am, I hit ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+tab and went to Wordle to let it pare everything down for me. From the resulting graphic (above), I can deduce that the plan consists largely of Meg Whitman and the state of California, along with some new taxes from the government. Good luck with that, Mrs. Whitman.

*edit: After a little fun with sed, sort, and uniq on my commandline, I preprocessed the House Reconcilliation Bill to the point where Wordle could handle it. The following mess is without “common English words,” and I tried to get rid of some of the words like “section” and “subsection” that are just the legalese equivalent of hypertext:

Sorted with the command cat reconcile.txt | tr ” ” “n” | sort -fbi | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed -e ‘s/^[ t]*//’ | sed -e ‘s/([0-9]*) (.*)/2:1/’ with its output available here. I had a heck of a time getting sed to use the [:punct:] POSIX notation, hence all the parentheticals that slipped through the cracks.

*Edit again: The Senate version, after similar massaging as the reconciliation bill:

Trimming out some of the section numbers and words like “paragraph” and “subsection” reveals that there are a lot of damned typos in there. 845 instances of “seretary,” for example.