Pretty much as I predicted nearly three weeks ago, Hillary Clinton has wiped clean her server so that there’s no chance of reviewing the emails she did not turn over to the Department of State.  Here’s what her lawyer wrote to Congressman Trey Gowdy:

To avoid prolonging a discussion that would be academic, I have confirmed with the secretary’s IT support that no emails…..for the time period January 21, 2009 through February 1, 2013 reside on the server or on any back-up systems associated with the server.

That won’t stop people from trying to find a way to still recover those emails, but let me offer a word of advice: it’s not going to happen and you’re getting played here.

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Cable News Trending Topics for 2015-03-14

I’m not sure what people were talking about yesterday on Cable News Twitter — certainly no dominant topic.  That happens, I guess.  We do know who was saying it: the viewers of Fox News’ Cashin’ In and their hashtag #WakeUpAmerica:

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It is fun to make up sentences out of the most popular words.  I bet “Obama now will like us” is probably not quite what people were saying, though.  Although “Hillary people: police know” is intriguing.  “Say truth President” — could be.

Raw data: 2015-03-14-TagStats.csv and 2015-03-14-WordStats.csv

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A mystery is happening this weekend.  My blog — this blog — normally gets under a hundred visitors a day.  Sometimes there’s a burst of activity, frequently tied to the fact that I have a list of all the US Senators’ Twitter accounts — somebody has a hot button issue and tells everyone to come to my site to get their representative’s account.  That’s very nice.  But this weekend, Google has been visiting a lot.  Not declaring itself to be a search engine, mind you, but clearly in an automated fashion thinly disguised as a user.  Here’s what I’ve seen:

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Everyone who uses Twitter is familiar with and uses hashtags.  But the usage of hashtags is not uniform; some people use them to identify specific topics while others use them as a sort of group identity. For those who use them as group identity, their hashtags tend to stand out in the crowd because of the consistent and widespread usage of them.  Topics come and go from day to day, but groups persist.  And that gives group hashtags unique staying power.

In the realm of US politics, conservative Twitter users tend to focus on a small set of group hashtags that get high usage as a result.  Here are the top conservative hashtags, as a percentage of overall english language tweets:

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