Matt Yglesias

RNC Chair Steele Says Republicans Are Untrustworthy

Amusing:

Interesting messaging concept.

Michael Steele’s Bad Math

One unfortunate aspect of human psychology is that people aren’t good at understanding magnitudes that are far outside the range of ordinary experience. Everyone’s very clear on the fact that 50 eggs is a lot more eggs than seven eggs. But the difference between a $50,000,000 budget item and a $7,000,000 budget item tends to get fuzzy. And it gets worse when you start using words in place of numerals. $5 billion is a lot more than $5 million—$4,995,000,000 more to be exact—but the two words sound similar and look similar on the page. Which brings us to things like this bit of rounding by Michael Steele:

When families keep the money, they spend it, save it, or invest it. And the private sector economy benefits when families and businesses buy consumer goods or invest it for the future. But when Washington spends the money, some of it may flow into the economy, but all too often, much gets wasted.

Democrats in Congress want a one-trillion dollar spending bill. You’ve heard about the pork-barrel programs they want to fund… 45 million dollars for ATV trails and removal of fish passage barriers is one that caught my eye. Exactly what is a fish passage barrier and why does it cost 45 million dollars to stimulate the economy with it?

There are about a million things wrong with this argument (to be saved for future posts) but just note that there’s a big difference between rounding 85 cents up to one dollar and rounding $850 billion up to $1 trillion. Nobody would call a candy bar that costs $1 a “$150 billion candy bar.” And yet $1 is, in absolute terms, closer to $150 billion than $850 billion is to $1 trillion. Of course that comparison isn’t entirely fair, the percentage difference matters as well. But the fact remains that when you’re dealing with very large magnitudes, these kind of decisions to round up or down—especially when the decision is made to add rhetorical force to the point—can wind up obscuring huge actual quantities. It’s true that if you round the recovery package’s cost to the nearest number you can express with one numeral followed by a word that it’s a “$1 trillion” plan. But it actually costs much less than $1 trillion.

Meanwhile, it’s worth saying that to call it a “one-trillion dollar spending bill” is just a flat-out lie. There are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tax cuts in the package. Some of them are there for good reason, others we’d do better to do away with. But either way, they’re there. Anyone who’s calling the bill a pure spending package is lying.

Doing It With Twitter

Incumbent RNC Chairman Mike Duncan tries to hold onto his job and explain the future of conservatism:

“We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today,” Duncan ventured.

“Let me just say that I have 4,000 friends on Facebook,” contributed Blackwell, putting his hand on Dawson’s and Anuzis’s knees. “That’s probably more than these two guys put together, but who’s counting, you know?” Acknowledged Saltsman: “I’m not sure all of us combined Twitter as much as Saul.”

Not only is this, as Steve Benen says, weirdly inadequate to the size of the conservative predicament, it just doesn’t make any sense. I love Twitter. I have two Twitter feeds. I manage one with Twitterific and another with Twitterfox. And of course there’s my iPhone interfaces, too. Twitter’s neat, it’s fun, I enjoy it. But you can’t do political persuasion on Twitter and anyone who’s at all familiar with either Twitter or political persuasion could tell you that. It’s important for political movements to embrace new technologies, but part of embracing new technologies is understanding them and actually respecting what they’re for and Twitter is never going to be anything other than an incidental sideshow to political activism.

RNC Deliberately Dumping on Sarah Palin?

Intriguing evidence that they are from Stan Collender.

Relatedly, I was talking with colleagues this morning about Sarah Palin’s scheduled rollout of a health care plan and the difficulties of scheduling an event in Alaska that can be well-timed to get news coverage on the east coast. It was a reminder that a governor of Alaska will face some logistical hurdles in trying to remain in the national eye. I also suspect that needing to talk about how falling oil prices are causing economic harship will remind people that experience as the chief executive of an underpopulated petro-state has relatively little to do with big national issues.

McCain Video

You can’t help but admire the way John McCain refuses to exploit his wartime service for political gain.

Man Bites Dog

You might have thought that lavish conventions spreads were only for big business or that only Democrats would kowtow to public sector unions, but there was some rather nice stuff available at the “Labor Salutes the Republican Party” lunch event at the Dakota Jazz Club sponsored by the National Education Association in partnership with some other unions:

I should have some video up some of the strange spectacle of union leaders singing the praises of their GOP friends.

Party On

I hadn’t realized the right was even pretending that they’re taking a “sober” approach to the coincidence of their convention with Hurricane Gustav. But for the record: Politically problematic speech by unpopular incumbent president = canceled. Parties = not canceled. Indeed, your ThinkProgress team walked passed Minneapolis’ famed rock club 1st Avenue / 7th Street Entry and saw what I think was a fundraising event featuring Sammy Hagar. They told us we were in violation of the dress code and that getting in would cost $125 so we skipped it.

I think conservatism could use a better class of celebrity endorser.

One Man’s View

Apologies for the not-so-hot photo, had to snap this from the back seat of a moving car. But I think the message is clear:

I appreciate this guy’s concision and message discipline. The GOP has to be worried that some of their over-enthusiastic supporters — especially the “stand on a bridge holding a sign” crowd — will go too far and say explicitly racist stuff. Bad for America and bad for Israel, though, isn’t something you have to disavow.

AT&T Makes the Case for Patent Reform

Think the current patent process is corrupt, too open to abusive patent-seeking and unduly influenced by corrupt rent-seeking special interests? Well, AT&T is here to disabuse you of that notion:

Photo snapped at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport.

Convention Bumps

The idea of a “convention bump” is the kind of thing I’m instinctively suspicious of, but apparently the best political science out there indicates that it’s a real phenomenon. Via John Sides, Tom Holbrook has a discussion of the issue. I reproduced his key chart above.

Everything is Un-American

Conservatives seem to have become so accustomed to being able to define by fiat which things are manly “real American” activities and which only puny foreigners would engage in, that they’ve now gone completely ’round the bend. First we learned that real men don’t inflate the tires on their car properly, and now the RNC is mocking Barack Obama for taking his shirt off at the beach. Or maybe they think the problematic thing here is that he likes to vacation at the beach during the summer? Or something. But this all has at least the superficial appearance of excruciatingly normal behavior. What will be next — attacking Obama for shaving in the morning? Brushing his teeth?