Make a donation of $30 or more now to help the DNC pay for these efforts, and you’ll get a commemorative 2008 Victory T-shirt.

The bigger issue, however, is how much money the Obama campaign has left.
The Obama campaign could transfer remaining funds over to the DNC.

Oh, definitely. Better if it’s hard to trace at all. You get a promotional letter in the mail that looks like it came from the Obama campaign or the DNC. Where did it really come from? Maybe good detective work can track it down to somebody who does misleading mailings for a living, who didn’t really know who was paying him.

Or email, even more so.

And it’s very cheap to run the fraudulent campaign. You don’t even need any t-shirts.

And of course if someone did this, there would have to be plausible deniability from the campaign that did the disinformation – it would have to look like a lone book depository employee running it all, if someone too closely affiliated to a campaign was caught organising it, it could backfire badly.

. . . sob . . . LEAVE ABI ALONE!

Oh, wait, you’re talking about the other Titmuss.

herman greg wins this thread, not breaking a sweat. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Whatever might be said against it, the New Testament is great art that great artists keep grave-robbing.

stostosto, soshulizm might be “to each according to his needs”, but in the real world, it’s more like “to each according to whatever it takes to shut them up, so when you toss out your final insulting offer, try to say something that leaves them collecting their jaws off the floor.” And that seems more relevant here. You were cute, though.

Let’s pretend for a moment that this has nothing to do with giving gifts, and is just a market. C’mon, it’ll only hurt for a minute. I’m only an armchair economist anyway, so you can blow this thought of mine out your left nostril at any time.

Lokman notes an observation made in 2006 by Turow that actually goes back to the dawn of Internet e-commerce. It’s been said ad nauseum that the Web, by creating greater price transparency, makes price discrimination much harder. No news there. It’s been said (less often, by economists) that price discrimination is, in some markets, the only way to make enough profit to have a hope of staying in business at all. Transparency beats prices down, and a market of firms operating on razor-thin margins is unstable, very likely coalescing into monopoly if not for anti-trust deterrence, or periodic “creative destruction” from upstart innovators. Schumpeter even used this phenomenon as part of his dour argument for the eventual triumph of s*cialism, believe it or not.

Then there’s Peter Drucker, who said all organizations, even “non-profits”, need to store up profit of some kind, and his proposal that profit (in competitive markets at least) should be called “the cost of staying in business” instead. And isn’t a political party a kind of “non-profit organization”?

Now, if you Google “Austan Goolsbee” and “price discrimination” you won’t find him using the term, but you’ll find he’s done a bit of work with pricing stuff online and price sensitivity among on-line customers. So I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that he’d like to publish another paper or two before he goes full-time for the Obama administration. I mean, they’ve got all these t-shirt to get rid of anyway, and the storage costs for them. Why not do an econ experiment?

Are the t-shirts horrid? Irrelevant. Recall the scene in “Basquiat” where Warhol and art dealer Bruno excitedly shuffle Basquiat’s miniatures back and forth over the lunch table, like two children playing cards. When the shuffle settles down, Warhol complains, “Oh Bruno . . . you have everything that’s good.” Bruno hisses back: “It’s not how good they are, it’s what you can get for them.”

So I agree with lemuel pitkin: this is actually smart. But I also understand the offense taken by some as well. Still, Righteous Bubba’s amusement notwithstanding, maybe you should take your cue from Joe Biden: considering paying the donation suggested, because . . . paying more when you can afford to pay more is your patriotic duty. You can always just burn the t-shirt when it comes in the mail.

To put it another way, the party would gladly give those shirts away for free, except that people value them more if they have to earn them. Think ‘Crew’ shirts of events.

Did anybody actually get a different e-mail from this? For example, MattF, what exactly was the phrasing of yours? My current guess is that in fact everybody got the same e-mail, with different numbers substituted for $500, and that they all stated that $30 was the minimum amount for a T-shirt. If this is right, then it’s just a matter of how carefully the recipients read the e-mail.

Or pure deep black.

Or half black, half white.

http://www.236.com/video/2008/get_your_war_on_new_world_orde_10121.php

Perhaps Craid Stolz, who wrote the TechPresident piece, could send $30 to the DNC, get the shirt, then sell it to his friend for $50. The magic of the market!

Obviously this fundraising policy doesn’t make sense, because, assuming perfect information, only people being asked to donate the minimum amount would buy their shirts directly from the DNC. [/snark]

There was a giant backlash, a whole lot of people were offended at the questions.

Some years after that a czechoslovakian spy defected and wrote a book about his experience. He claimed that his boss ran a disinformation campaign; they sent a lot of insulting surveys that claimed to be from Project Camelot so that people in latin america would get mad at the USA. He praised the elegance of it—their costs were very low and they had a big effect, far more than many better-funded russian projects.

After that I didn’t know whether Project Camelot had been damaged by a czech plot, or whether Project Camelot itself offended people, and the czech defector’s book had that claim added to it so that Project Camelot wouldn’t look so bad in itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camelot

Could GOP dirty-tricks teams do a project-camelot-style attack? Insulting fundraising literature that purports to be from Democrats would be an obvious method, though this example seems both too subtle and too weak.

In general if you get something offensive it might make sense to check with the actual organization it comes from (contacted by some other method than responding to the address, phone number, email address or website provided with the offensive communication). I expect there’s more room to exploit disinformation than has actually been exploited yet, and the better you check sources the better it can be slowed as it ramps up.

About 9 o’clock he went out and saw other standing in the Lowe’s parking lot doing nothing. He told them, “You go work in my vineyard, and I will give you whatever is right.” So they went.

At noon he did the same thing, and at 5 o’clock, he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, “Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?”

“Because no one has hired us,” they answered.

He said, “Get to work in my vineyard!”

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said, “Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.”

The workers who were hired at 5 o’clock came and each received a t-shirt. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a dollar. When they received it, they began to grumble. “These men who were hired last worked only one hour,” they said, “and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.”

But he answered, “Friends, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a t-shirt? Take your shirt and go. I want to give the men who were hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own t-shirts? Or are you envious because I am generous?

So the last will be first, and the first will be last.