In an interview with CNBC, Eastwood spoke about the attention surrounding his speech, in which he addressed a chair with an invisible President Obama. "One thing about getting into the senior status of life, like I am, you don't really care," he joked. "You just say what you say and then you get away with it."

Watch:

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The vote was 310-95.

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla, who sponsored the legislation, says the government has spent about $224 million on the quadrennial gatherings of party faithful since 1976, when in the post-Watergate era it was considered a way to reduce the influence of money in politics.

He says this year federal assistance for the two conventions was about $35 million, slightly more than 20 percent of the total costs as the parties turn to private donors to pay for the lavish events. In 1980 federal grants paid for nearly 95 percent of convention costs.

"There's no need to be writing checks to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party," Cole said. "Clearly it's an idea whose time has come and gone."

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The AP reports that Susana Martinez, who spoke at the Republican National Convention, also said in the press conference that New Mexico has a lot of people living at at poverty line, "but they count just as much as anybody else."

"It doesn't matter what economic level you come from (or) what kind of jobs you have," she said. "I urge everyone ... that 47 percent, the middle class and the upper class to all get out on Election Day."

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10. "I voted for the Budget Control Act. But the Obama Administration proposed $478 billion in defense cuts. We don’t agree with that, our budget rejected that, and then on top of that is another $500 billion in defense cuts in the sequester." Truth: Ryan has been doing back flips to explain why he has been criticizing the Democrats for the $600 million "sequestration" cuts that will automatically go into effect if there's no budget compromise by December. Ryan, in fact, voted for those cuts. The sequestration cuts, along with $487 million in other defense cuts, were both a part of the Budget Control Act.  (September 9, 2012)

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"I only regret you're repeating it day in and day out. When you give a speech you don't go through a laundry list, you talk about the things that you think are important and I described in my speech, my commitment to a strong military unlike the president's decision to cut our military."

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The speakers at the DNC did plenty of things at their convention: explaining the economy President Obama inherited and the steps he took to turn it around, standing up for the rights of voters and women and gay people and immigrants, and outlining a clear vision of America based on the fundamental idea that we're all in it together.

But there's one notable thing speakers at the DNC barely did: lie.

Speaker after speaker stood up to praise the president's record and critique Mitt Romney's rhetoric with the sort of straightforward honesty that Americans should expect from political campaigns.  That’s not to say the campaign didn’t spin the facts.  Every political campaign massages the truth toward its own advantage and the Obama campaign is no different. But unlike Republicans who spouted known lie after known lie at their convention, pretty much every assertion at the DNC can be traced to some kernel of truth.

When, in his DNC speech, the president accused Mitt Romney of wanting to hand over Social Security to Wall Street, while it’s true that the Romney campaign has denied this agenda currently, the fact is both Romney and Paul Ryan supported privatizing Social Security in the past.

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“I had three points I wanted to make,” Eastwood told the Carmel Pine Cone, a paper from the city where he once served as mayor. “That not everybody in Hollywood is on the left, that Obama has broken a lot of the promises he made when he took office, and that the people should feel free to get rid of any politician who’s not doing a good job. But I didn’t make up my mind exactly what I was going to say until I said it.”

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In 2008, the Democratic National Platform Committee spoke to the anger, pride and righteousness of civil liberties-loving Democrats. The platform proudly said that "we will ensure that law-abiding Americans of any origin, including Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans, do not become the scapegoats of national security fears." In 2012, the Democratic National Convention dropped a Muslim prayer service from its online calendar after receiving criticism from conservative groups, and the FBI sent agents to question the Charlotte Muslim community about its event. Naturally, this year, the Democratic National Platform Committee doesn't mention Muslims or Arabs.

Meanwhile, writer JA Meyerson, attending the convention, overheard New York delegates derisively talking about Occupy Wall Street's fixation on drones and presumed whistle-blower Bradley Manning's torture and imprisonment. This type of talk, according to one delegate, was really alienating Democrats from Occupy Wall Street, who presumably should have been functioning as a support arm to the Democratic Party.

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Mitt did slightly better among Republicans, with 25 percent saying that his speech was the highlight compared to Eastwood's 19 percent.

Only 2 percent of overall viewers thought Chris Christie was the best part but they probably didn't ask him.

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"While I would love for [Chris] Christie to put a hot poker to Obama’s butt," Barbour told Bloomberg Businessweek. “I thought he did what he was supposed to do.”

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Romney’s suggestion that only business owners should occupy the White House was hardly surprising; it just reinforced the reverence for builders of small businesses manifested in the Republican gathering in Tampa. But it is a curious claim nonetheless. For most of the nation’s history, lawyers, educators and military men have dominated the roster of American presidents. Voters often questioned the public spiritedness of business leaders, looking to the White House less to unleash the energy of the free market than to shield them against its vicissitudes. Romney’s campaign embodies a recent, and very different, model of presidential leadership.

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What the right wants, and what they tried to build for themselves in Tampa, was a time machine.

Republicans are panting for a tricked-out DeLorean that can take them back! Back in time! To a period when the power structure was fixed and comfortable, when there were no black first ladies or black camerawomen, when loud Jewish ladies were not in charge of national political parties, back to a time when only a select few – the white, the male, the straight, the Protestant – could reasonably expect to exert political or financial or social or sexual power.

The desire to chronologically reverse our nation’s history has been the undercurrent of the 2012 election cycle and its primary debates; it’s barely been disguised in the agenda of John Boehner’s House or in state legislatures around the country.

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No minimum wage for the Mariana Islands. “The Pacific territories should have flexibility to determine the minimum wage, which has seriously restricted progress in the private sector.”

This caught our attention (and thanks to colleague Theresa Riley for sending) because it once again reminds us of the sordid past of evangelical and political entrepreneur Ralph Reed who, as this week’s edition of Moyers & Company reports in detail, has emerged from the ashes of epic career fail to reestablish himself as a powerful figure in Republican politics.

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We were sitting just outside the Tampa Bay Times Forum minutes after Mitt Romney spoke at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, and Berden, a grandmotherly delegate from Michigan, was talking about Ann Romney's declaration that women's lives are a little harder than men's. Berden agreed with Romney about that, and also, apparently, that it wasn't government's role to do anything about it. She'd told me that we'd been hearing so much this week about women because while "Democrats pander to women on reproductive rights, Republicans really respect women as joint partners."

I was surprised to hear her use the phrase "reproductive rights," which I'd never heard a conservative use. Berden blamed it on seeing Sandra Fluke on TV all the time, volunteering with a chuckle, "She's a grown woman, we shouldn't have to pay for her stupid birth control. She could cross her legs."

"To be fair," I replied, with some hesitation, "she never talked about herself. She talked about her friend who was raped, she talked about her friend who had a medical condition…"

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One way to think about vice-presidential candidates is in terms of the resources they bring to a ticket. Those might include popularity in a swing state, as when Dwight Eisenhower chose Richard Nixon; ability to raise money, as when John Kennedy picked Lyndon Johnson; policy expertise to cover a nominee’s weakness, as when Gov. Ronald Reagan added foreign policy experience in George H.W. Bush; or support from an important party faction, seen in John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin.

The idea is that any politician important enough to be considered will probably control some politically useful – and at least potentially transferable – assets.

Paul Ryan? He brought two resources to the Romney campaign. One was the enthusiastic support of conservatives. That’s something that Romney wanted to have, and it is intact after the convention. But it’s not exactly a scarce resource, because as we know the Republican Party is well-equipped to stir up support for even the most unknown candidates; just think back to the passionate embrace of the previously unknown Sage of Wasilla within hours of when she was chosen in 2008.

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What they did make time for at the convention included a song by the guy your grandma liked on "American Idol" a few years back, a speech by former Hooters promoter Connie Mack and an old man yelling at a chair.

The old man yelling at the chair was, of course, legendary American actor and director Clint Eastwood, who was invited because I think the organizers assumed he wasn't as crazy as every single other Republican celebrity, but then he went and did the craziest thing of the week. (I don't think Eastwood is crazy, actually. He's just ... eccentric.)

That had to be particularly galling, for Donald. This totally unvetted rambling piece of absurdist theater got prime billing right before the nominee, but the dumb video he made was just ignored completely.

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In the power struggle within the Republican Party for control of the politically important and emotionally fraught issue of immigration, Bailey has positioned himself as the anti-Kris Kobach. Kobach, the Yale-educated secretary of state of Kansas, though largely unknown to the outside world, has become the party's leading voice and advocate on immigration. He has advised Mitt Romney's campaign, helped write the hardline immigration laws in Arizona and a half dozen other states, and succeeded in adding his own language to the party’s new platform.

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"No," King stated plainly. "Obviously, we always have to be looking out at all times that the police maintain their proper role. But I think the Department of Homeland Security, and the police I deal with -- whether it's the FBI or the New York City Police Department -- no, I think civil liberties are being protected. Privacy is being protected. And considering the nature of the threat against us, I would say the police are remarkably restrained."

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The Donnie Darko Explanation

The president appears to Eastwood yesterday as a monstrous, soft-spoken bunny. He lures Clint out onto the streets of Tampa (“closer, closer”) and tells him the world will end in 28 days, six hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds. With nothing to lose, Clint lets the president lead him to the RNC stage, and now Clint will spend the next month committing increasingly desperate acts before ending it all in an epic confrontation with a guy in a rabbit suit (college football season is upon us, mascots beware).

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