The National Republican Senatorial Committee somewhat belatedly launched a fundraising pitch tied to Rand Paul's filibuster. As of this afternoon, they'd raised about $75,000 — or about a dollar for each of the 76,470 words Paul spoke.

The numbers for the GOP's senate campaign team get much more interesting than that. Using New York's word counts for the speech, we also learn that the NSRC pulled in about $54 each time Paul referred to himself. That's $1,190 for each mention of the president by name. Our own data shows that the NRSC got $153 each time someone mentioned drones — far more than they made by talking drones during the Bush administration.

Paul (and his compatriots) spoke for 12 hours, 52 minutes, meaning that he made the NRSC $97.15 a minute, or a robust $5,829 an hour — the amount earned by 804 people working the federal minimum wage. It's a buck-sixty-two a second — just about $114,000 less per-second than the federal government spends.

It's a pretty decent clip, but still one that means Paul has his fundraising work cut out for him. To match the $8 million he raised for his 2012 race, Paul would have to speak for 57-and-a-half straight days. At yesterday's pace of 99 words a minute (!), that's 8.2 million words — or War and Peace, 14 times.

And when he's done with that, he needs to allocate even more time to help the NRSC match the $117 million it raised in 2012 — specifically, two years, 105 days. In other words, he can't do it before 2014 midterms.

Better get Sen. Cruz on the mic, too.

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Philip Bump