47% | featured news

James Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, may have been the one to make the video of Mitt Romney's damning remarks about the "47 percent" in the run-up to the presidential election last year go mainstream, but the man who actually shot the video has remained a mystery, until now. The filmmaker has been revealed as a bartender that was working at the dinner for wealthy Republican owners, and will reveal his full identity this evening.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has described his disparaging remarks about the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes as "not elegantly stated." Now he's calling them "just completely wrong."

The presidential campaigns and their allies began the week with aggressive attacks on the candidates’ records ahead of the first presidential debate on Wednesday. In an opinion article published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney accused President Obama of foreign policy failures, saying that the president had allowed the nation’s influence to atrophy by “stepping away” from American allies overseas.

After a secretly recorded videotape was released on Sept. 17 showing Mitt Romney making unflattering comments about the “47 percent” of Americans who he said had become dependent on government benefits, I suggested on Twitter that the political impact of the comments could easily be overstated.

Mitt Romney stepped up his efforts to repair the damage from his “47 percent” comments, trying to reassure voters that he cares about the poor and middle class.

New polling by Reuters/Ipsos indicates that during the past two weeks - since just after the Democratic National Convention - support for Romney among Americans age 60 and older has crumbled, from a 20-point lead over Democratic President Barack Obama to less than 4 points.

Now, at least, there can be no doubt about who is waging class warfare in this presidential campaign. Mitt Romney would pit the winners against the “victims,” the smug-and-rich against the down-on-their-luck, the wealthy tax avoiders against those too poor to owe income tax. He sees nearly half of all Americans as chumps who sit around waiting for a handout.

A senior Palestinian official says Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is undermining hopes for peace and democracy in the Middle East. A senior Palestinian official says Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is undermining hopes for peace and democracy in the Middle East.

Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he would represent “100%” of Americans, striving to dampen a controversy that has dogged him since Monday, when video surfaced of him saying nearly half the nation’s voters were dependent on the government and would never support him because he would not be able to convince them to take responsibility for their lives.

Fighting criticism of his controversial remarks on government dependency, Republican challenger Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he would better help poor and middle class Americans than President Barack Obama.