Gop, Mitt Romney | featured news

Conservatives had hoped that Mitt Romney’s choice of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.) as his running mate would make Romney act more like Ryan — bold, specific, confident.

...The Romneys gave $4.1 million to charity, but only took a deduction of 2.5 million of that in order to make sure their tax rate stayed above 14 percent... If he loses, he might be able to file an amended return and claim those deductions anyway.

Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, paid $1.94 million in federal income taxes on 2011 income of $13.7 million, most of it from investments, for an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent, his campaign said Friday.

After dominating the fundraising race for much of the summer, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney started the fall campaign sprint with a little more than $50 million available to spend and a large loan to repay, campaign-finance reports filed Thursday show.

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.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has resigned as a national co-chairman of Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign to lobby for Wall Street. He has also ruled out a run for governor or Senate in Minnesota in 2014....

In a brief and hastily called news conference Monday just after 10 p.m., Mr. Romney acknowledged having made the blunt political and cultural assessment, saying it was “not elegantly stated,” but he stood by the substance of the remarks, insisting that he had made similar observations in public without generating controversy.

...He dismissed these Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, who don't assume responsibility for their lives, and who think government should take care of them.

Hours after Mitt Romney’s campaign promised that the GOP nominee would begin to offer new policy prescriptives, Romney stumped in Los Angeles on Monday at a gathering of Latino business leaders, promising to cut federal spending, help small businesses and reform a “broken” immigration system. But he offered no new details on how he would accomplish these goals.

The Romney campaign, it seems fair to conclude, is in panic mode and maybe already convinced they’ve lost. Today brings stories in the New York Times, BuzzFeed and Politico about the campaign “abruptly switching strategy” and making “a painful course correction” — never a good sign when you’re just 50 days away from Election Day.