Election 2012

With less than seven weeks to go before the presidential election, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is leaving his job as co-chairman of the Mitt Romney campaign to take a top Washington lobbying job.

Pawlenty, 51, will become the next CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, whose 100 members include many of the nation's largest banks and insurance and securities companies.

There appears to be no question that President Obama will win the lion's share of Hispanic support. But there are still very big questions to be answered about how many votes such support will translate into.

"What we know is that we don't know," says Ruy Teixeira, a political analyst at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank.

"If you're the Obama campaign, there's cause for concern, because at least so far, [Hispanic support] is not translating into encouraging data on the turnout front," he says.

This being America, the Galactic Capital of Capitalism, it's no wonder folks try to cash in on just about everything — including the presidential election.

Give us a big event — the Olympics, the World Series, a blockbuster movie — and we will offer you all kinds of foodstuffs and folderol that are linked, however loosely, to the occasion.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney took his effort to contain the damage from the video of his remarks about Americans who don't pay taxes to Fox News Channel Tuesday.

There, he acknowledged that some of those who don't pay federal income taxes are senior citizens and military service members.

Kansas City, Missouri voters will decide on only one city ballot measure in November, and it won't be the proposed blight-relief fees for billboard companies or a "no nukes" initiative from Peace Planters.

The day after GOP leaders called for Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin to withdrawal, his opponent, Claire McCaskill, didn't have much to say on the topic.

GOP officials and the Mitt Romney campaign have cut a deal with Texas Rep. Ron Paul's campaign to allow some — though not all — of Paul's delegates from Louisiana and Massachusetts to be seated at the Republican National Convention. The status of Maine's delegates remains unsettled.

The compromise would appear to avert a potential public clash with Paul supporters during the convention's opening day Monday.

Two new polls come to much the same conclusion about the 2012 presidential campaign:

Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin is apologizing for comments he made yesterday about rape that touched off bi-partisan criticism and outrage. Akin, who is running for the Senate seat in Missouri held by Democrat Claire McCaskill, told a television interviewer this weekend that women's bodies are able to prevent pregnancy caused by what he termed legitimate rape. Akin now says he made a mistake, but that he wont drop out of the race. Still, republicans from Mitt Romney on down are distancing themselves from him.

After Republican Rep. Todd Akin's inflammatory comments over the weekend in which he blithely minimized rape-induced pregnancies, there are at least two inescapable questions:

1) What impact will his remark have on his U.S. Senate race in Missouri against Democratic incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill?

2) And how much will the shockwaves buffet the presidential contest or other races elsewhere?

Saying that the comments "don't make sense to the American people" and were "way out there," President Obama just weighed in on the controversial remarks made over the weekend by Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., who said in a television interview that "if it's a legitimate rape," it's rare for a woman to get pregnant and therefore want an abortion.

Missouri’s GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin is facing a wave of criticism for comments he made during an interview about pregnancies caused by rape.