Gop, Republican | featured news

Lights, camera, action: The Republican National Convention officially begins today at 2 p.m. ET inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum. USA TODAY is providing full coverage throughout the three-day event, which wraps up Thursday when Mitt Romney accepts his party's presidential nomination. Check your local TV listings for more coverage. Here is our guide to the five things to watch on Tuesday, Aug. 28...

Into the carefully scripted Republican convention has come a complication: a natural disaster that not only distracts attention from Mitt Romney but sets up a collision with a fundamental tenet of today's GOP.

Tapping a popular idea to restore confidence in the dollar, the Republican Party is expected to call for a commission to look at the idea of returning the U.S. to the gold standard. To make that happen, they're going to have to find a lot more gold.

The Tampa Bay Times Forum has a new kind of scoreboard -- a "national debt clock" that is ticking up to $16 trillion. The ever-ticking clock, hanging above the delegates to the Republican convention, is designed to be "a compelling visual reinforcing the desperate need for new fiscal leadership in the White House," says the Republican National Committee.

Less than 12 miles away from the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Texas Rep. Ron Paul gave an impassioned farewell speech to about 8,000 raucous supporters at a farewell rally Sunday night where he declared the so-called Ron Paul Revolution was not over.

All the political attention might be focused on Republicans or even Tropical Storm Isaac, but that's not stopping President Obama from asking for more campaign money. In a new fundraising e-mail today geared to the swing state of Iowa, Obama says he's losing "the air war" and needs $5 or more from donors to pay for more campaign commercials.

Delegates began to arrive in Tampa on Sunday as convention organizers said they were still working on a revised schedule after canceling the first day because of the weather. Still, many of Sunday’s events were going ahead as planned.

Mitt Romney is shedding some light on lessons learned while he headed the private-equity firm Bain Capital, a key part of his presidential campaign narrative. In an op-ed column published in today's Wall Street Journal, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee discusses how his 15 years at the firm he co-founded laid the foundation for his work at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and then as governor of Massachusetts.

Mitt Romney's success in raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the costliest presidential race ever can be traced in part to a secretive data-mining project that sifts through Americans' personal information - including their purchasing history and church attendance - to identify new and likely, wealthy donors, The Associated Press has learned....

The website Gawker published online hundreds of pages of documents from investments made after Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital on Thursday. Romney's work at the firm, as well as statements he's made on the issue, have come under scrutiny over the course of the presidential campaign.