While many presidential candidates head to the convention podium with an Ivy League degree in their back pockets, a majority of Republican vice presidential candidates in the last 24 years have come with a common qualification on their resumes.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney‘s selection of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate continued a trend of Republican vice presidential candidates with resumes boasting former and, now with Ryan, current membership, in the Republican Study Committee (RSC).

Six of the last seven presidential elections, and four of the last five tickets have featured RSC vice presidential candidates — former Vice President Dan Quayle (1988 and 1992), former Housing Secretary Jack Kemp (1996), former Vice President Dick Cheney (2000 and 2004), and now Ryan (2012).

Mitt Romney has selected strongly pro-life Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate. Ryan is a Wisconsin congressman know for his conservative stances on fiscal and budget issues but he is very strongly pro-life — saying he would never vote for abortion.

Ryan has made a solid pro-life pledge that will endear him to millions of voters looking for a pro-life Vice President to replace pro-abortion Vice President Joe Biden.

During the 2010 elections, Ryan told The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, “I’m as pro-life as a person gets.”

He responded to a controversial “truce” that Mitch Daniels of Indiana had put forward saying social issues should be put on the back burner, and repudiated it.

“You’re not going to have a truce. Judges are going to come up.

Romney aides invited reporters to their campaign headquarters for a background briefing on the Republican presidential candidate's upcoming bus tour which will roll through the battleground states of Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio over the next four days.

"In 2008 these states were all won by Obama but this time around his support has eroded considerably," said Senior Advisor Eric Fehrnstrom. "Even though his team is pouring tons of resources into these states, the bad economy continues to hang over Obama like a dark cloud."

The briefing however quickly turned into an intense assault on what the Romney team sees as distortions coming from President Obama.

"You've all witnessed the Obama campaign's desperate tactics. They've gone from what started as petty distortions and untruths to unbelievable exaggerations that diminish the office of the president and insult the American people," said Fehrnstrom.

Mitt Romney asked Thursday where all the "hope and change" has gone, as President Obama's supporters pressed ahead with plans to air a misleading TV ad and a top campaign aide was accused of "lying" about her knowledge of its contents.

The Republican presidential candidate, in his most forceful comments to date, suggested Obama's supporters should be "embarrassed" over the super PAC ad that ties him to a woman's death from cancer. But he wasn't holding out hope that the group would pull it down, after the Democratic operative behind the ad claimed it'll be airing soon in battleground states despite the furor.

"You know, in the past when somebody pointed out that something was inaccurate campaigns either pulled the ad - they were embarrassed," Romney said on Bill Bennett's "Morning in America" radio show. "Today, they just blast ahead"...

The battle between President Obama and Mitt Romney reached new levels of rancor Thursday, with each campaign accusing the other of lying over Romney's tenure at private-equity firm Bain Capital.

The charges flew at a rapid pace, and by the end of the day the Romney campaign was calling for an apology after a senior Obama campaign official said the Republican presidential candidate may have committed a felony.

Obama official Stephanie Cutter made the claim following a Boston Globe article that said documents show Romney was in charge at Bain for three years longer than he had claimed. Cutter said Romney was either misrepresenting his position at Bain to the Securities and Exchange Commission, "which is a felony," or misrepresenting to the American people.

Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades issued a blistering statement in response...

President Obama has a very complicated argument to make as he works to sell his plan for higher taxes on top earners.

Calling for higher taxes on anyone in an election year during a fresh economic slowdown is tough. Obama and his campaign may be having some success in stoking resentment at the rich in general and Republican Mitt Romney specifically, but when Democrats talk about raising taxes, voters get anxious. It reinforces the most unpopular part of the blue team’s brand: tax-and-spend liberalism, a label that could prove toxic to Obama’s re-election hopes.

The president has tried to soften the blow in his current push for higher taxes by saying that he wants to give a $2,000 tax break to middle-class families next year.

But there is no tax cut. Rather, Obama is offering the one-year delay of a tax increase on middle-income households from current rates, some more than a decade old.

Republicans are turning the tables on the Obama campaign, launching an aggressive effort to cast the president as the "outsourcer in chief" in response to Democrats labeling Mitt Romney an "outsourcing pioneer."

The belated counter-attack comes weeks after President Obama's campaign seized on a Washington Post story examining how Romney's former company Bain Capital invested in firms that provided outsourcing services like call centers.

As it happens, the Republican National Committee on Tuesday pointed to a new Post story -- this one examining Obama's "outsourcing" record -- as the GOP unveiled a website that outlines in fine detail how federal dollars under the Obama administration funded foreign projects.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who traveled to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Tuesday for a press conference shortly before Obama arrived to speak at a community college, told Fox News that Republicans are "getting aggressive" with this message...

Four more chances.

That's what President Obama has left to prove he's helped turn the economy around -- with just four more monthly jobs reports remaining before the November election. Those reports could determine whether he gets four more years.

The last three employment snapshots released by the Labor Department have been persistently weak, and marked a distinct slowdown from earlier in the year. In the latest report, the department said employers added a meager 80,000 jobs in June, leaving the unemployment rate unchanged at 8.2 percent. The number of jobs added in June was lower than expected, and rounded out a poor second quarter for 2012.

The average number of monthly jobs created in the first quarter of the year was 226,000 -- by contrast, that average in the second quarter was just 75,000.

With the economy typically polling as the top issue in the 2012 race, Obama is now under heavy pressure to demonstrate a turnaround sometime between July and October.

The Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling on Thursday cuts right to the very fabric of the relationship between a once-limited government and a once-free citizen, but the eternal struggle between liberty and tyranny endures. It is a beginning, not an end.

As enormously important as the high court’s Obamacare ruling is - and it’s huge - it’s not the final word. The legal and political dust has not yet settled, and it will take some time for the unpredictable ripples to form the powerful waves of history. Yet, history waits for no man, so we begin by asking: What now?

First, we mourn. We mourn that a nation built on the principle of limited government has grown the largest government in the history of humankind. We mourn that our Supreme Court rewrote Obamacare into Obamatax to allow for the individual mandate. We mourn that once again we read the lips of a president who promised he would not raise our taxes but did so anyway.

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney's first traditional campaign trip of the general election, a six-state trek by bus, is aimed at swaying undecided voters living outside America's big cities. To hear his advisers tell it, he'll be visiting the towns President Barack Obama forgot.

The former Massachusetts governor is planning to roll through at least 14 small cities and towns over five days on his "Every Town Counts" tour. His aides say he will stop in the kinds of places that are hurting because of the bad economy -- not those, they say, that Obama has in mind when he speaks about how to make things better.

The tour begins in New Hampshire on Friday and continues to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan...