Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign toasted its top donors today aboard a 150-foot yacht flying the flag of the Cayman Islands, ABC News reports.

“The exclusive event, hosted by a Florida developer on his yacht ‘Cracker Bay,’ was one of a dozen exclusive events meant to nurture those who have raised more than $1 million for Romney’s bid.”

Stephen Colbert teaches Republicans about the female body.

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Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) said that he believes Rep. Todd Akin (R) will ultimately decide to withdraw his U.S. Senate bid in Missouri, The Hill reports.

Said Blunt: “I didn’t say I was confident … I’m hopeful he will and I believe he will. He’s an engineer, he’s a quantitative guy. I think at some point you have to add up the columns here, and my belief is that by anyway you add them up, they don’t add up.”

Meanwhile, John Fund reports “behind-the-scenes efforts to figure out a way to have Akin exit from the Senate race before the final deadline of September 25 continue unabated.”

“By the time I get to town, the delegates may have decided to nominate
Ann instead. And wouldn’t that be interesting? And do you think if Ann
were the nominee, the press would write stories about how my job is to
humanize Ann? I don’t think so.”

— Mitt Romney, introducing his wife via video to a crowd at the GOP convention in Tampa.

A new Public Policy Polling survey in Connecticut finds Rep. Chris Murphy (D-CT) just ahead of Linda McMahon (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 48% to 44%.

The poll confirms results of a Quinnipiac poll yesterday that also found this race unexpectedly close.

Meanwhile, President Obama leads Mitt Romney in the presidential race by 13 points, 53% to 40%.

CNN reports that two people were removed from the Republican National Convention yesterday after they threw nuts at an African-American CNN camera operator and said, “This is how we feed animals.”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will accept the Republican party’s vice presidential nomination tonight.

First Read: “Already a full-fledged star in the Republican Party, Ryan has the potential to rock the crowd here in Tampa. After all, he can do it with biography (his family, the loss of his father, his love of hunting) as well as policy (the Ryan budget). And it will be the biggest speech of his political career so far. But let’s also not get too carried away about the VP nominee speech; Palin’s was the exception. (Beyond her, name another impactful VP nominee speech. The memorable convo speeches are almost all keynotes, spouses and top of tickets, not the VP.)”

Matt Taibbi: “But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.”

“By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place…”

“If Romney pulls off this whopper, you’ll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It’s almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.”

McKay Coppins: “Since Romney announced his second presidential campaign 15 months ago, his strategy in dealing with questions about his Mormon faith could be boiled down to three steps: duck, dodge, and weave. But the past two weeks, the candidate and his team of advisers have made a dramatic about-face in their approach to the religion question… an unexpected series of moves that comprise, as one campaign adviser conceded, ‘a total 180.'”

“The official explanation for the sudden shift in strategy is that the campaign was always waiting for Tampa — where they would have tight control over the choreography and the narrative — to start telling Mitt’s Mormon story… But the decision to start owning his religion on the campaign trail was more complicated — and personal — than a mere convention course correction.”

Ross Douthat: “One useful way to think about Mormon culture is to envision an outpost
of old-fashioned Yankees dropped down in the Mountain West.”

A new CBS News poll finds that 45% of voters are paying a lot of attention to the campaign, 34% say they are at least paying some attention, but 20% say they are tuning out the election almost entirely.

Huffington Post: “Among all the rhetoric and exultant language on the first day of the 2012 Republican Convention, one phrase was notably absent: Bain Capital.”

“Not a single speaker was heard mentioning the name of the private equity firm founded by the Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney… It shows how toxic Bain has become for the former Massachusetts governor after sustaining attacks both from fellow Republicans during a vicious primary race and more recently from President Barack Obama’s campaign, which highlighted Bain’s investment in companies that sent American jobs overseas.”

As Rep. Paul Ryan prepares to introduce himself to the nation in a prime-time speech at the Republican convention tonight, the Obama campaign offers their own take on Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate.

Politico: “The video harkens back to the newsreel days of old, using grainy, black-and-white footage to try and portray the GOP vice presidential nominee as a throwback to a bygone era.”

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“A well-placed Republican source tells Townhall that Oscar-winning director and actor Clint Eastwood will travel to Tampa, Florida to attend Mitt Romney’s nominating convention this week… Our source — who spoke on the condition of anonymity — could not confirm if Eastwood is, in fact, the intriguing ‘to-be-announced’ speaker, but stated unequivocally that the Dirty Harry star will arrive in Florida late on Wednesday or early on Thursday, and will return to southern California on Friday.”

With the Republican convention seemingly crafted around President Obama’s infamous “you didn’t build that,” the Washington Post fact-checkers reevaluated their take on the line which they say was merely a grammatical error by the president.

“We originally gave Romney’s use of the phrase Three Pinocchios… However, in light of the GOP’s repeated misuse of this Obama quote in speech after speech, we feel compelled to increase the Pinocchio rating to Four. (Warning to Democrats: You will get the same scrutiny of out-of-context Romney quotes next week. It’s really a silly thing on which to base a campaign.)”

The AP obtained an early copy of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden, a firsthand account of the Navy SEAL raid that killed the terrorist leader and notes it “contradicts previous accounts by administration officials, raising questions as to whether the terror mastermind presented a clear threat when SEALs first fired upon him.”

The author “also writes disparagingly that none of the SEALs were fans of U.S. President Barack Obama and knew that his administration would take credit for ordering the May 2011 raid. One of the SEALs said after the mission that they had just gotten Obama re-elected by carrying out the raid.”

Many Democrats believe Mitt Romney’s “decision to inject welfare into the campaign — with a factually inaccurate ad claiming Obama had reversed Clinton-era work requirements — was an unmistakable, if coded, effort to imply that the first black president stands for handouts for lazy people,” Politico reports.

“Combined with a recent lead-balloon joke by Romney about controversy over Obama’s birthplace, Democrats have concluded that Romney is making deliberate appeals to prejudiced whites.”

“Many Republicans — with years of resentment over how they believe Democrats and the media seek to throw them on the defensive on racial issues — howled that Vice President Joe Biden was exploiting racial fears when he told a majority-black audience in Virginia that the GOP’s Wall Street allies want to ‘put you all back in chains.'”