Jonathan Kantrowitz

What a great song! See if you can catch the Connecticut connection.

He’s preaching right-wing nonsense about medical malpractice lawsuits – with a clever but completely obnoxious ad:

This isn’t going to win him the Democratic nomination – Democrats know that restricting the right of injured parties to sue for compensation for their injuries is undemocratic.

Republicans – what do you do when the candidate with the awful resume has more sense than the candidate with the better resume?

Rick Green has the story:

It seems a day doesn’t go by when Rob Simmons and Linda McMahon don’t take aim at Democrats in the U.S. Senate for failing to do enough to create jobs and support private sector employers.

What will they do now that moderate Republicans in the U.S. Senate broke ranks this week to support a Democratic jobs initiative that feels like a Republican proposal? The jobs measure passed the Senate by a 70-28 vote Wednesday.

A McMahon aide told me she would have supported the bill. A Simmons spokesman said he would have opposed it…

Simmons…recently toured the state emphasizing his commitment to tax relief for small businesses. His Plan for Prosperity supports reducing taxes on small-business owners — as long as it’s not a Democratic plan.

First the bad news – Fewer young voters, the teens and twenty-somethings that make up the Millennial Generation, identify with the Democratic Party and more lean Republican than in the recent past, according to a Pew Report:

Young voters were Barack Obama’s strongest supporters in the 2008, but the Democratic Party’s advantage among Millennials predates Obama’s emergence on the political scene. Indeed, they had been the party’s best age group in both the 2004 and 2006 elections.

However, over the course of 2009 the Democratic Party’s advantage among Millennials in party affiliation weakened considerably from its high point in 2008. The most recent party affiliation data (from the fourth quarter of 2009) show that in terms of straight partisan identification, Democrats held a 36% to 24% lead over the GOP among Millennial voters, a significantly narrower edge than the nearly two-to-one margin (41% vs. 22%) in 2008. At the same time, the percentage of Millennials who said they lean Republican has nearly doubled, from 8% in 2008 to 15% at the end of 2009. There was little change in the percentage who leaned Democratic (20% in 2008 vs. 18% in late 2009).

Now the good news – Obama and the Democrats are in better shape than you might think, according to Andrew Kohut, President, Pew Research Center:

Just 29 percent of Americans say the Republican Party has done a good job of offering solutions to the country’s problems during the past year. The Democratic Party is still given a good rating by a somewhat larger number — 40 percent. Similarly, more voters, 46 percent to 34 percent, continue to think that the Democrats rather than the Republicans can bring about the changes the country needs.

Democrats with a 58 – 42 majority in the Senate ( I don’t count Lieberman) on Wednesday evening let pass by voice vote a one-year extension to the Patriot Act.

Democrats had been extremely critical of the law, which has been described as overreaching and reactionary. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), in a statement Wednesday, said he “would have preferred to add oversight and judicial review improvements” to the act’s renewal.

Read more.

National Bank Regulator Lets Unsafe Practices Flourish; Are Banks the New Face of Payday Lending?

A key federal regulator for years has let national banks engage in lending practices that the regulator itself admits harm consumers and lenders, according to two new reports from the Center for Responsible Lending. Full reports:

Payday lending

Overdraft Abuses

The reports focus on two of many areas in which the regulator — the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC — has fallen down on the job: payday lending and checking account overdraft charges. The OCC’s regulatory lapses documented in the reports include the following:

• Allowing nationally chartered banks to evade state law and offer high-interest payday loans directly to consumers. Years ago, the OCC cracked down on bank partnerships with payday lenders, citing concerns about “safety and soundness, compliance, consumer protection, and other risks to banks.” Yet the OCC allows the banks it oversees to make the same type of loans directly
• Allowing national banks to market payday loans to account holders as a way to return accounts to good standing after overdraft charges are assessed, thus encouraging repayment of one high-cost debt with another
• Allowing banks to unfairly increase overdrafts charges — which have shot up 35 percent in just two years and now cost Americans $24 billion per year — even though the OCC determined that these practices were a problem for consumers as early as 2001.
• Failing to investigate whether banks’ payday loans and abusive overdraft programs violate anti-discrimination and fair lending laws

Several civil rights leaders agree that the status quo cannot continue:

– “These reports reveal the inadequacy in our current system of oversight,” said Gary Flowers of the Black Leadership Forum. “Unfair overdrafts and bank payday loans strip working people of their hard-earned funds. Given the state of our economy, one would think we could expect some real reform now. Instead, we see a national bank regulator stepping back and letting more unjust practices spread through the banking system.”

– “The continued predatory targeting of African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities by unscrupulous financial institutions harms our initiatives to build wealth or simply retain financial stability,” said Hilary Shelton, Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau and the Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy. “As these reports show, the federal government hasn’t been protecting all Americans from financial exploitation. This is why Congress needs to create an entity as soon as possible dedicated to safeguarding all consumers.”

– “NCLR calls on the OCC to fully enforce its own guidance on payday loans and overdraft fees,” said Janis Bowdler, Deputy Director of the Wealth-Building Policy Project at NCLR. “High bank fees and abusive practices not only disproportionately affect communities of color, but they drive families away from mainstream banking system. Instead, OCC should be focused on how to connect the unbanked with sustainable bank products.”

CRL predicts that unless the OCC and other bank regulators curb bank payday loans immediately, this unsafe product will likely spread throughout the banking industry as swiftly as overdraft abuses have.

The OCC’s failure to police payday and overdraft practices, coupled with its catastrophic failures in the credit card and subprime mortgage arenas, has cost financially distressed borrowers as well as taxpayers greatly. These repeated failures underscore the need for an independent regulator focused solely on ensuring basic, common-sense financial safeguards for consumers. As the current recession makes painfully clear, such safeguards are the underpinning of a safe and sound banking system and, ultimately, of the entire economy.

I love it:

Higher intelligence is associated with liberal political ideology, atheism, and men’s (but not women’s) preference for sexual exclusivity.

More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.”

“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. Those that our ancestors had for millions of years are “evolutionarily familiar.”

“General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions,” says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa’s hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans’ tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see “the hands of God” at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. “Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

Young adults who identify themselves as “not at all religious” have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as “very religious” have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

In addition, humans have always been mildly polygynous in evolutionary history. Men in polygynous marriages were not expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate, whereas men in monogamous marriages were. In sharp contrast, whether they are in a monogamous or polygynous marriage, women were always expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate. So being sexually exclusive is evolutionarily novel for men, but not for women. And the theory predicts that more intelligent men are more likely to value sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men, but general intelligence makes no difference for women’s value on sexual exclusivity. Kanazawa’s analysis of Add Health data supports these sex-specific predictions as well.

One intriguing but theoretically predicted finding of the study is that more intelligent people are no more or no less likely to value such evolutionarily familiar entities as marriage, family, children, and friends.

The article “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent” will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, a publication of the American Sociological Association

Congressman Jim Himes (CT-4) helped pass legislation today that will ensure American consumers get real choice and a fair deal when purchasing health insurance. The Health Insurance Industry Fair Competition Act will eliminate the anti-trust exemption for health insurance companies, requiring them to compete fairly and adhere to the same anti-trust laws as other companies.

“Repealing the unfair anti-trust exemption that health insurance companies enjoy will improve choice and competition for health care consumers across the board,” said Himes. “This unfair practice drives up costs and, left unchecked, will ensure that we continue to pay too much for two little when it comes to our health care.”

For 65 years, the health insurance industry has been legally exempt from anti-trust laws, and the federal government was banned from even investigating evidence of possible collusion. In the last 14 years alone, there have been 400 mergers among health insurers and now 94% of all insurance markets are “highly concentrated” – meaning consumers have little or no choice between insurance providers.

Health insurers that were previously exempt from anti-trust laws will now bear legal responsibility for price fixing, dividing up territories among themselves, and sabotaging their competitors in order to gain a monopoly in the marketplace. Such practices have been outlawed in other industries for decades.

The legislation is supported by numerous groups including the American Hospital Association, American Nurses Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Consumers Union, and the Consumer Federation of America.