Citizen Cartwright

Elizabeth Warren: Technology is key to consumer protection

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will use technology to “supplement the cop on the beat by building a neighborhood watch,” the head of the new agency says in remarks prepared for delivery at the University of California at Berkeley.

"The agency can empower a well-informed population to help expose, early on, consumer financial tricks," she says. "If rules are being broken, we don't need to wait for an expert in Washington to wake up. If we set it up right from the beginning, the agency can collect and analyze data faster and get on top of problems as they occur, not years later."

The outside money in campaigns outside Congress

In the past seven weeks alone, nonparty groups have spent at least $100 million on ads and get-out-the-vote efforts supporting or opposing specific candidates in state and local races, according to a state-by-state review by The Associated Press.

And the actual total probably is millions more because there's no way to find out exactly how much was spent, AP says.

Campaigning 101: Self-scrutiny

In an article on the proliferation of opposition research — campaigns digging up dirt on the competition — CQ Politics notes the importance of candidates first scrutinizing themselves.

All of the opposition research professionals the reporter contacted said an underappreciated part of opposition research is “self-research.”

“Particularly with first-time candidates, ones that haven’t held legislative office, they always think there is nothing to be found on them,” said Kevin Wright, founder and director of the Old Dominion Research Group, a Republican research company. But the opposition uncovers something they said in the past or a controversial paper they wrote in college, “and then they are scrambling trying to find a way to refute it. If they had just done their due diligence, they wouldn’t be.”

There's a 'liberal gene'

Or so say researchers in the Journal of Politics.

The research is the first to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views, the study's authors say.

"It is the crucial interaction of two factors — the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence — that is associated with being more liberal," according to the researchers from the University of California at San Diego and Harvard University.

Don't like this planet? Wait, there's more.

In just our galaxy, at least 46 billion Earth-size planets are orbiting close to the roughly 200 billion sun-like stars — and there may be billions more planets farther out in the "habitable zone," researchers from the University of California at Berkeley report in the journal Science.

Also in the news

EU leaders agree on permanent fund to help euro in times of crisis

Investigators: Senior Pentagon official set up spy ring in Afghanistan, Pakistan

Toyota accused of secretly buying back defective cars

Halliburton used flawed cement on BP well, panel says

FDA denies approval for diet drug Qnexa

What the foreclosure mess could mean

The uncertainty over the legal status of the country's foreclosed homes could further depress home prices and delay the recovery of the housing market, an Obama administration official said on Wednesday at a hearing of the Congressional Oversight Panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program.  

“If investors lose confidence in the ability of banks to document their ownership of mortgages, the financial industry could suffer staggering losses,” said panel Chairman Sen. Edward Kaufman, D-Del. “The possibility is especially alarming, coming so soon after taxpayers spent billions of dollars to bail out these very same institutions.”

Defections from Obama's base

"Critical" segments of the coalition that sent Barack Obama to the White House and turned control of Congress over to the Democrats in 2006 — women, Roman Catholics, less affluent Americans and independents — are switching to the GOP in the final phase this year's elections, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The GOP's plan for next year

Republican leaders who are increasingly confident of taking control of the House and maybe the Senate are planning more than $100 billion in cuts.

The question is how much of their government-shrinking, tax-cutting agenda to tackle, and how quickly, The Associated Press says.

Are you eating what's good for you?

Early next year, it may be easier to be sure.

In what's being described as the biggest change to U.S. food labels in almost 20 years, the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Association say health information will appear on the front of food packages.

The Food and Drug Administration has been working on guidelines for package-front nutritional labels.

The food industry was forced to stop a package-front labeling campaign called Smart Choices that drew criticism because it gave a nutritional seal of approval to foods including cereals with lots of sugar and frozen meals with lots of salt.