Washington Post:
Blogs & Columns

• Fluoridation fails in Portland by 20-point margin (Wed, 22 May 2013 19:10:28 GMT)
  

  For any avid readers who have read our coverage of the fluoride wars, we now have results on the latest battle: Portland has rejected fluoridated water by a 20-point margin, with 60 percent of voters against and 40 percent in favor.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• After 37 years, the Senate could finally revamp nation's chemical-safety laws (Wed, 22 May 2013 19:08:10 GMT)
  

  The current U.S. law on chemical safety is 37 years old, riddled with exceptions, and widely seen as ineffective — so much so that the federal government hasn't even tried to restrict an unsafe chemical since an asbestos ban was overturned in courts in 1991.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• You ask, we answer! Can employed people get Obamacare subsidies? (Wed, 22 May 2013 19:01:26 GMT)
  

  Welcome to Health Reform Watch, Sarah Kliff's regular look at how the Affordable Care Act is changing the American health-care system — and being changed by it. You can reach Sarah with questions, comments and suggestions here. Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for the latest edition, and read previous columns here.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Everything you could possibly need to know about student loan budgets (with gifs!) (Wed, 22 May 2013 17:13:28 GMT)
  

  On Monday, we wrote a post explaining that "No, the federal government does not profit off student loans" (as the original headline put it). A number of people have pushed back at that conclusion, pointing out that it depends on how you do the arithmetic.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Robert Kaiser on Dodd-Frank: 'This example of Congress working also illuminated why it works so rarely.' (Wed, 22 May 2013 17:10:17 GMT)
  

  Almost three years ago, the Dodd-Frank Act was enacted, a sweeping piece of legislation aimed at overhauling regulation of the financial system. And now our colleague Robert G. Kaiser is out with a book reporting the inside story of how the law came to be. Kaiser's "Act of Congress: How America's Essential Institution Works, and How it Doesn't" uses the long battle over Dodd-Frank--and the unique access to Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, and their staffs that he was afforded--to show how 21st century legislating really works. Here, Kaiser, an associate editor and senior correspondent for the Post, explains what he found.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• The Circuit: Facebook joins human rights group (Wed, 22 May 2013 16:57:00 GMT)
  

  Facebook joins the Global Network Initiative: Facebook announced Wednesday that it is joining the Global Network Initiative, which asks companies to commit to certain standards when it comes to protecting the freedom of expression and Internet privacy rights.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Bad news for patent trolls, in one chart (Wed, 22 May 2013 14:46:11 GMT)
  

  Why has the software industry seen an explosion of litigation lately? The courts played a big role, by making it easier to get patents in the 1980s and 1990s. But as this chart shows, the pendulum started to swing back in the opposite direction a few years ago:

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Bernanke to Congress: Seriously, guys, what are you doing? (Wed, 22 May 2013 14:05:11 GMT)
  

  Ben Bernanke testifies before Congress today for the first time in three months, and the Federal Reserve chairman has a message for lawmakers: You're the reason the economy isn't taking off more.

  Of course, Bernanke is too polite to phrase things quite so bluntly. But to anyone versed in Fedspeak, that's the gist of his message. Even as state and local governments are becoming less of a drag on growth, Bernanke says in his prepared testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, "fiscal policy at the federal level has become significantly more restrictive."

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Yes, heads should roll at the IRS (Wed, 22 May 2013 13:47:47 GMT)
  

  The big IRS news today is that Lois Lerner, the IRS director who oversaw the Cincinnati unit charged with discriminating against the tea party, intends to plead the fifth when she appears before Congress later today.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Millions of Americans don't have bank accounts. That could be a problem for Obamacare. (Wed, 22 May 2013 13:11:39 GMT)
  

  Americans shopping for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act next year might hit an unexpected obstacle: the lack of a bank account.

  Millions of Americans are expected to qualify for tax subsidies under the health overhaul, which they can use to purchase coverage on new marketplaces. One quarter of those people are effectively "unbanked" and without a checking account, according to a new report from tax firm Jackson Hewitt.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Wonkbook: A thaw in the Senate? (Wed, 22 May 2013 12:21:27 GMT)
  

  Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Stretching your retirement dollars (Wed, 22 May 2013 00:16:00 GMT)
  

  For the second time in as many weeks, educators have joked that I was scaring them about retiring.

  In the end, these readers felt that they would be okay, but the steady news of retirement woes have them thinking of plans A, B and C.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• The best sentences we read today (Tue, 21 May 2013 22:48:23 GMT)
  

  -- "More than 800 people have paid as much as $200,000 apiece to reserve seats on commercial flights into space, some of which are expected to launch, at long last, within a year."

  -- "Fashion models are almost twice as likely to get their visas as computer programmers, by one rough measure." (Note that this stat is misleading, but the article's interesting.)

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• A short history of violent tornadoes in the United States (Tue, 21 May 2013 21:07:25 GMT)
  

  It's official: The massive tornado that ripped through Moore, Okla., on Monday has been rated an EF-5 — basically at the very top of the scale, with winds over 200 miles per hour.

  
  So how common is this? An EF-5 only comes around about once a year, on average. Here's the National Climatic Data Center: "On average over 1000 tornadoes hit the U.S. each year, [and] 20 can be expected to be violent and possibly one might be incredible (EF5)."

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Five things we learned from Tuesday's big Apple tax hearing (Tue, 21 May 2013 21:07:11 GMT)
  

  On Tuesday, Washington took a break from its usual scandals to bring you the Senate vs. Apple, a face-off between the chief executive of the computing giant and a group of senators who seemed shocked — shocked! — that Apple has been able to minimize its U.S. tax obligations by funneling international earnings through holding companies registered in Ireland.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• The IRS controversy isn't about taxes. It's about disclosure. (Tue, 21 May 2013 19:43:10 GMT)
  

  At some level, the scandal around the IRS's targeting of conservative 501(c)4 groups has nothing to do with taxes. That may sound weird -- 501(c)4 is a section of the Internal Revenue Code, the entire 501(c) section exists to list groups that are exempt from some federal taxes, the IRS is the tax man, etc.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Self-driving cars are a privacy nightmare. And it's totally worth it. (Tue, 21 May 2013 19:22:15 GMT)
  

  Will self-driving cars let the government track your every move? Greg Beato says yes, and Randal O'Toole disagrees. Beato is right: Self-driving cars will make it easier for the authorities to track you everywhere you go. But the benefits of self-driving cars are likely to be so enormous that American consumers will sign up in droves, regardless of the privacy implications.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Apple CEO Tim Cook says U.S. should lower corporate tax rate (Tue, 21 May 2013 18:50:00 GMT)
  

  Apple chief executive Tim Cook told a Senate panel Tuesday that the U.S. tax code needs a dramatic overhaul with the overall corporate tax rate, currently at 35 percent, falling to about 20 percent.

  Testifying before the before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Cook said the high tax rate has prevented companies from repatriating their massive cash holdings overseas. So, he proposed a tax rate of below 10 percent on those offshore funds.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Study: Election officials are biased against Latino voters (Tue, 21 May 2013 17:33:26 GMT)
  

  There's an election coming up, and Greg Walsh wants to be sure he's ready. So he shoots a quick e-mail to his county election commission to clear up what documentation he needs to vote. The note goes like this:

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Lawmakers grill Apple’s Tim Cook, other executives on taxes (Tue, 21 May 2013 16:38:00 GMT)
  

  Lawmakers had pointed questions for Apple chief executive Tim Cook and two other top company executives Tuesday at a Senate subcommittee hearing examining the Apple’s tax practices.

  As The Washington Post reported, Apple is the latest technology firm to come under fire from Congress over its offshore accounting practices. Apple’s status as a legend in the tech industry — it was the most valuable company in the world as of Monday — makes it one of the highest-profile corporate firms to come under scrutiny for its use of legal loopholes in the tax code, which some lawmakers say is a ruse to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Swastikas and 'witch hunts': On the front lines of the fluoride wars (Tue, 21 May 2013 16:22:14 GMT)
  

  After I posted my history this morning of the fluoride wars, Wonkblog reader Sandra Guerard wrote in with her own experience more than four decades ago. After reading through the literature on the fluoride battles, hers seems like one of the more extreme fights that has occurred over fluoridating a city's water supply:

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• The National's new album is out! Here's one song. (Tue, 21 May 2013 15:58:16 GMT)
  

  The National put out its eighth album, "Trouble Will Find Me," on Tuesday. Public radio station WFUV recently had the band play one of its new tracks, "Graceless," in its Cutting Room Studio.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Apple CEO Tim Cook defends tax practices at Hill hearing (Tue, 21 May 2013 15:38:40 GMT)
  

  Apple chief executive Tim Cook went to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to defend the tech giant against accusations that it is using gimmicks to pay less than its fair share of taxes.

  In prepared testimony before the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Apple released Monday night, Cook strongly denied that the company uses any improper methods to reduce its taxes, saying that the subsidiaries that Apple has set up in Ireland help the U.S. economy by improving its position in Asia and Europe.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  
• Hollywood should not decide our copyright laws (Tue, 21 May 2013 15:37:00 GMT)
  

  Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has vowed to conduct a comprehensive review of our nation's copyright laws to determine whether they are "still working in a digital age." That's a long overdue task. But there's a danger that the process will be dominated by a handful of special interest groups that have long been reflexively hostile to technological progress.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
• The end of health price secrecy may be starting in Miami (Tue, 21 May 2013 15:21:16 GMT)
  

  When Medicare released thousands of health-care prices this month, one of the biggest criticisms was that these figures didn't represent what patients actually paid.

  Medicare, for example, pays hospitals on a set fee schedule, regardless of their prices. Health insurance plans typically negotiate a lower rate with a hospital than the sticker price that showed up in the new data. Those prices still remain secret -- but that may change.

  Read full article >>

      

  
  
  
  

_{Copyright 2012 Washington Post Company}