The payroll tax cut is popular with the American people. That helps explain why President Obama is talking about it so relentlessly — and, perhaps, why Republican presidential candidates have addressed the issue only glancingly.

Tuesday's vote seems to signal the end of a 2005 agreement to end the judicial wars in the Senate by barring filibusters except in extraordinary circumstances.

In 2008, the railroad industry launched an ad campaign to make its benefits known. Perhaps you've heard trains can move a ton of freight 500 miles on a single gallon of fuel. Now the barge industry is hopping on the public relations train, saying "we're like railroads but better." Both are transportation sectors that previously worked hard to stay out of the public eye. But the barge industry, in particular, depends on government funding for river infrastructure — some of which is operating on borrowed time. With locks beginning to fail and the prospect of river slowdowns, barge companies are banding together in a push for help from the government.

President Obama was in Osawatomie, Kan., where he delivered an economic speech about the middle class. Osawatomie is the same city where, a century earlier, former President Teddy Roosevelt called for a "New Nationalism," in which he talked about the role of government. For more, Robert Siegel talks to NPR's Scott Horsley.

New California rules are meant to get school kids to drink fewer sugary drinks and more water. But many students don't want to drink out of public water fountains.