Your customized headlines for Tue, Feb 28, 2012

Google, I wish I knew how to quit you.

That's the frustration felt by Patience O'Connor, who has put much of her sensitive personal and professional information on Gmail and other Google programs and doesn't want the company to use that data to create a detailed profile of her.

The federal budget is fairly simple. I can explain it to you in fewer than 30 words: Most of the money comes in through taxes and borrowing. The vast majority of it is then spent on programs for the old, programs for the poor and defense. That's pretty much it.

BEIJING – The ritual is now familiar. European officials meet with Chinese leaders seeking assurances of help for the continent's debt crisis. During smiling photo ops, the Chinese respond with the requisite promises to assist.

Washington was consumed for months by the debate of how to "pay" for this year's Social Security tax holiday, which cut the tax employees pay to 4.2 percent of their covered wages from the normal 6.2 percent.

The federal government is doing a poor job of coordinating its responsibilities in dozens of areas, including food safety, breast cancer research, assistance to small business owners and home buyers and background investigations for federal job applicants — a disorganization that could be costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars annually, according to a new report.

Mullah Rick has spoken.

He wants religion returned to "the public square," is opposed to contraception, premarital sex and abortion under any circumstances, wants children educated in what amounts to little red schoolhouses and called President Obama a "snob" for extolling college or some other kind of post-high school education. This is not a political platform. It's a fatwa.

Okay, probably not. But as Alexis Madrigal notes, the fact that Facebook is set to go public will help — a lot. According to the California Legislative Analyst's office, the Palo Alto company's Wall Street debut could lead to as much as $2.5 billion in additional revenue for the state over the next five years, thanks to taxes on the sale of stock. That includes $1.5 billion in the next year alone.

If you want to see the difficulty Mitt Romney is going to have distinguishing his health-care plan from President Obama's health-care plan, you should take a look at this post by Republican economist Doug Holtz-Eakin, who tries to do it for him. Holtz-Eakin writes:

The federal budget is fairly simple. I can explain it to you in fewer than 30 words: Most of the money comes in through taxes and borrowing. The vast majority of it is then spent on programs for the old, programs for the poor and defense. That's pretty much it.