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As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt's inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt "under the guardianship of the Constitution," investors would be spared from being "subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress." Two years later, on the verge of the amendment's ratification, its champions inside the Republican Party made their intentions absolutely clear, proclaiming in their 1868 party platform that "national honor requires the payment of the public indebtedness in the utmost good faith to all creditors at home and abroad," and pronouncing any repudiation of the debt "a national crime." More than three generations later, in 1935, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, ruling in the case of Perry v. the United States, revisited the amendment and affirmed the "fundamental principle" that Congress may not "alter or destroy" debts already incurred. As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt's inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt "under the guardianship of the Constitution," investors would be spared from being "subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress." Two years later, on the verge of the amendment's ratification, its champions inside the Republican Party made their intentions absolutely clear, proclaiming in their 1868 party platform that "national honor requires the payment of the public indebtedness in the utmost good faith to all creditors at home and abroad," and pronouncing any repu

Julian E. Zelizer, author of "Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security -- From World War II to the War on Terrorism," is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He points out that accusations of "soft on defense" are not new - they have existed since WW II. And he argues that they had very bad effects on US policies in the 1950s & 1960s.

>In America, just about everyone is some sort of hyphenated hybrid of race, religion and ethnicity/nationality. Irish-Catholic-American, African-American Pentecostal, Jewish-American secular Humanist, and so on. As Walt Whitman said, "I am large / I contain multitudes." > When interfaith cooperation is done well, it not only helps people from different faith and philosophical backgrounds get along, it creates space for the diverse identities within each of us to become mutually enriching rather than mutually exclusive.

"In a major encyclical addressing the economic questions raised by the upheaval in Eastern Europe in 1989, Pope John Paul II warned capitalist nations yesterday against letting the collapse of Communism blind them to the need to repair injustices in their own economic system. "The encyclical, "Centesimus Annus" ("The Hundredth Year"), includes the fullest, and in many ways the most positive, treatment of the market economy in any papal document. But praise is typically followed with qualifications and ringing reminders about economic failures in both developing and developed countries."

"New York's newest basketball sensation spends most nights on a couch in a one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side. The housing choice is understandable once you get to know Jeremy Lin. He is a Harvard graduate playing in the National Basketball Association. He is an Asian-American in a league devoid of them, which makes him doubly anomalous. No team drafted Lin in 2010. Two teams cut him in December, before the Knicks picked him up. His contract, potentially worth nearly $800,000, was not even guaranteed until Tuesday afternoon. So for the past six weeks, Lin, 23, has been sleeping in his brother Josh's living room, waiting for clarity and career security."

"While extremely rare, Powassan virus is deadlier than other tick-borne illnesses - killing 30 percent.... [Unlike delay of Lyme penetration X 24h], with Powassan virus, a tick can start transmitting the virus within 15 minutes".... The number of other tick-borne illnesses reported to the CDC is on the rise, led by Lyme disease, but also including anaplasmosis, babesiosis and ehrlichiosis. The Hudson Valley had been the national epicenter of such diseases for years.... Some natural remedies - fungi, oil of rosemary, and extract from Alaska yellow cedar trees - have been proven to reduce ticks."

They have been held in solitary confinement for at least 20 years, each in his own 8-by-10-foot windowless cell at the Pelican Bay supermax prison, with about a thousand others - half of whom have been there for more than a decade. A 2011 United Nations report said the practice can amount to torture and called for a ban on terms longer than 15 days. In this country, there are an estimated 25,000 prisoners in long-term solitary in supermax prisons; in California, the average stay is nearly seven years. The inmates are isolated because prison officials have determined that they pose a threat to the safety of the guards and other prisoners, despite a growing body of evidence that such use of solitary does not reduce prison violence or promote safety.

'If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing - except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis. I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency." If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing - except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis. I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency." I never knew it until I started poking around, but this particular kind of discriminatory doctoring has a name. It's called "diagnostic overshadowing." According to a review of studies done by the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, it happens a lot. As a result, people with a serious mental illness - including bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder - end up with wrong diagnoses and are under-treated. That is a problem, because if yo

'For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box. In "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History," published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed. Mr. Hollinger's argument generated much chatter among his colleagues when he first presented it at the 2011 meeting. But his sometimes pugnacious new book, he said, is just a "punctuation mark" on the recent spate of work reconsidering the left-hand side of the American religious spectrum, which includes titles like Matthew S. Hedstrom's "Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century"; Jill K. Gill's "Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left"; and David Burns's "Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus." The surge of interest in liberal religion, many say, reflects the renewed vitality of religious history more generally, which has spread beyond its traditional redoubts in divinity schools to become one of the most popular specializations among academic historians, according to the American Historical Association.

'Faisal bin Ali Jaber stood face to face with Representative Adam B. Schiff - a California Democrat who had carved out 20 minutes between two votes on natural gas policy - to tell his story: how he watched in horror last year as drone-fired missiles incinerated his nephew and brother-in-law in a remote Yemeni village. 'Neither of the victims was a member of Al Qaeda. In fact, the opposite was true. They were meeting with three Qaeda members in hopes of changing the militants' views. '"It really puts a human face on the term 'collateral damage,' " said Mr. Schiff, looking awed after listening to Mr. Jaber. 'A gaunt civil engineer with a white mustache, Mr. Jaber spent the past week struggling to pierce the veil of secrecy and anonymity over the Obama administration's drone strike program.... He did not have much luck. 'He met at length with a half-dozen members of Congress, as well as officials from the National Security Council and the State Department. Everywhere, he received heartfelt condolences. But no one has been able to explain why his relatives were killed, or why the administration is not willing to acknowledge its mistake. 'It was an error with unusual resonance. Mr. Jaber's brother-in-law was a cleric who had spoken out against Al Qaeda shortly before the drone killed him. The nephew was a local policeman who had gone along in part to offer protection....'

Do Americans have a moral responsibility to people in poverty in other countries?

Republicans attack Obama for seeing US as no more (intrinsically) exceptional than other nations, & suggesting that what is exceptional is the goals citizens strive for, not a pre-ordained status.

NYT-Op-Ed

Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children's welfare. They can't be "pro-life" when the "child" is in the womb but indifferent when it's in the world. The good news is that last year the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the rate of premature births fell in 2008, representing the first two-year decline in the last 30 years. The bad news is that, according to the March of Dimes, the Republican budget the House just passed could do great damage to this progress, including: $50 million in cuts to the state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs; and nearly $1 billion in cuts to CDC's preventive health programs, including its preterm birth studies.

Princeton mathematician's review of history of debt & growth in US shows little to worry about in current debt load as $ of GDP (which was higher in growth period following WW2. Some letters quarrel with this, and he responds.