CNN (BELIEF BLOG): Politics And Prayers
Speaking at the 60th annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Thursday, the president said, "We know that part of living in a pluralistic society means that our personal religious beliefs alone can't dictate our response to every challenge we face.
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CNN: Senate Passes Insider-Trading Bill
Aiming to restore voters' faith in Congress, the Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill Thursday that makes clear it's illegal for members of Congress, their staffs and many executive-branch employees to trade stocks and other securities based on inside information learned on the job.
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THE HUFFINGTON POST: What Childhood Poverty Means (OPINION)
More than one in five American children lives in poverty. In my home state Tennessee it is an astounding one in four.
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MOTHER JONES: Nation-Building Vs. Al-Qaeda-Crushing In Afghanistan
The romantic vision of the transformation of Afghanistan involved passionate Westerners with graduate degrees donning local garb and riding on donkeys to dirt-poor villages to educate their girls and extend their agriculture.
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THE ATLANTIC: Should All Americans Have To Earn Their Citizenship?
With an eye toward the children of illegal immigrants, some politicians are trying to end birthright citizenship. Imagine what that might mean for the rest of us.
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THE ATLANTIC WIRE: That Former Slave Who Wrote His Ex-Master Never Went Back To Him
On Monday Letters of Note published this gem of a correspondence between Jourdon Anderson, a freed slave in 1865 who had been asked by his former master to return to Tennessee from Ohio as a paid worker. Anderson, in short, essentially told him to shove it unless he paid up: "we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you."
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THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: NC's Heath Shuler Won't Seek Re-Election To House
U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina announced Thursday he won't seek re-election in what's become another blow to conservative Democrats on Capitol Hill and the party's state congressional delegation.
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THE WASHINGTON POST: Syria: It’s Not Just About Freedom (OPINION)
Imperial regimes can crack when they are driven out of their major foreign outposts. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not only signal the liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow. It prefigured the collapse of the Soviet Union itself just two years later.
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THINK PROGRESS: Jobs Report: Unemployment Rate For Returning Veterans Fell 6 Percentage Points
Today’s stronger-than-expected jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also contained good news for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
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